Up to Standard

The National Governors Association released a draft of the proposed common core standards yesterday. You can find it here. I'm OK with standards. I like having a good idea what it is that my students should know, regardless of whether or not they are at a place where they can know. It gives me something to shoot for. Something to gauge their understanding against.

But, I'm worried for my own sake. As I read through these standards this was my train of thought: "These seem pretty decent. They seem to reflect the work that we're currently doing in my classroom. I could easily organize my curriculum around these. I think the other teachers I work with could easily organize their curriculum around these. Hey, maybe if we're all teaching these same standards we could do more sharing. Heck, if everyone's doing the same thing, maybe they could create a national text book to go along with the national standards. And if every student is doing the exact same thing, from the exact same book, maybe we could just get one really good teacher on the tv and have them do all the lectures."

Of course I know that every student is an individual and the role of a teacher is to adapt the curriculum to be as successful as possible for each of their individual students, but if they all need to learn the same things...maybe...just maybe...I wonder how much they would pay that one television teacher.