Concluding Post: An Open Letter to My Students

To my students; past, present, and future:

My teacher friends and I often joke about how those outside the field of education have no idea what the life of a teacher is like. My family members often ask me about my plans for summer as if it were a long-stretching, wide-open space of time for me to fill however I want. I do my best to hold back my instinctual sarcastic responses and answer honestly; I’ll be taking this class or that, meeting regularly with the cheerleaders I coach for practice, camp, and fundraisers, working on curriculum planning with my colleagues, and, yes, hopefully taking a trip to a Spanish speaking country to brush up on my Spanish, which I constantly fear is going to stagnate at a level 1 if I hear one more student say, “Me llamo es…” or “What does ¿Cómo estás? mean again?”

Students, with the exception of those whose parents are teachers often see teachers the same way. Yesterday a student asked my why I hadn’t gotten his project graded, reminding me that I had had a three day weekend! I didn’t know exactly how to explain to him that I had, in fact, spent about four hours on Saturday grading, but hadn’t gotten to that class’s projects, and that, while Monday the students didn’t have class, I was at school in meetings, planning for the coming week and beyond. In this letter I hope to broaden your understanding of the profession of teachers and consider the things I consider as a teacher. Education affects everyone in our country, and I think it’s both sad and strange that so few people really know and understand it.

So to my past students, while what I have to say here may come too late, as I’ve learned some of it after having taught you, and to my present students, who I know I sometimes fail because I’m still figuring things out, and to my future students, who will hopefully get to see a more polished version of me as a teacher: I’d like to explain who I am as a teacher, what learning has been like for me as a student, a teacher, and a citizen of the world, and how what I’ve learned can impact you and help you on your way to become a responsible global citizen.

Let me start by sharing with you some of the basics of how I look at my role as a teacher. I am now finishing the last courses in my Master’s program in teaching and curriculum, and while I have learned and grown more than I ever expected, I’m surprised by how much what I thought about education when I first graduated with my Bachelor’s degree six years ago is still the same. In the philosophy of education I wrote as a piece for my first graduate class, as an intern in 2008, I wrote, “I believe as a teacher my responsibility is to help students become independent life-long learners.” I would, perhaps now tweak that to include something like the objective line on my resume: “to prepare students to be responsible, informed global citizens,” but overall I find that the goals I had in my first year of teaching are still goals I have now. Even though my job title is “Spanish teacher” some of the most important things I hope to impart to you have nothing to do with Spanish. One of the reasons I love teaching Spanish is that I find it lends itself easily to other lessons that help reach those main goals of teaching you to be a life-long learner and preparing you as a global citizen.

In fact, learning Spanish played a key role in shaping who I am today as a teacher, and why I believe the way I do about education and my role as a teacher. Students often ask me when I became fluent in Spanish, how long it took. It’s a hard question to answer, and often I say something like, “I’m still working on it,” which is true, I feel like there is so much to learn I could spend a lifetime on it. (Which is another thing I love about Spanish!) But the true answer to that, one that often (unfortunately) discourages the most eager students, is that it wasn’t until I moved to Spain. Sure I learned all the verb tenses and plenty of vocabulary in school, but none of it became real until I had a chance to, and had no choice but to use the language in real situations. If I wanted a cell phone I had to go to the Vodafone store and speak Spanish. If I wanted Internet at home I had to first make it through the most difficult phone conversation of my life with a Jazztel representative. In order to find a place to live I had to be able to communicate all kinds of things about myself, the building, how to get there, what was included in the price, etc. Not to mention adventures like finding employment, reporting a lost purse to the police, helping a stranger with directions on the street or in the metro, navigating a local market, finding enjoyment in anything on TV. When I first moved to Spain I thought it would be a good idea to enroll in a Spanish class to brush up on my grammar since I was being flooded with opportunities to try it out. I went to one class and promptly decided it was a waste of time, I got more out of a two minute (*free) conversation with my neighbor than I did out of the hour long class.

I don’t say these things to discourage you, or to make you think that school is unimportant. Of course it isn’t. I never would have been able to accomplish any of those things without a strong background in Spanish first. My friends in Madrid who didn’t speak any Spanish prior to moving there didn’t gain nearly as much through their experience of living there as I did, because they had first to overcome the language barrier (or look for a way to complete all those transactions in English), which took considerable time and energy!

