Is it just me, or does this seem worrisome?
VIDALIA, La. - Concordia Parish teachers spent Tuesday learning how they are going to teach this year. Pre-written lesson plans, firm dates for units and mostly hands-on learning are the major changes a new comprehensive curriculum will bring to the district.Hmmm. Does anyone else find it odd to see teachers celebrating the fact that they'll have little input about what they teach this year, and rejoicing about having no more hated textbooks? The teachers quoted feel this method will increase test scores. For their students' sake, I hope they're right.In keeping with the state's decision to require a standardized curriculum statewide, a committee of local teachers and administrators worked over the summer to write the model curriculum...The district's comprehensive curriculum must align with the state's model curriculum.
Ferriday Junior High teacher Angel White worked on a committee from June 13 to July 29 to rewrite the social studies curriculum. "There's more cooperative learning," she said. "Less teacher direction. The students are responsible for doing their work. There's not a lot of lecturing"...
"It's going to be fabulous," Vidalia Lower teacher Lori Beth Edwards said. "We know exactly what we have to do and when we have to do it. I like it because it's not textbooks. The kids hated (textbook learning) and I hated that."
Click here and then follow the links to check out the standardized curriculum. For the heck of it, I clicked on 5th-grade math. Hmmm. Seven weeks spent on whole number review? Sample activities like the following?
Discuss with students what determines whether an exact answer or an estimate is appropriate for a given situation. Use the following as examples that require either an estimated or exact answer: · An estimate is all that is needed when a friend asks you for the temperature or you want to know about how long a bus trip takes. · An exact number is needed when you want to determine the number of meteorologists that work for a TV station, or you want to find out how many scheduled stops a bus will make.Have each student go on the Internet or look in a newspaper for numbers in news stories. Ask students to find three numbers that are exact and three numbers that are estimates and copy the full sentences about the numbers. Have them work together in groups to write a problem that can be answered with an estimate and a problem that requires an exact answer. Ask a volunteer from each group to write the group’s two problems on the chalkboard and have the rest of the class solve the problems and discuss the results.
I've never taught math at this level, so I'll ask you - does this seem useful, or like a waste of time? And what, exactly, is the groupwork element supposed to add to this?
Posted by kswygert at August 10, 2005 08:02 PM