Start With the Verb

You know you have officially become an "adult" when you begin to craft your first resume.  The resume is what sets you apart from others in the vast world of never-ending job applicants.  You scour the internet for the best verbs possible to make your resume stand out among the rest.  You begin to type, and when you think back on your schooling, these potential "achievements" came to mind:

• Filled out a plot diagram
• Summarized a nonfiction article
• Edited DOL sentences
• Wrote 178340 research papers
• Mastered math fact time tests
• Answered textbook questions

With these innovating tasks, you are sure to bounce off the paper and come alive to that potential job prospect.  Right?

WRONG.  

It takes more than recall, memorization, and acing mundane tasks in school to get a job in this current market.  We should start creating those skills within our learners in the school setting.  After doing a quick Google search on "resume verbs", I was confronted with pages upon pages of results.  Words such as collaborate, design, assist, manage, and facilitate were among the verbs included in the lists.  It makes sense to begin cultivating these skills in students as early as possible.  With the competitive market for jobs, our duty as educators is to best prepare students with the skill set necessary to succeed in their adult life.

I began to think about the connection between the verbs in the Common Core Standards and the verbs that stand out on resumes.  The Common Core is what drives and directs our curriculum content, so I was interested in discovering if any of the standards included some of these "resume verbs" that I came across when doing a brief search on the internet.  I chose to look solely at the 7th grade E/LA Common Core Standards, as I did not intend to begin a doctoral search on the matter.  Below is a chart of what I found:

Granted, I realize the Common Core Standards are generic guidelines, but I feel until we start demanding innovating guidelines, then we will continue to see generic results.  Unfortunately, I feel the verbs that have been chosen are verbs that are easy to quantify, and thus easy to test.  "Determining two or more central ideas", important nonetheless, will not stand out on a resume.  It's what we have students DO with those central ideas that make them stand apart from the crowd.  Understandably so, this is no easy task, but what would happen if we just tried to incorporate some more innovative and "resume-worthy" skills into our national/state standards?

If our nation really wants to do an overhaul on education, then we should start simple.  Start with the verb.