Gary Rubinstein, a high school math teacher at Stuyvesant High School, wrote an excellent blog piece Saturday on math and the Common Core. He argues that most math teachers are forced to cover too much material, and students’ understanding of the discipline suffers mightily as a result:

The biggest problem with math education is that there are way too many topics that teachers are required to teach. Why has this happened? Over the years things have been added, often as a way to prepare students for something that is going to be needed for a future course … Though things keep getting added, it is rare that anything ever gets removed from the curriculum. The common core was an opportunity to remedy this, but from what I can see they haven’t really allowed anything to be removed. If I were made ‘Math Czar’ I would gleefully chop at least forty percent of the topics that are currently taught from K to 12.

Rubinstein believes education reformers who emphasize “accountability” and “rigor” actually harm students’ comprehension through their fixation on testing. “When teachers have to teach too many topics, they do not have time to cover them all in a deep way,” he writes. “The teacher, then, has to choose which topics to cover in a meaningful way, and which to cover superficially. It would be as if an English teacher was told to cover fifty novels with her class. Not being able to have her classes read all fifty books, she would pick some to read fully while having her class read excerpts or even summaries of the other ones.”

Rubinstein’s example isn’t far from the mark, according to Hechinger Report: the new Common Core standards require English teachers to focus on “depth over breadth, more challenging readings, and increased emphasis on nonfiction.” For teacher Chris Kirchner, this meant altering her curriculum drastically:

…Novels like “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Great Gatsby” have been squeezed off the syllabus to make room for nonfiction texts including “The Glass Castle” and “How to Re-Imagine the World.” For the first time, students will read only excerpts of classics like “The Odyssey” and “The House on Mango Street” instead of the entire book. And Kirchner will assign less independent reading at home, but will require students to write more essays, and push them to make connections across multiple texts.

While the emphasis on writing and (as the article mentions later) plays may be beneficial to students, it is hard to see how Common Core’s “depth over breadth” comment would necessitate excerpting and cutting classics. “Depth over breadth” would, one assumes, mean less and more detailed reading. Like Rubinstein’s math class, it would focus on a handful of excellent titles, rather than a wide and shallow range.

Unfortunately, as Rubinstein points out, the new Common Core tests are likely to put additional pressure on teachers and students—yet states who have started assessments “have seen proficiency rates drop from 60% on the old tests to 30% on the new common core tests.”

I encourage you to read his entire blog piece. His brief examples from the classroom bring beauty back to math. One hopes an English teacher will arrive who similarly re-enchants the subject for students.

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