But while official schooling and all the conjugating and vocabulary memorization were helpful in the end, I needed to be able to use those things, I needed actual life skills, and that is why my main goal as a teacher is not about Spanish at all, but rather about helping you develop and reach your destination in life prepared to be a responsible, well-rounded individual who is able to enjoy life as much as I have been able to.

Over the course of my journey through my Master’s degree, I have done a considerable amount of reflective writing on different aspects of curriculum and education. As I stated at the beginning of this letter, I think it’s an injustice that only teachers know anything about these topics, so I would like to share with you what I have learned through creating and analyzing these writings, and how I think what I have learned can affect you as well.

Studying my writing for this course, I found four themes that emerged that I believe can stand in as rules that I teach, and maybe even live by. The first I’ve already addressed here- the idea that learning does not end at school, and as such my job as a teacher is not simply to oversee your memorization process, but to teach you to grow your abilities and develop skills you will need in real life. School is, after all, just one portion of your life. What you do next will be much more important in the grand scheme of things, and I want you to be prepared for that.

The second rule involves standards. As my past and present students know, and future students will understand soon after joining my class, I have very high standards. This applies to my students, to myself as a student, and to my personal life. I don’t think there’s any point in doing something and not doing it to the best of your ability. This means a few things for me as a teacher. One is that having high standards doesn’t always mean having the same standards for everyone. My Spanish 3 students sometimes (though not often) complain about the rigor involved in their assessments. They ask why the other classes don’t have to write as much, or take listening tests, but they do. My response is simple- they have to because they’re capable of it. I’ll admit that I’ve demanded more from them than the other Spanish 3 teachers have of their classes, but my students have risen to the occasion. I’ve never asked more of them than they’re capable of, and they’ve proven that over and over again. Even in my Spanish 1 classes, they’ve come to realize that it’s actually a very bad thing when I give up and speak English to them. As much as they complain about how they “can’t understand” and “why can’t I just speak English,” when I do, they usually get offended and tell me they can handle it, I don’t need to go easy on them.

Likewise, when I taught Spanish 2 and I knew that several of my students just wanted to pass Spanish 2 so they could graduate, but never planned to do anything more with the language, I had to check my overzealous feelings about Spanish in exchange for a more realistic view of what would actually be useful to them. I hated that it felt like lowering my standards in a way, but really it was more about shifting them, keeping my teaching consistent with my professed goal of preparing students for their actual futures.

Another rule I teach by as far as standards is that failure is okay. In today’s world, in most

contexts, failure is absolutely not okay. In my classroom it’s okay to fail sometimes. I have very high
standards. I’ve admitted it, and I know you all agree. This means that sometimes you won’t quite measure as high as I’d hoped for you. This doesn’t mean that you’re a failure, it means you still have more to learn, and I will make it my goal to help you see what needs to happen to get you to a place where you can be more successful in the class.

My favorite analogy with failure is videogames- you play and play and play, and fail all the time. (How often do you save just in case you fail, so you won’t have to start all the way over?) But you still keep going, and in the end you focus on how good it feels to finally beat the game instead of how frustrating it was to fail all those times. You will fail sometimes in life. I certainly have. Going back to some of my experiences in Spain, I think about when I first tried to purchase a monthly metro pass. I didn’t know that you can’t actually buy one in the metro station (of course, right?), but rather you have to go to a tobacco stand at street level. When I asked about the ticket at the metro ticket window, the man working responded with “eres idiota.” That’s all he would say to me. I did my best not to cry in front of him, and spent the rest of the day missing my small town where people offered to help when you needed it instead of calling you an idiot. Eventually I figured out where to buy my metro ticket. I failed at first, but I ended up learning how the system worked as well as the word for the tobacco stands, “estanco.” In fact I learned that word so well that at the one Spanish class I attended, when the teacher asked me what I had done the past weekend, I told her I bought an “estanco.” I was going for “estantería,” bookshelf, and after lots of confusion on her part and explaining on mine, I figured it out and haven’t confused those words since. Sometimes we learn the most when we fail. So, while I know you hate it, and I hate that it’s painful, sometimes it’s okay with me if you fail in my class, because I believe you’ll learn through the experience.

