Common Core and Me

Common Core curriculum had become a huge controversial topic for today's high schools and middle schools. I often see, on Facebook and other social media sites, parents complaining about how common core is ruining their student's grades and their understanding of the class materials. Often times when I see these comments, I wonder what the adult is comparing their student's current grades to. Previous grades before common core? Other students' grades? Either way, these parents have obviously not been thorough in their gathering of information before accusing the common core program for the problems their student is having in school.

My graduating class is the first class to be put through common core. The year we moved from middle school to high school (8^th to 9^th grade) was the year that a lot of schools quite accelerated math classes. I had taken geometry in eighth grade and was set to go into Algebra II my Freshman year, but because the high school I was going to was adopting common core, none of the students in my class were able to progress to Algebra II and instead were placed in a secondary honors class where a lot of the mathematic material we had already studied was covered again.

Luckily I moved the summer before my freshman year and the high school I moved to put the common core cut off year to the year behind mine. In other words, anyone from my grade that had previously taken an accelerated course in middle school was able to continue on that accelerated course through high school, so long as they maintained high enough test scores.

This was not the case for my other classes, such as English and Science. I did not notice any huge changes in the way these classes were taught, though, once the common core program had been adopted at my school. There were still honors and AP classes offered for these different subjects, history as well, and actually the syllabi for these courses in honors and regular were not very different. Really the honors classes would only end up with one extra project and maybe one less quiz.

I have watched the grades below mine struggle with common core a little bit, as far as the mathematics portion goes, and students that move to Utah from a state farther east. My sister comes home from school confused about math almost every day. She is very bright and has pulled straight A's since elementary school, with math as her best subject. Often times she will ask me for help and I will not have a clue how to help her because the way the math material is taught is so different from when I went through the program.

I had a friend that moved here from Minnesota her sophomore year and immediately fell behind because her previous school did not have common core, and now she was supposed to learn an entirely new way of thinking.

In my opinion, it is absolutely fine to have common core in English, science, and history classes but it should definitely be left out of the math classes. I don't believe that learning "across" rather than building from the bottom up is any way to learn math. ​