Essay Contest Entrant Loni Stott writes on Common Core’s harm to children

——————————————-

It’s impossible to condense my many oppositions to Common Core in under 3 minutes, because there are so many. Therefore, I’m going to focus on the harm I have seen caused to my children and other people’s children because of Common Core.

I have watched the education system change from my older children to my younger children and I don’t like it. I worked in a school for 2 years and I saw the emotional toll this new Common Core was having on kids and how it made them hate learning. Not to mention all the indoctrination/agenda pushing in the curriculum.

That’s what started my research into Common Core and I didn’t like what I found. I didn’t want that for my kids.

I decided to home school. I never thought I would ever have to do that. I gave my daughter, that would be going into 8th grade, an assessment test just so I would know where to start her in the old Saxon math books. I found out she couldn’t even do basic division. That was alarming as I had been told she was doing great in math and there were no worries.

I showed her a couple of math problems the traditional way and she got it right away. She said she was so confused trying to do it the Common Core way and that left her feeling inept. She is doing great now. My younger daughter is also doing great in math and if the old math was still taught she would be a grade ahead in math. While I was working in the school I saw the destruction CC was causing to some kids. They felt stupid and felt like failures. It was heartbreaking. I would show them traditional math and they were always surprised at how easy and understandable it was. But of course we were encouraged not to show kids the traditional form of math. Why take so many steps to solve a problem when it isn’t necessary? If you add a bunch of unnecessary steps it gives the child more opportunities to mess up and get the wrong answer. Why confuse them? Math also has an answer. By telling kids they aren’t wrong or there is no wrong answer, it is also setting that child up for failure.

Now let’s move on to my son. He didn’t want to be homeschooled and therefore I went to the school and told them I wanted to circumvent the CC so he could stay in school. I didn’t want him learning CC math or English. He had already wasted 1 full year of math because it was stuff he already knew, not to mention some of the pornographic reading material that is being assigned for children to read.

So when I went to talk to the counselor about how to do this he said we could go the “honors track”.

“Honors track? What is that?” I asked.

He proceeded to tell me it’s basically the old traditional math track that kids had been on before CC.

“Wait!” I thought to myself, “If Common Core is so much more rigorous, why is the old math called honors?”

My oldest son took the old math track and was taking college level calculus as a junior in high school. My younger son will not be able to do that because he wasted a year in math when CC was implemented.

I think the testing is abusive. They’re set up to make kids feel like failures in my opinion. I don’t like the data mining of children, and the tacking of their every move. What happen to privacy.

This is supposed to be America. Kids are not the same, they are not Common. They are unique and should be allowed to spread their wings. I know I have 5 and no two are alike. They learn different, they respond to different situations differently. But that doesn’t mean one is any more special than any other one. Einstein said:”Everybody is a Genius. But If You Judge a Fish by Its Ability to Climb a Tree, It Will Live Its Whole Life Believing that It is Stupid.”

Our kids deserve better. America deserves better. We need to take back education and put it in the hands of parents and local teachers that know what is best for their children. How does someone from WA know what my child here in UT needs or what values I want them taught. They don’t. I reject Common Core and I hope you all will too.