A third rule for my teaching, and again, for life in general has to do with values. I believe that everyone deserves to be treated with respect. That’s the motto of our school: Respect Others, Accept Responsibility (which we as Golden Lions shorten to

ROAR), and I couldn’t agree with it more. When we study different countries and cultures and we talk about acceptable ways to discuss diversity we’re doing more than meeting the World Language Standards about culture. We’re learning about how to be accepting of others and to interact with people in a respectful way. I hope that you’ve seen how important RESPECT is to me, and can understand that I’ve made such an issue of it in the classroom in hopes that you’ll carry that out into the world with you. 

A final rule I’d like to address is that of the relationship between community and schools. Throughout this letter I’ve expressed my belief that learning doesn’t happen only at school. This is why I think it’s crazy to try to separate school and community, or, conversely, to not try harder to link the two. In one of my classes it’s a joke among the students that I’ve called all of their parents about one thing or another. They like to compare notes about who got a phone call home and why, and when we took a true colors assessment as a class, and I explained what it meant that I was “gold,” they said, oh, that’s why you have to be in everybody’s business. They joke about it, but me connecting with their parents is important, and if I had the time I truly would call every parent much more regularly. 

Curriculum theorist Ralph Tyler reminds teachers and curriculum creators to study what students need and consider what curriculum can do to provide that, he reminds teachers that curriculum extends past school into the community. Similarly, curriculum experts and authors of the book Align the Design, remind teachers to “learn, then do.” This is something I struggled with as a teacher from small town southwest Michigan working for the first time in the diverse Lansing Public School system, again as a new English teacher in Madrid Spain, and yet again when I moved to North Carolina. Every context I’ve taught in has been markedly different, and each time it took quite a bit of studying, learning (about what students needed, wanted, expected, etc.) in order for me to be successful as their teacher. In Madrid I had to learn to pronounce my “t”s in words like “twenty.” In North Carolina I’ve learned more expressions than I ever imagined existed like “mashing a button” (instead of press), or “trying someone” for calling them out. I had to learn to tone down my polished neutral English teacher accent, because I sounded even more foreign than a “regular Yankee” to my Southern students. In each of these scenarios, the more I understood about the community I lived and worked in, the better able I was able to understand my students. 

Nel Noddings says, “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely” (433). This is something I’ve tried to convey to you in the classroom. When I encourage you to work as a team, when I make you stay with your group throughout a whole unit even though you “don’t like each other,” I’m trying to share with you what I believe about community and schools and their relationship. Things go smoother when we work as a team- in school, out of school, connecting school and community- I think this belief holds. I want you to learn to think of more than just yourself, to be more global, to be more willing to take on collective responsibility for more than your personal choices; to see how what you do affects everyone else.

In closing, let me thank each of you for everything you have taught (or will teach) me. I’m by no means finished with my journey as a teacher, so I’m confident that these beliefs will grow and be challenged, and continue to take shape as I go, but, like the basics stated in my philosophy of education and the objective on my resume haven’t really changed, I am sure that the basis for these beliefs will hold true, because they’ve taken years of formal and informal education and life experiences to form. I hope that reading this has helped you understand my perspective as teacher; what goes into the decisions I make, why I do things the way I do, and how I have arrived at these beliefs and “rules” that I live, and consequently, teach by.

Sincerely,

Sra. Rose 

Cycle Five: What does a good school look like?

Assessing schools is, in my opinion, one of the most difficult aspects of education. There are so many factors that contribute to a schools´ success or lack thereof that it´s hard to pinpoint those that are controllable and measurable and should be used to hold schools (and teachers) accountable.  Eliot W. Eisner, in “What does it mean to Say a School is Doing Well,” points out that many believe “we have a national problem in American education and that national problems require national solutions” (327). Eisner agrees that using standards and rubrics in the education system is beneficial in that “if you don’t know where you’re headed, you will not know where you have arrived” (328), but goes on to question the current favorite method of evaluating schools based on test scores, as “curriculum gets narrowed,” that “Tests come to define our priorities” (329). Eisner also mentions how the pressure surrounding a focus on standardized tests to provide data about school “effectiveness” has markedly negative results as both teachers and students worry more about grades and test results than about actual learning, and the many other important things that should go on in classrooms other than preparing for tests.

