As a college professor, I can say this: students are coming to college with a greater deficit of the skills needed to succeed than ever before. I encounter very few students with adequate critical thinking or writing skills, so rather than building from a foundation that should begin in primary and secondary schools, I feel like I have to start from scratch to teach my students who to read, write, and think effectively. High schools teaching common core have turned their students into test machines with very little aptitude for critical thought, and the only incentive teachers have is to keep their test scores high, because they fear the repercussions of underperformance on tests. It's far more of a problem than a solution.
"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body
Updated On: 12/3/13 at 02:12 PM
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