Elsewhere I’ve Been: Guns and Common Core
I’ve been on The Guardian twice in the past few weeks!
First, I was talking about keeping guns out of my classroom:
We don’t need more guns in schools. We need more empathy and compassion. We need to make dealing with mental health and keeping guns out of the hands of would-be criminals our main priorities in order to prevent these tragedies in the first place. Our first reaction shouldn’t be to meet violence with violence. Antoinette Tuff showed us it can be done another way, and we need to follow her lead.
Read the whole article here.
I also wrote about the new Common Core national education standards:
My concern about the Common Core is that the pendulum will swing too far the other way; about 10 years ago when I started teaching, we were so hung up on creativity with CRISS strategies and constant, colorful poster projects that we forgot to teach them about good, old reading, writing and arithmetic. Now, with the focus the Common Core puts on nonfiction texts, technology utilization and career skills, it’s very possible that educators zero in on that and forget about the creativity.
Read the whole article here.
Featured Image Credit: The Guardian