My Experience With #CommonCore...

Common Core Woes

Kristen C Snow-White

I was raised in a liberal household, Union workers for the theater going back several generations. But politics were never discussed and I didn't vote until 1992 when I was in my early 30's. Prior to that I was a simple, naive, red (unbeknownst to me) girl, living in a purple-ish state. However my daughter, Lauren, was born in 1996 and for the most part, she was raised by me, her single Conservative-Republican mom!

I thought we were "safe" from the encroaching fingers of CA Common Core. It's supposed to kick-in 2014-2015 school year and my daughter will be a Senior, hardly enough time to learn new, complicated ways to do addition and subtraction.

We weren't so lucky. Let’s go back, briefly, to the summer of 2013. My 16-year-old daughter had just finished her sophomore year and was going to take US History-11 over the summer so she could free up a block for an AP Psych class. It had been many years since I had studied history, and it was 2013 we had lived a lot of it, so I thought we might have fun.

That thought was very short lived.

My daughter had a packet of questions she had to complete each week so I began reading aloud to her and she would follow along writing her answers. This went on for about five minutes when I read: “The United States of America is a Democracy…” I nutted up! “Oh no, no, no--we are a Republic! Here’s the difference and here’s why!” I began.

“No mom, we’re a democracy”, my daughter said. “That’s what they taught us, that’s what we are.”

I had two choices and I didn't like either of them. Keep the peace and just walk away, or grab my laptop, Google Democracy v Republic and print it out so she could read for herself, in black and white. I chose the latter. Epic fail.

Lauren would have no part of what does she called my “political drivel”. But I mom’d up, shook it off and she finished the remaining 6-7 weeks relatively unscathed. That is, until the last day of class. She had worked on her project, one of those, fold-out boards you get at the craft store, over the weekend at her fathers'. When she got home, she locked herself in her bedroom to finish it up with a glue stick and pink ribbon and wouldn't let me see her "Masterpiece" until the next morning.

 

At 6:30 am in July, it was already hotter than you-know-what in the middle of summer, she proudly emerged from her room with her final project:  A TIMELINE -Titled- FEMINISM THROUGH the AGES. Okay feminism, not my thing, but it looked finished and presentable. I took a picture of it, for posterity and immediately I felt an unsettling wave wash over me. This feminism thing, odd, but she's a kid. Then I realized on the second take that in my kitchen, staring at me with empty eyes and a stoic face was, not one but two, pictures of Margaret Sanger (the eugenicist and founder of Planned Parenthood).

I ceased to breathe. It took me a few minutes to get my bearings back. Somehow, some way, over the course of the summer, my 16 year old precious baby girl had been brainwashed into believing that Margaret Sanger had made positive steps in the history of feminism and therefore she deserved two pictures on my daughter’s Final Timeline-project. To say the least, I was mortified and livid.

So here we are nine months later. The book, titled The Americans: Reconstruction Through the 21st Century took the better part of the school year to get a copy of . Everything about that class now felt "Common Core" starting with her insistence that our Nation is a Democracy, NOT a Republic. I felt like I needed to see this book again, read it, and find out what was said that could have warranted this woman's likeness on my daughter's History Final.

I do not like this Common Core, it can leave through the backdoor!

I do not like revisionist History, it’s been played-out, the end’s not a mystery!

(You know it’s bad when I go all Dr. Seuss!) 

This mom has a couple of things: A laptop, the book online ($5 for a 1 year membership) a pen and a phone. I will read this book line by line, it will be easy to highlight suspect text and Google what really happened. I'm going to take a lot of notes.I will bring any and all discrepancies, between their "Revisionist" history and "Real" history to the attention of the appropriate people. I will write a letter to the Editor of the local paper. I will take my findings and go to a TEA Party meeting. I will go to a PTA meeting at the school and board meetings at City Hall. If I have to drag my laptop around town with colored stickies and notes hanging out, I’m okay with that.

I’m not okay with Common Core coming in and putting a politically correct spin on history! Our kids deserve the truth. It hasn't always been pretty and I’m sure some people of decades past wish they had done things differently. But I won’t have my daughter feeling “guilty” for the rest of her life because someone decided that the history of our great nation, this exceptional place we live in called America, needed to be revised so that our American ancestors didn't appear to do anything awful or reconcile their differences with the people they may have wronged.

The only way to change history is to understand what really happened. Then you can build on the parts that worked and not repeat past mistakes.

What a Twisted Web They Weave...

