Reflection: Thoughts on Common Core/New Bill

Since nearly all of my students are away at space camp for the next three days, I thought that I would address an extremely pressing issue that has been weighing on my mind for quite a while.

As an educator, I tend to avoid revealing my political views because I know that I have the ability to influence many people. I want to instill a sense of responsibility and good citizenship in my students, but I want them to be able to think for themselves. Spoon-feeding them my viewpoint on various topics will not help them become critical thinkers.

The Alabama state legislature is attempting to pass SB 380, a bill that would rescind the adoption of the Common Core and push back the adoption of those standards until at least 2017.

Over the course of the past couple of years, I have heard murmuring about the danger of adopting the College and Career Ready Standards (most widely known as the Common Core). In preparation for this reflection, I tried to find and read as many articles on both sides of the argument as possible. After reading the various arguments, I have come to the conclusion that those who are against the CCRS are, frankly speaking, ignorant of the facts.

In fact, Tommy Bice, the Alabama State Superintendent of Education, recently wrote an article for the Montgomery Advertiser that addresses the fears that Alabamians have about adopting the CCRS.

I could only hope to be half as persuasive and eloquent as Dr. Bice is in his article, so I will let his writing do the work for me (thanks, Dr. Bice!).
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As an addendum to the CCRS argument, I would like to address something else I came across during my research. A Gawker article was published a little after noon today announcing that the Alabama legislature passed a bill that requires all students and school employees in the public schools to spend fifteen minutes every morning participating in Christian prayer.

I will not even begin to address the first amendment violations that this bill commits, as those arguments tend to be a bit subjective. Instead, I want to approach this from a mathematical perspective.

Fifteen minutes.

FIFTEEN.

Do you realize how much time that is in the span of a class period?

An average class period in every school I have been in, either as a student or as a student-teacher, is between forty and fifty minutes. Being an optimist, I will use fifty minutes as the measured class period. First, let us subtract fifteen minutes for the government mandated Christian prayer (50-15=35 minutes). It takes at least five minutes to prepare students to begin and to end class (35-10 minutes=25 minutes).

Twenty-five minutes.

TWENTY-FIVE.

That means I have twenty-five minutes to teach your child how to read, write, and think critically. This is all while trying to instill good habits that will prepare them to be properly-functioning adults and employees.

Think about that.

We will be spending about thirty percent of first period in prayer.

My question is this: could the students not simply wake up fifteen minutes earlier to pray in the morning instead of taking away crucial instructional time?