I recently took a survey for a doctoral student doing research on test anxiety from teachers and students’ point of views. As I don’t teach a “core” subject, there is (so far) no standardized test in my content area, and I’ve largely avoided any of that stress. As I answered questions about how often I remind my students they’ll be tested on the content, and to what degree my stress over the testing affects me in my career I realized how lucky I feel to be excluded from this, at least for the time being. With talk of rating teachers, and maybe even paying them based on students’ test scores, I often joke with my husband after grading a set of tests that I might be out a job soon. It’s hard for me to stomach the fact that, even though I am doing everything I can think of to help my students be successful, I have one class with several students who refuse to do hardly anything in class and absolutely nothing outside of class, and, if judged only on their test scores with no consideration for the research-based strategies I’ve tried, the parent contact I’ve made, the conferences with their other teachers, etc., I would look like a failure. Maybe I’m not trying as hard as I think I am, and if the stakes were higher I would find something that works better than what I’m doing now, but I don’t think it’s fair to place sole responsibility for these student’s failure on me as their teacher.

This leads us back to the original question- what a good school looks like. If I don’t want that responsibility, and I don’t want to say my school is a failure either, who is responsible for those kids who are continuing to fail? I guess in my opinion a good school is so connected to the community that the community as a whole (school and teachers included) shares the responsibility of producing productive citizens. As they say, it takes a village. It’s easy for policy makers to come up with these ideas that things like teacher tenure create lazy teachers who are unmotivated to work to do better, and performance based pay would solve all those problems. How would they feel if their salary were based upon the unemployment rate? And what would they do differently to suddenly solve a problem that they’ve so far been unable to settle?

Nel Noddings in “The Aims of Education,” quotes John Dewey, “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely” (433). Our country, based on capitalism, is so competitive that most parents don’t necessarily want the same things for their children as for all children. They want better for their own children so they’ll have an advantage, more likelihood to be successful. This causes a break down between school and community, as community often believes that between family and school the kids will be fine, and we know this is too often not the case.

When I read the title of this week’s blog, I did a quick Google search on “what does a good school look like?” This list  was among the first I found, and I agree with many of the things listed, even though some I hadn’t considered before. I found it interesting that it never mentions “has high test scores,” but it does mention community involvement over and over again. Similarly, Meier’s chapter “The School at Work,” in which she describes Central Park East and Central Park East Secondary School, she repeatedly mentions how closely connected the schools are to families and the community. She says the schools “are more often faulted by kids for being too close, not too distant, from their families and communities. It’s amazing how much can be done to bridge the gaps if we eliminate some of the obvious barriers” (52).

I wonder how many schools have such a close connection to the community? I know the administration at our school encourages us to stay in regular contact with parents, but they haven’t put anything into place to make that easier for us, like the limited number of students each teacher deals with at the schools Meier describes in her book. I love Dave Egger’s  idea about getting local writers involved in tutoring. I think that’s something every community should work on. My school is considering a new model next year in which students have study hall built into the day, a way to combat the problem we’re facing in that not all of our students have parents who support them in doing their homework, and in this way we can provide that lacking support. Egger’s tutoring center is the same idea, but I think the community involvement makes it a better option than our plan. Obviously one problem is that kids would still have to choose to go to the center, but I think it’s important for them to be in contact with professionals other than their teachers. We’re often encouraged to talk about college with our students because it’s likely that we’re the only person in their lives who went to college. This could be a way for them to see other successful professionals (college grads or not) who care about their learning, and maybe that would make academic success more appealing to them. In her article, “The Importance of Community Involvement in Schools," Anne O’Brien sites examples of the positive relationship between community involvement and successful schools and gives tips on where to start such an overwhelming task.

Overwhelming as it may be, I believe this is a key factor in school achievement that is often overlooked. As hard as teachers and schools may try to improve teaching strategies and test scores, outside factors often affect students more than any one institution can hope to control. A good school is one that has the community backing it, so all students are encouraged and provided with the tools and resources they need to learn.

Cycle Four: How should curriculum be created?

After this week’s readings, my first response to this question is to look at how it should not be created- by people who know nothing about curriculum and education, as the example with the Texas State Board of Education illustrates. Reading that article sparked my interest in the makeup of the North Carolina State Board of Education. I remember wondering when researching candidates before the elections this past November why so many people with no experience in education would want positions on the school board, or as superintendent (and, for that matter, why given a choice of a former teacher or an entrepreneur with a degree in political science anyone would not vote for the teacher.) What I found is that the current North Carolina board of education is made up of six former educators and six non-educators who, “set(s) policy and general procedures for public school systems across the state, including teacher pay and qualifications, course content, testing requirements, and manages state education funds.” Although Tyler warns that subject specialists can be “too technical, too specialized” in their ideas about curriculum, I would much rather have too specialized than not at all specialized. Perhaps having variety (school board members who lack experience in education, but are parents, for example) lends a needed balance to the mix, but I think one of the most important things in curriculum development is that it should be created by experts in the field. I have been shocked over and over again at the people who have no knowledge of curriculum who influence policy. I realize my lack of experience and limitations as far as business goes, and I would never try to influence business policy. I don’t understand, then, why others would try to do the same in my field!

