Standards and Accountability

In the service placement that I observed standards being taught, I asked the teacher if they came up with their own agenda or they had to go by the book. Some of the activities or lessons they did, in my opinion did not seem like it would be beneficial or effective, more of a time waster. When I asked this question to the teacher I observed she said that she had a book that had lesson plans and activities, but it also had the state standards that the student needed to be able to pass so she would make her own activities to pass off that standard. So for kindergartners they need to be able to recognize the alphabet by the end of the school year, that's a standard. She would play this game with the kids where they would put a bunch of symbols on the floor and have one or two letters and the kids had to hop across the letters to the other end of the room. It seemed very repetitive and not effective to me that the students seemed to just memorize the path from others. Also their success in this activity did not lead to the success in other activities with recognizing the letters they were working on. But this is a standard that the teacher needed to accomplish with the student so she is on the right path, just not executed in the best fashion. Is there certain subject matters that seem to be given more emphasis than others? Absolutely! I was browsing through the state standards and for first grade out of the core subjects, language arts has the most emphasis. It looks like math follows language arts in being the most important taught at that level. What are my thoughts on these two topics being the ones with the most emphasis around them? I think its brilliant. Think about it what are the two things that you need to be good at to get by in life. It is math and language arts. I have never met someone that is successful that is good at history and science, but not math and english. Seems like those that excel in history or science do well in the other areas as well. I agree with this in selection standards that students need to focus on being they are the essential building blocks to careers in our society. The teacher that I am working under thinks that state standards and standardized testing is effective in leading teachers to do the right thing and not to get off topic in what they are teaching their students because sometimes they go way out left field and accomplish nothing that is beneficial to the students learning and success.