Okay. So. Perhaps not everything is going so swimmingly at school. Even though I helped write the curriculum we’re implementing, I’m finding it more than a little… constricting.
Part of it is that the new standards with which we’re working are somewhat… limiting in what they consider respectable reading and exemplary writing. I understand the reason for it — changing times and digital literacy and twenty first century skills and edubabble buzzwords and all — but the end result is a bit infantilizing.
Part of it is that my district really, really wants something uniform for every single teacher to follow. So there’s common language and common checklists and common boxes to be filled in — which is fine, to a certain degree, but has become A Bit Much. It feels like district administrators are trying to keep tabs on their teachers and cover its own ass and create as much of a canned curriculum as is possible, given that they — even superficially — acknowledge some kind of need for actual human educators. Even though I understand their motivation, the end result is insulting.
Add to that — budget. Or, more accurately, the lack thereof. To implement these new standards and this newly designed common curriculum, we can have any texts we want — as long as they don’t cost anyone anything.
This is not the way to educate. This is not the way to show that we — as communities, as states, as a nation — value education. In fact, this is a bit crap.
But anyway.
No, wait.
It is crap. It is enough crap that I cannot do it, at least not in its entirety.
What I mean is, we check off the ticky boxes. We read the assigned things, and I supplement the fuck out of them to make them both meaningful and interesting. I make a point of teaching my kids to understand, appreciate, connect, analyze, evaluate, support. In terms of teaching reading — because it is imminently clear that I am following the prescribed readings and having success at teaching my students the art, science, and process of reading, I mostly get left alone.
Writing, however, is a different subject. (Well, actually, it is the same subject, since I teach both in the same class. But you know what I mean.) There are required prompts that we must do because they are the Required Prompts that were constructed over the summer by two teachers — me included! — where those were the best ideas we had at the time. Because, you know, if I happen to have a better idea later — I will change it for the better. But once ideas have been administratively approved, however, they are apparently set in stone.
So we do the assigned writings; we do them damn well. But I can’t stop there.
When a student asks me about essay contests and scholarship searches? I direct him to the best resources I know, help him find one that he’s excited about, then say, “Write that.”
When a student asks why Nike isn’t sponsoring our football team like they’re doing with That Other School, I say, “Do some research! Find a sponsor! Write a letter; write that.”
A student asked me to read the first part of her story. It’s a fanfic based on… on… some anime. I worried less about that — or about catching all the external references — and more about whether it was awesome as a story in its own right. Which it was. So. Write that.
When a student, trying to do the assigned ticky box writing, asks, “Why are there no black superheroes?”
I say, “Write that.”
Whatever is the piece that inspires you to write well — write that.