Down River – August 28, 2014
They’re Trying:
I’ve been trying to get a grasp on all this new Common Core stuff that has been thrust by the feds and the staties on local school districts all across the country.
I’ve talked to more than a few educators, locally and elsewhere and I have some serious reservations not so much about the content of the Common Core approach to curriculum but the way it is being force-fed to the teachers and the kids.
I still have not gotten a satisfactory answer to this main reservation: If districts are implementing this new system, why don’t they do it incrementally, starting with kindergarten students this year, then kindergarten and first grade the following year and then kindergarten, first grade and second grade in the third year and so on.
I welcome someone telling me the merits of teaching a third grade kid one way a year ago and this year, as a fourth grader, throwing an entirely different approach at him.
But this is why our educators make the big bucks and I hope someone can provide me a satisfactory answer.
I must tell you while visiting Dickey Elementary earlier this week to examine the outstanding job Mike Andrus and Deb Geraty did in their artwork on the hallways there, I had a couple minutes to take a look at a fourth grade Core math primer for teachers.
What was inside caused a double-take. I can’t recite its contents verbatim but it contained instructions on things similar to those old, “If a train leaves St. Louis at 1 p.m. and travels 40 miles an hour and another train leaves Joplin at 2 p.m. and goes 30 miles an hour, where will they pass each other?’
I hated that stuff in either junior or senior high (I can’t remember which). And now they are attempting to teach something of that scale in fourth grade?
Apparently we’ll have to wait a year or two or three to see if this new system passes muster, checking the scores after those weeks of testing are imposed on our youngins’.
In the meantime here’s a sincere start-of-the-school-year good luck message to the students, teachers and administrators in Clinton County.
I sat in on the curriculum presentation at Central Mountain High School last week, ostensibly for the public (other than a handful) which did not show up. But the administrators and teachers there gave every indication of working very hard to make the new system work, what one participant called “turning a lemon into lemonade.”
Down River wishes them well.
Candidates, Candidates, Candidates
:
We have to get through the November election this year, but next year’s municipal balloting here at home is shaping up as what the late Bellefonte football coach/broadcaster Bill Luther would call “a dandy.”
If you’re a political junkie, you have to love this stuff.
For instance, for Lock Haven mayor alone, many, many people are considering running to replace America’s favorite $1,800 a year mayor, Rick Vilello.
Looking for some names? Council member Rick Conklin on the GOP side and council members Steve Stevenson and Bill Baney, and maybe even former councilman Alan Black on the Democratic side.
For Baney it may or may not a second attempt. I had a Baney contemporary tell me he recalls Baney announcing for mayor at the Bellefonte Avenue McDonalds some decades back but nothing came of it; our fourth ward moles are checking on that.
And there is a report of some independent also stepping forward for city mayor; haven’t heard a name to attach to that and occasional candidate Richard Morris has told Down River he’s not the guy.
And did you hear this one? There could be a self-described “good looking handsome man” from western Clinton County seeking one of the two Democratic nominations for county commissioner next spring. Keep your good ear open for more on that.
You can book Republican incumbents Pete Smeltz and Jeff Snyder will go again, as will two-termer Democrat Joel Long. Folks are saying former commissioner Adam Coleman, knocked out the last time under unusual circumstances (for reasons of space limitations, we’ll let it go at that) likely will be a candidate, as could one or two women who at this point have not made a final decision and/or are not ready to publicly disclose their plans.
An Ouch in Renovo:
The folks in Renovo government are not real happy with how that Clinton County repository sale of the old Knights of Columbus site played out on a couple counts.
Not only did the borough have to sit tight for a year with its ultimately unsuccessful $500 bid in limbo, it cost the cash-starved borough $100 for the effort.
The bidding process, we have been told, required a non-refundable $100 processing fee and, you guessed it, when Renovo got its check back better than a year later, it was minus that $100 fee.
Someone cue that good looking handsome man in western Clinton County.
