Week 1, January 8 2020



Hello all, while reading over the PESB website and looking at the competencies for us English teachers, I found that the first section was a list of everything that I had learned in Professor McHenrys' Linguistics course last spring. I am happy to know that the courses I have taken so far have helped prepare me for my career. Reading over the rest of the sections, I found the speaking and listening section interesting because I always knew that how we speak and listen to our students was very important, but I had no idea that there were official standards connected to them. I am also curious as to whether or not all other subject areas have standards about speaking and listening, because I believe this is a more general aspect of teaching that everyone who wants to be a teacher needs to learn about and master.



For the Common Core State Standards, coming from a small town I heard lots of negative comments about the Common Core. I saw my younger siblings math lessons change into something that even myself as a high school student got confused by, and the explanation for it seemed to be the Common Core. I think that it was a very common misconception that the Common Core set a specific type of curriculum for schools, and this is not the case. I would however wonder if the Common Core Standards did in fact influence the change in curriculum across the states that adopted it, or if there was just a change to a brand new curriculum. One other thing that I learned from reading the frequently asked questions on the Common Core website, was that Common Core only covers English Language Arts/Literacy and Mathematics. I was never taught this distinction, and thought that Common Core covered several other topics as well.

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