California Common Core Standards

The classic testing situation : you are staring at the same 4 letters - A,B,C, and D. You're about to go up to your teacher and ask her for help, but then you remember to give your best guess - something that you are so used to. Through process of elimination, you cross out B and D off your list. Now, you have a 50-50 chance of getting an answer right to a question you had no idea of. Your eyes slightly wander off to Amy's sheet.....question #12... first bubble... A! Phew - that was easy!

Not anymore with Common Core. We've all heard it, sure, and our teachers our making us learn things completely different from the original process of elimination, but what does Common Core really have in store for us?

Common Core better prepares students for college, and helps them to become critical thinkers. The transition to Common Core will neither be easy, nor quick, as you will experience in your near future. This year, Moreland will continue to implement the standards in order to prep for the first pilot CCSS test in the spring of 2014. These new standards will en-courage problem solving, collaboration, student-led work, and deeper and more critical thinking.

Getting towards Common Core is a big leap for the education system as a whole. Daniella Mazerlav, a teacher at Fremont Unified and a mother sums up her viewpoint on Common Core as:

"As a parent, I think it's great. As a teacher, it's going to be very hard to imagine this going smoothly." 

Nationwide, districts are in various stages of implementing a full-fledged Common Core plan. This 2012-13 school year is the time of transition. Though we may feel that the students have it the hardest in this process, the teachers must be having the same overwhelmed feeling that we are dealing with in the same classroom. For example, Mrs. Bliss has not been teaching math for over 3 years, and is now being asked to teach it again using a new curriculum, "Common Core Integrated," That‘s hard. Other teachers around MMS campus - Mrs. Saldivar, Mrs. Rough, Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Fleck, Mrs. Kilbourn, Mrs. Ferro, and Mr. Schoenberg - feel the same way about the new standards. The curriculum isn't changing a whole lot, but the approach is. Deeper thinking is required, instead of glossing over the surface as we are right now. All of the teachers feel that this is definitely a step in the right direction, though it will take time to adjust, especially this year. Teachers are having to make up their own lessons from bits of other materials instead of having a textbook or file to go to, and always have to double-check that the lessons are meeting the new standards. Surprisingly, this is somewhat a stress factor for teachers, but they feel that they are prepping us for the future.

The new Common Core Assessments won't be like the average Benchmarks tests. The new math assessments will be more like the MARS or a little bit like Math Olympiad, for those of you who participated last year. English classes will involve a lot more higher level thinking and writing with greater emphasis on argumentation.

The Common Core Standards may really nag you to take that extra step, but it will hopefully ease your transition from high school to college. This year‘s batch of students all over the U.S. are the pioneers; we are the experiments to see if all this Common Core stuff works. It will take a full cycle of students to find out.

We may think it's difficult to cut the healthy STAR tree of decades past, only to be replaced with a sapling- Common Core, but think again! Change is a huge part of growth. That may be because we are so used to the multiple choice curriculum, that “show your work” is a dreadful expression to many of us. However, Common Core will become so routine, that soon, we will not feel the stress we are going through right now. True, we want to stick with what we've always done, but Common Core was simply bound to happen, if not today; then tomorrow.