I realize the point was not who should create curriculum, but how, but I think the who is an important basis to have established, since it’s apparently not as obvious as one would think. However, curriculum initiatives such as South Korea’s recent move to make English as a Foreign Language instruction more communicative, (which experts in the field support) without taking into consideration the resources available (low number of native speaking or highly proficient teachers), don’t have the hoped-for results either. This is why Tyler’s emphasis on “study” is so important. He reminds curriculum developers to study first what students need and consider what the curriculum can do about providing that, but to extend that study to the school and community as well. Such a study in South Korea would have revealed the discrepancies in the new curriculum and perhaps led them to find a more practical, feasible way to implement best practices as suggested by experts. Nancy J. Mooney and Ann T. Mausbach, in their book Align the Design encourage curriculum developers to “learn, then do.” I think that’s essential advice for any type of curriculum development.

A final aspect of curriculum development that I’d like to comment on is the evaluation stage. I think this can be the trickiest to implement, especially at present with new accountability modes and teachers being held responsible for (and maybe paid based on) student performance on evaluations. Tyler discusses evaluating “how far the learning experiences as developed and organized are actually producing the desired results,” identifying, “the results of the plans” (105). This idea of evaluating the curriculum instead of only the students is something that I think is often overlooked. A new curriculum will be presented and implemented, and no changes are made to it until the next completely new curriculum comes out ten years later. Evaluating the curriculum and not only what the students are able to recall on a standardized test about the curriculum is an important stage.

Tyler also discusses taking samples of student work to get a snapshot of what the student has learned and how he/she has improved throughout the course. This portfolio take on evaluation is very different from the state mandated standardized tests our students prepare for at the end of a course (and make up 25% of their grades in North Carolina!) I like the possibilities technological advances like the Khan Academy can offer us in terms of evaluation, tracking every aspect of what students are learning and struggling with in a way most teachers don’t have the time for. This also facilitates the connection of curriculum from year to year, as teachers can see a student’s progress through previous courses as well to see where gaps of knowledge might be. I would love to have a snapshot of each student available to me at the beginning of a new year to get a sense of the student’s academic strengths and weaknesses. As it is by the time we realize there seems to be an issue and get in touch with the previous teacher to find out if it’s something that he/she noticed as well, and how he/she found best to deal with it, much valuable time has been lost. (Not to mention the time it would take to contact each student’s past teachers as well as carry on conversations about all of your previous students!)

Cycle Three: Should the curriculum address controversial issues?

I think a more important question than should the curriculum address controversial issues is how curriculum should address controversial issues. While it might make some teachers or parents more comfortable to avoid certain issues, it leaves important gaps in student’s education, and can affirm negative views on the topic by labeling them as taboo. As adults, Joel Burns reminds us that “it is never acceptable for us to be the cause of any child to feel unloved or worthless.” I think most teachers would take this statement as a given, but sometimes the way we overlook issues in our curriculum or even within the classroom contributes (even if it’s unintentionally) to a child feeling less loved or worthy. Creating opportunities for dialogue about touchy issues and having clear expectations about what is and isn’t appropriate language to express can go a long way towards showing struggling kids that they do matter and deserve to be treated with respect.

Curriculum has gone a long way to correct oversights of this type with issues like women’s and civil rights, but is still lacking in other areas, and in some cases seems to even be taking a turn in the opposite direction. The “Don’t Say Gay” bill, now called the “Classroom Protection Act” is back in Tennessee. The bill would forbid discussing “anything inconsistent with natural reproduction” in grades K-8. Honestly I don’t know how this can be completely avoided. Students with same-sex parents wouldn’t be able to talk about their families in the classroom in the way other children do. Instead of teachers finding ways to make students feel comfortable discussing diversity, it takes this away completely.