This is such a TWISTY-WEB I don't even know where to start! Net entirely true, it started back in 2012 with a noxious, vile hash tag (h/t or #) on Twitter: #TPFA. The Tea Party Fire Ants are not at ALL related to Tea Party Patriots or TeaParty.org or any other LEGIT arm (or leg) of the TEA PARTY, in general. The ONLY communications between #TPFA and another #TeaParty is @teaparty_net which by all appearances is a "Sock" account for #TPFA. 

Before He Was a Dead Commie...

Before Twitter handle @FrankMDavisJr was a Dead Commie he was +Proe Graphique.

Been doing a little RESEARCH and what I found is INTERESTING, to say the least. Jr here professes to be a Conservative and while working closely with his MOUTH PIECE, Twitter handle @Kathy_Amidon (2, 3 & 4) they use the HASH TAG #TPFA to "Swarm" a/k/a "SPAM" members of Congress with delusional "fliers" consisting of BOLD colored backgrounds, BIG FONTS, drop-shadows and/or pictures of Holocaust victims, depending on which daily bug is up their proverbial ass.

The "Blog" they rant on is called: Benghazi-Truth. Unfortunately the name of the blog and the content couldn't BE more opposite. It is nothing more than incoherent ramblings and Twitter screen-shots mixed in with a lot of self-promoting back-pats. It appears they both "blog" since there are two different and unique styles (term used loosely) of writing (term used loosely-er). Going back to 2011 it seems that when it comes to blatant self-promotion, NOTHING has changed!

Here is one example from an 8 Sept 2011 article by Bernard Goldberg titled "Hypocrisy!"

Poor Max commented (note the WHEN!):

Max • 3 years ago

Boy this is interesting. Could it be that Mr. Goldberg wishes to avoid a circus like the Clinton impeachment mess. Even though that SOB should've been strung up by the Sisterhood for unleashing his attack dogs on that starry-eyed intern, and but for a blue dress he would've gotten away clean, they still gave him a pass.

An entire YEAR passes and in jumps Jr under the name "Proe Graphique" to RANT & RAVE about an entirely different subject:

Proe Graphique  Max • 2 years ago

Max,

Mr. Goldberg has placed himself very well to follow up or be called out for not following up: he mocked the birther issue with poisonous sarcasm voluntarily and he still writes about the "lamestream media" and hypocrisy while walking away from what has developed into what should be the biggest political story since Watergate and quite possibly ever.

Your post suggests a defeatism in the face of adversity when it comes to reporting what's right, making a difference and the resultant consequences. Does that mean we should only report the stupid little stories as contests we are sure to win, or do we tackle the big ones, also, regardless of the odds because in so doing we're doing what's right? If you choose the former over the latter, then we'll agree to disagree on a fundamental world-view.

For people just coming to this conversational party, read the thread immediately below this post. Obama's birth certificate has essentially be proven a fake and no one needs to see the original to know a deception of a tall order has been committed: the forgery is self-described as such by the operational history of its own creation embedded in the layers of the document. This is fact, not speculation. Ask Joseph Newcomer whose analysis of the Killian documents got Dan Rather fired from CBS News. He agrees.

Go here to listen to a radio blog interview with Newcomer, Zebest (huge graphics name and lifelong Democrat!) and others in the second hour. They tear the birth certificate to shreds, but suddenly Mr. I-Am-The-Media's-Watchdog Goldberg no longer has a journalistic interest:

http://obamafake.blogspot.com/...

Here's the next comment & I'll leave you to decide if you want to read the rest:

Chester A. Arthur  rider237 • 2 years ago

"?? are you guys going to hijack every comment section with this stuff?"

Yeah...why not? Bernie threw the first stone.

"we know your position."

I'm not sure Bernie knows yet. Why is he hiding under that rock?

"at this point you are probably not doing your cause much good."

I disagree.

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

-Edmund Burke

Bernie is letting evil triumph.

The back-and-forth continues. I didn't read the remaining 5 or 6 posts from "Proe," now Jr, but this is what he does. He HIJACKS threads about issues that are important to people and perverts them into something else, something about HIM and his OBSESSION. That's what he's done with the #Benghazi massacre, something that I personally take VERY seriously and he's using people who support the #TeaParty to do his bidding. Don't get caught up in his ugly web of deceit. Dude's talking some serious crap on a select few really GOOD PEOPLE that he once trusted and who once trusted him. Please don't be his next target...