Looking over the English Language Arts Standards, they claim that these standards "[stress] critical-thinking, problem-solving, and analytical skills that are required for success in college, career, and life," but as someone who has grown up taking standardized tests, I can tell you the only thing these test stress is the students. No normal human enjoys tests, but no test should leave nearly an entire generation with crippling test …show more content…
write informative/explanatory texts, including the narration of historical events, scientific procedures/experiments, or technical processes... [and] produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to [the] task, purpose, and audience." Simple enough, right? Wrong. Absolutely wrong. Underneath all of the subtopics, there is a list following that explains exactly what Common Core is looking for in the "perfect essay." If I took all of their "requirements" and put them to use in this paper, I would've already failed since I'm not using appropriate headers, metaphors and other figurative language dispersed throughout in a meaningful manner, and maintaining a formal style whilst sticking to social norms of my environment. And this is only a small portion of this list, I haven't even hit the mathematics …show more content…
It stands out to me though, that they chose the word "proficient." Not all students are skilled in math, hell, not all students are skilled in most subjects (We all know that one class we dread going to), but to claim that mathematically skilled students will be doing x, it makes me question what they believe mathematically incompetent student would be learning. (Context: Just because I am stating there are mathematically incompetent peoples, I am in no means being rude. Some people are not good at math and will kindly admit that they prefer another subject over it.) Regardless, according to Common Core, students will see the correlation between math problems and life, and please, let me be the first to tell you that y=mx+b has never been useful in my retail job. Some things in math aren't applicable to real life unless you plan on being an engineer, and yes, you should still learn these things because it's interesting and helps explain how the world works the way it does, but I can't expect everyone I meet to be able to tell me the quadratic