Tammi Shulz, a parent opposed to lessons in tolerance as a part of school curriculum, claims, “I just don’t think it’s great to talk about homosexuality with five year olds,” and many parents echo her concern that children shouldn’t be exposed to such issues at such young ages. Something that Mary Cowhey reminds readers in her essay on “Creating a gay-and lesbian-friendly classroom” is that “We are not talking about ‘sexuality’ when we discuss gay and lesbian issues any more than we are discussing sexuality when we read Cinderella or any other story with all heterosexual characters.” While some parents still may not feel comfortable with their children discussing these issues at an early age, they can’t keep them in a bubble, and chances are good that at some point their child will meet a student who has a non-traditional family. Parents generally treat their children to share, to play nicely with their classmates, to treat others as they’d like to be treated, and they should want their children to learn to extend those values to all of their classmates, regardless of their background. This means having “controversial” discussions with young kids.

One of the big ways (unrelated to curriculum) that teachers fail students is by failing to react to homophobic name-calling. Leonore Gordon claims that “if adults criticize other forms of name-calling but ignore antigay remarks, children are quick to conclude that homophobia is acceptable,” much in the same way that when we fail to recognize something in our curriculum children are likely to conclude that it is unimportant or unacceptable. This is an area that I am struggling with this year. I have a class of mostly ninth grade boys who see it as their mission in life to taunt each other more than the others. I have tried to be clear with them that it’s unacceptable, but it’s so constant with them, their first reaction after anyone says anything is to ridicule him, that if I stopped to address every single comment I would never get anything else taught. I guess it comes down to how important it is that I teach these boys to respect each other, but this area has me frustrated this year. They are all friends, and don’t see why it’s not okay for them to talk to each other like that, it’s like it’s all a big joke to them (and to their parents.)

My school, like others, made a push to promote anti-bullying and spread awareness about doing the right thing and standing up for people who are being bullied. All of the 9^th graders participated in a Rachel’sChallenge event, and we showed videos and had discussions in homeroom, but none of that seems to have made a difference with these kids. I guess it’s an example of disjointed curriculum attempt that’s not integrated into student’s lives so they don’t take hold of it.

Another area I had never considered is talking about HIV/ AIDS at school. I’m almost to the end of my master’s with a focus on multicultural education and had never read anything on this topic. It fits well with homosexuality, because again the issue many parents are afraid of is talking about sex, and the (unfounded) fear that talking about it will somehow make kids more likely do it. The Silin article brings up problems with The New York State AIDS Instructional Guide, which breaks down talking about HIV/AIDS in the classroom, starting with how it isn’t transmitted in 4-6 grades, and not talking about how it is transmitted until 7-8 grades. This could be confusing, for kids, but talking about how it’s transmitted means talking about sex, and I can understand why parents aren’t comfortable with their 9-12 year-olds talking about that outside the home.

I remember when my little sister’s 4^th grade class read The Giver, and my mom was uncomfortable with some of the references in the book. I can only imagine how she would have reacted to my 4^th grade sister learning about the transmission of AIDS at school. Some parents (my mom being one of them) want their kids to hear about things from them; parents like Tammi Shulz are worried that the views expressed at school might not line up with the values the family wants to impart on the child. I think both parents and teachers have to recognize, that with the reality of our current time things have changed, and what we consider to be an age of innocence might need to change to protect kids in the long run. If teachers handle topics with discretion and parents stay involved and continue the dialogue at home we can benefit from controversy in the curriculum, remembering, as Silin put it, that “not all knowledge is about control.”

Cycle Two: What should schools teach? How should they be held accountable?

 It’s hard to determine the answers to these questions, because the second depends on the first, and the first always leads us to the question of who has the right to decide that answer. Hirsch, for example, in his chapter “Cultural Literacy and the Schools” claims that, “many more students could become highly literate if they were presented with the right sort of curriculum” (p.116). However, despite my Bachelor’s degree, work towards my Master’s, and experience living abroad, according to Hirsch’s standard I would be culturally illiterate, based on the fact that John brown evokes nothing for me, (certainly not “a whole network of lively traits”), and that I couldn’t even tell you that Falstaff is fat and likes to eat and drink (p.127). I think Hirsch would take this to mean I had earned a subpar education, and probably would be horrified to know that I minored in English. It would be both impractical and impossible to cover every work of Shakespeare, though, and in my English classes we read Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Hamlet, not Henry IV. I don’t think this makes me in any way illiterate, nor has it hindered my life in any way. In this day and age I don’t think it is necessary to memorize long lists of facts, because we have Google. 

