How my quest for great boobs led me to the Common Core

We have a teacher at our school who has really awesome boobs. I mean, this lady taught for many of our students’ parents and despite the pull gravity has on the rest of us, she consistently stands at attention. I have nursed four children, and I turned 30 this year; so I knew that I must pry this boob secret from her. It is only a matter of time before things start going downhill for me - literally. After a slightly awkward conversation, she told me, “The secret is simple; stand up straight.” She also said to buy a good bra, but that doesn’t really factor into this story.

I took her advice, but my complete lack of will power eventually led me to seek the assistance of a personal trainer to help with my posture. When Kelly (the wonderful trainer, for real, she’s really good and will make a great teacher one day) arrived, the exercise list she had for me was short. She told me that you don’t need to do a lot of exercises if you do the right exercises. Some of the things she showed me were hard to do (yoga push-ups? seriously who thought of that?) but some were easy, like bicep curls. I thought, “These are good. I can do, like 100 a day.” That’s when she shattered my delusion by telling me, “When working with weights you should only repeat an exercise 8-10 times. When it becomes easy don’t increase the number of repetitions; add more weight otherwise it’s pointless.”

The day after my session with the trainer, I attended a back-to-school in-service. The keynote speaker said some things that reminded me of my training session. Common core standards dictate that you don’t need to teach a lot of standards if you teach the essential ones. Also, when your students have mastered those, increase the weight; dig deeper into the standard - or add another muscle group.

This analogy made me think about lifting weights, theoretically of course; I would never actually do such a thing. Although I must admit that I did lift weights once with another teacher at our school. She is insanely strong, well, compared to me at least. I remember when she was showing me how to use the bench press and I was unable to lift the bar. She quickly realized that was not going to work for me and gave me small free weights instead. Even though we were working out together she didn’t decrease her workout and use free weights just because I had to. She lifted that bar (and multiple weights) like a beast. This made me think about differentiated instruction. We were working out together; working the same muscles, but working toward similar yet different goals - her, the ability to lift a car, and me, the ability to wear something sleeveless without looking like Olive Oyl.