Sunday, October 6, 2013

Special Edition: Common Core GrammarCatz

This is actually NOT Latin-related, but I know a lot people who read this blog are teachers, and so you are perhaps grappling with Common Core. I am a long-time foe of Common Core for many reasons (I'll spare you the details; anyone who runs in the same teacher circles as I do over at Google+ knows what I think about CCSS), but I did something today that amused me enormously: I took my GrammarCatz (something my grandson and I invented this summer), and I aligned them to the Common Core.

Now, I hasten to add, I think that Common Core is hogwash, so by saying that I aligned the GrammarCatz to the Common Core, I am just saying that I aligned them to hogwash... but they are aligned!

So, below is today's GrammarCat, and here's a link to the GrammarCatz blog post where you can see all the relevant Common Core literacy standards in the right-side bar. In each blog post, I use a javascript so that you can click and reveal the "corrected" cat with standard English. This particular cat has spelling and capitalization problems (like all LOLCats), and he also needs some help with the apostrophe, a.k.a. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.2.2c: Use an apostrophe to form contractions and frequently occurring possessives.


For those of you wrestling with Common Core, perhaps this might be a source of amusement. I know I was chortling all day as I tagged the posts with the CCSS standards and substandards and subsubstandards.

Don't worry: normal Latin programming will return on Tuesday. :-)