Jonathan Wai disagrees, quoting David Lohman that “how well we reason depends on how much we know.” This makes sense of course, but if you’re reading a book or find yourself in a situation where you missed something because of a cultural reference, you can use technology to find the answer within seconds and be able to make the connection. Wai also quotes Benjamin Stein, saying today’s youth “are not mentally prepared to continue the society because they basically do not understand the society well enough to value it.” This ignores the fact that society is changing at a more rapid pace than it ever has, thanks to technology. Today’s youth may not be as well versed in the things that past generations would mark as vital for cultural literacy, but if you go back even farther I think you’d find that their predecessors found them equally lacking. Add globalization to this, the way cultures are blending and interacting more and more, and the feasibility of compiling a list of things someone should know becomes even more improbable.

While I don’t think a strict body of knowledge that must be learned is necessary, I do think there are some things which technology cannot replace. Al Doyle, teacher at Quest to Learn, for example, calls spelling “outdated.” Yes, students have spell check available to them, but students still need to have a basic understanding of spelling in order for spell check to recognize which word they’re trying to use. And what about homophones? Uniform spelling is necessary for mass communication, and to get to the stage of someone (or some machine) editing your spelling, you must have some handle on the skill.

Basically I think students should be taught to use resources available to them to solve problems. These resources will likely include Google and spell check, but the still need basic knowledge to use those tools. Even though they have Google, they have to be able to determine whether the information they’ve found is trustworthy or not, and what to do with it next. The what of what we teach, in my opinion, becomes a lot less important than the how and the why.

In this way I really appreciated the article about video games and learning- they present problems that students must work (often collaboratively and creatively) to solve. And while I’m torn about the idea of making school “fun” simply to avoid kids dropping out because they’re “bored” (honestly, many jobs are boring, and most bosses unfortunately won’t work to try to make their work more fun), Paul Gee points out that gaming is not always fun, there’s a lot of failure involved. Will Wright calls it “failure-based learning” which is absolutely right, kids are willing to fail over and over again trying to find a way to beat a game, and still love the game, unlike the feelings that evolve if they fail continuously at school.

Data shows that the Quest to Learn school students didn’t perform any better on standardized tests than their peers from traditional schools despite how much funding this innovative design requires, but I think it’s unfair to judge the success and value of this experience based on traditional testing. Students might not perform any better on a paper-pencil type of test, but given the opportunity to apply the knowledge in a more performance-based assessment, I bet they’d outperform their peers. This would be an interesting study.

I know kids love games (Yesterday my students were working on a project using imovie, and after finishing one student asked me if he could play a math video game until class was over. I was surprised he was so excited about practicing math, but said yes, please do.), but I lack the competence with gaming and programming as well as the time it would take to implement the methods used at Quest to Learn, so I searched the internet to see how other Spanish teachers are using video games. At first I found very little, just that the market for Spanish video games (not the educational sort) is expanding. Then I found this thesis  on using video games like The Sims 2 in foreign language classes. I have considered using this game in class before, but haven’t gone anywhere with it because of logistics (buying/ installing the game, how to monitor student progress.) I also decided to check out Alice, a program mentioned in the reading about Quest to Learn school. It claims it’s for beginners, so it might be something I try out this summer, but at this point I don’t have time for it. Something else I stumbled upon while doing this research is Inanimate Alice, a digital story-telling website. I’d love to learn how to make stories like that, but my students aren’t advanced enough to really benefit from the ones offered on the website.

The idea of video games as assessments in themselves intrigues me, and I wonder about the uncovered possibilities there. I don’t think standardized tests as we’ve known them make sense in our technology-rich future, and while some tests (like AP, that are delving deeper instead of trying to memorize so many facts) are making positive changes, others seem to be digressing. (Like Kentucky assessing music with a paper-pencil standardized exam when music teachers have been using performance-based assessment all along.)

In my last post I struggled with this same idea- that we need some sort of accountability measure, but that it shouldn’t be restrictive. I know my stance is still vague, but I still think that’s where I’m at. We need to find a way to test what students are able to do, to prove that they can think critically, as they’ll need to in their real futures- and this probably won’t involve a lot of rambling off memorized facts, so why should tests?

Cycle One: What is curriculum? What is its purpose?

