My Thoughts On... Common Core State Standards

Common Core State Standards or CCSS are the guidelines for the curriculum that we in Washington must follow.  I personally did not like the idea of the standards before working in the classroom. I felt like they would be holding me back from a teaching style and curriculum that I wanted to create. Since being in the classroom, I have been humbled by the fact that as a teacher I need to be adaptable and flexible with what I plan on teaching. I have learned to work with the standards instead of against them. I have learned to structure my lessons on the standards which has created a guideline for my lesson. Instead of creating a goal to work towards, they are already established for me. This can be a good and a bad thing. I like the structure and the fact that I know that what I am working towards and teaching is administration approved. With creating my very own curriculum, I would have to get all my standards approved and could run into a lot of problems with admin. For the current CCSS in particular, I find that some are very open ended or can be taught using a variety of different methods. If there was a way to make them even more open ended then that could possibly create problems as well. If a standard that standardized tests were based off of was too open ended, then a teacher could interpret and therefore teach the concept wrong making state testing even harder for students. Although CCSS are very widely speculated upon, I think that overall they are not impossible to adapt to at the moment. As of right now, I have been able to build lessons off of them with minimal hardships, however moving forward as a teacher, I could see the problems that may come from them in their current state.