The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Nonsense in curriculum writing
Poor Elijah invited me to drop by for a socially distanced visit while he taught his niece to change the oil in her car. Before they started, she announced she’d decided to follow in his footsteps. He replied that shuffling gracelessly through middle age was hardly an ambition he’d recommend for a healthy 20-year-old.
“I mean my career,” she explained from behind her mask. “I’m going into education.”
Poor Elijah repeated his observation that this was hardly an ambition he’d recommend for a healthy 20-year-old. “Besides, what does a career in education have to do with me?” To make his point, he grabbed a pad and inscribed the following:
Oil change curriculum
1. Students will demonstrate an understanding of lubrication principles, materials and tools.
2. Students will read and interpret relevant service manuals and warranty documents.
3. Students will demonstrate mastery of effective oil changing skills and generalize when servicing other vehicles.
4. Students will exhibit an appreciation of the internal combustion engine, and the role of internal combustion in the social and political fabric of modern society.
“This,” he informed her, sliding his pad across the kitchen table, “is education. Teaching is what we’re about to do out in the garage.”
Curriculum comes from Latin and denoted the course laid out for a runner. Over the years, it’s come to mean the course of study students need to follow. Unfortunately, most curricula continue to earn their accustomed places on dusty shelves. That’s because these epic scholastic prescriptions typically qualify as the most outrageously wordy, jargon-laden, irrelevant, redundant, staggeringly useless documents ever compiled by reputedly intelligent people.
Competent teachers routinely sacrifice hours on curriculum revision and “roll-outs.” These labors commonly yield little more than new “cutting-edge” loose-leaf doorstops, which, at best, make no difference in our classrooms, and sometimes lead us perilously off course.
While we changed the oil, Poor Elijah outlined his views on curriculum.
1. Curriculum is just a fancy word for “stuff.” Knowledge is stuff students should know, like “Who’s George Washington?” Skills are stuff they should be able to do, like writing coherently. Poor Elijah recommends substituting “stuff” for the word “curriculum” everywhere in public education. This will save money and simplify life for everyone. Schools won’t budget for “stuff coordinators,” applications for “stuff development” grants will evaporate overnight, and no one will expect teachers to volunteer for “stuff revision” committees.
2. Break the curriculum scratch-itch cycle. Don’t revise your curriculum unless there’s specific stuff that needs changing. Then just change that stuff. Yes, keep up with the modern world. But why rewrite the solar system chunk of your science curriculum unless someone discovers another planet? How much has the Civil War changed lately?
Education’s great minds constantly debut the latest fashions in curriculum writing, preaching the “K-12 continuum,” “exit skills,” or “graduation proficiencies.” All this trendy paper pushing keeps the experts happily employed, but it rarely touches the real world where students and teachers live, except to embroil their classrooms in year-to-year chaos.
3. The case of the missing content: Reformers’ serial curriculum changes have often replaced content with vague objectives and social goals such as “develops productive, satisfying relationships.” Many experts would find Poor Elijah’s concern for the Civil War and solar system quaint. “This is the information age,” reformers
intone. “Students don’t need to know things anymore.”
4. Whose children are they, anyway? Local school districts need to govern their own curricula. Let education departments offer frameworks and Common Cores as models. But beware of efforts to impose consolidated district, state, and national curricula, with strings attached to funding for local districts reluctant to toe the line.
5. The Goldilocks factor: Not too vague, not too specific. A good curriculum serves as an anchor and a guide so teachers can offer consistent, comprehensive instruction with a minimum of gaps and unnecessary repetition, with topics addressed in increasing depth and intensity over a 12-year education. What we teach shouldn’t be left to teachers’ whims.
On the other hand, we need to allow teachers enough latitude so they can highlight topics where their expertise, interests, and
experience make them particular assets to their students, and where their students show particular interest or need. Individual teachers do, and should, develop varied methods, materials, and approaches to reach prescribed objectives, especially at a moment when everybody’s talking about “personalized learning.”
In the early days of the Common Core, many policymakers were touting and mandating canned, hyperstructured, “aligned” curricula that packaged specific materials along with “paced,” timed-to-the-minute daily scripts that teachers were required to recite verbatim. That way, boosters crowed, every class in every school would be doing exactly the same thing at the same time. Never mind that every class comprises different students, teachers, talents, and deficits.
Recurring reform “cures”
like this one only inflict more crippling turmoil and mediocrity on public schools. They also make clear how appallingly little education’s leaders know about teaching and real classrooms.
Some districts doubtless need curriculum revision. Hopefully any adjustments we make will restore the content and continuity we’ve lost across recent decades. But even if we set down every curricular word perfectly, we won’t have solved our education problems.
Poor Elijah’s oil change curriculum couldn’t teach his niece to change her oil. He had to teach her. But even more important, Poor Elijah’s curriculum couldn’t “learn” it for her. That was something she had to do.