My initial thoughts in consideration of these questions jump to text books and mandated curriculum guides. I think that for most teachers what we teach is so specifically mandated that curriculum is reduced to that. Upon further reflection and considerable reading about the idea, however, I have been able to think about curriculum in a broader sense. William Schubert (1996) names curriculum as “what is worth knowing,” and expands upon the root of the word coming from the word “currere,” associating it with “the act of running the race” (p.169). This broadens the context of curriculum quite a bit. In these terms it truly can’t be contained in a single document, as the course that individuals will run in their lives is varied by so many factors.

I like Wilson’s view of curriculum as “anything and everything that teaches a lesson.” It’s important to remember that not all learning is done in the classroom, nor even in the school building. Students learn through every interaction they have at home, in the community, and through the various forms of media they encounter as well as at school. However, thinking of curriculum in this broad of terms makes it difficult to draft any sort of national or even local curriculum guide that would be useful in maintaining a sort of uniform education across the country.

Obviously some question whether such uniformity is at all necessary, if it wouldn’t be better to simply follow the interests of the individual children in a class and allow their curiosity to naturally guide them to discoveries in different disciplines simultaneously, in an uninterrupted way that mimics the way discovery happens in the real world. These same people assert “if a skill or body of knowledge is indispensable for a given project, it will emerge as a learning need in the course of working on that project” (Schubert, 1996, p.174). I wonder, though, how likely this is to happen if, say, only one student is lacking that skill or body of knowledge. Ideally education would be individualized enough that the student would get a chance to catch up with that skill, but I don’t find this likely to happen.  More likely, in my opinion, the one who didn’t have that skill would be the one left behind, struggling to gain as much as his peers from the lesson at hand, given his missing understanding of something it's assumed the students already know (and in fact the majority do.)

Schubert mentions the fact that even with a strict curriculum guide, the learning that takes place will be different in different classes because of personal preferences and personality of the teacher (p. 174). I agree with this, but I think if the understood curriculum task is that students will be able to use the past tense in Spanish, for example, however they get to that point, two classes with different teachers will produce students who can use the past tense in Spanish. However, if we followed student interest only, and the students in one class really had no interest in talking about the past, but wanted to focus on the future, or hypothetical situations, when they mixed the following year with a class that had spent weeks practicing the past tense, their differing skills and abilities would make it difficult to find a common ground on which to continue to the mutual benefit of both sets of students.

This isn’t to say that I think curriculum needs to be rigid and ignore student interest, but I think it will be more effective if it has some kind of agreed upon starting ground that is in common across schools. The way teachers go about meeting these curricular goals can be tailored to the individual students in his/ her class, and that’s where student interest and difference can be taken into consideration in order to make that learning meaningful for a particular group of students.

Additionally, I believe curriculum is constantly changing, and written curriculum needs to be continuously adapted. Especially in the technology age where the world itself is changing faster than it ever has before, what is important for students to learn needs to be re-evaluated, to consider whether things are still relevant for students to learn and develop the skills they’ll need to be successful in their uncertain futures. As in Donovan’s case, what he needed to learn had to depend upon his probable future. Unfortunately in his case, as he grew older his developmental level didn’t change much, so neither did his probable future, but for other students the reality of their future will change frequently during the span of time in which they are a part of the public education system.

This leads me to the second question, the purpose of curriculum. I don’t see the purpose of curriculum as constricting, as a certain body of people’s beliefs about what is important to the exclusion of other areas of studies. Schubert’s traditionalist speaker, for example, admits to his weakness in classics outside of Western Europe, but doesn’t try to claim that nothing outside of his area of expertise is valid. Rather, he claims that he would like to learn more about other areas as well; he is open to diversity (170).

Instead of this constricting vision, I see curriculum as a loose-fitting guide that can be adapted to meet various needs and realities, but that is vitally important in its role of ensuring consistency and quality in education across different types of schools. I think this is important so that students coming from disadvantaged areas are not stuck in those disadvantages. Certain parts of our nation, unfortunately, have lower standards for education than others, and it’s not fair to the children of those areas to be held to lower standards and therefore probably be provided with fewer options later in life. Written curriculum holds schools and individual teachers accountable to standards that, while they may fall short of the intended goal in the end, at least attempt to promote equal opportunities for children. Susan M. Drake and Rebecca C. Burns (Meeting the Standards Through Integrated Curriculum), explain that, “Although accountability mandates require that we cover the standards, teachers have the freedom to expand on or connect to other standards to make them more meaningful.” We don’t have to be held back by standards and mandated curriculum, we can use them as a tool to enhance student learning while maintaining accountability.