Education: Curriculum

Curriculum is the key to great teaching.

Across the country public school district administrators produce three-inch binders of curriculum guidelines for the teachers of their district. Each course offering is meticulously outlined, dissected into objectives, sequenced. Teachers are required to teach the objectives. Textbooks adopted by the district cover the objectives. State standards exams test the objectives. Students are required to demonstrate mastery of the objectives in order to earn credit.

Great teachers view the curriculum guidelines as guidelines, a starting place, a list of minimum standards, a skeleton. Great teachers review the guidelines and proceed to develop their own curriculum, building a course of study that embodies all of the muscle of their own advanced knowledge and the beating blood of their passion for their chosen subject. Great curriculum is as human as the teacher who creates it. It is the technology of great instruction. It is an offering of wings.

Poor teachers view the curriculum guidelines as the goal, checking off each district objective “covered” as one step closer to achieving their quota. For poor teachers the district guidelines are the curriculum. Of course, textbook manufacturers use the district standards to outline the course of study they release with each new edition of the text. A textbook can be a very useful tool in the classroom. Like a dictionary, thesaurus, or Wikipedia, a textbook is a resource. A reference book. An empty vessel, the poor teacher relies heavily on the text. The text is their curriculum.

The best teachers read great books. They study. They are life-long learners, people who never stop being a student [whether or not they opt to earn advanced degrees]. Great teachers are people who want to know everything for the sake of knowing and so that they can answer any question their students may pose. They are people who are not afraid to say—“I don’t know the answer to that question…let’s find the answer.” Great curriculum is often discovered right in the middle of a lesson…a discovery initiated by an insightful student. Poor teachers fail to see and to seize these opportunities.

The knowledge base of poor teachers is a static quantity, the sum total of everything they learned in college. Some even use their notes from college classes taken ten years ago to teach tomorrow’s lesson. Poor teachers fail to revise and amend, grow and extend that “knowledge.” They dress up their stale ideas with colorful Power Point presentations and believe themselves fresh and innovative. Their students copy notes. The unfortunate students of a poor teacher go home at the end of the day with sore hands. The students of a real teacher walk out of class each day with their heads spinning with ideas and possibilities.

Curricular malpractice I have witnessed first hand…

> Science teachers who hate mathematics [the language of science] and who deny the validity of the Theory of Evolution because it conflicts with their irrational faith.

> A science teacher who told her students that “we can’t be sure U.S. astronauts actually landed on the moon.”

> High school math teachers [regardless of what level they teach] who can’t do basic calculus. [Even I could do pre-calculus, once upon a time, and I consider myself a math-moron.]

> A history teacher who claims to be unbiased, never offers a view on a controversial issue, and then teaches Franklin D. Roosevelt as if he was the nation’s greatest president. [I think the socialist FDR is one of the worst on the domestic front.]

> An English teacher with a PhD who boasts that she hates to read…that she only reads “what they make me read.”

> An economics teacher who tells his students…”Well, if you don’t believe in God, that’s just stupid.”

> A social studies teacher who argued [in 2000] that Bill Clinton had not been impeached, frowned, and looked at me like I didn’t know what I was talking about.

> Our school library had a dozen books on Michael Jordan…one on James Madison. When I pointed out the problem to the librarian, she asked: “What’s he famous for?”

> English teachers who send out memos and e-mails with multiple grammar and punctuation errors.

> A high school government teacher who could not define Federalism.