Curriculum vs materials

I always cringe when people talk about needing new curriculum. This came up recently in my local news when Seattle began discussing the need for new arts curriculum. Curriculum is what a teacher teaches. Sounds simple enough.

What does a teacher teach? The state standards and Eventually this will likely be the Common Core Standards. Either way, teaches teach various grade level standards. Materials are created by a publisher to help a teacher teach those standards. This helps districts keep kids across a district on the same relative page, while also helping those teachers that just don't know what to do to meet standards. Think of them as a one size fits all big box store of teachers. Similar to a Target where you can get many things of varying degrees of quality.. And some things not at all.

Materials are useful. I use Units of Study to help teach reading and writing. I love them. I also use TCI to teach social studies. I like that too, but I use it as a reading text and not a social studies text so the teacher's guide is somewhat useless. Regardless they are not my only resources, as they alone don't help me address the state standards. If there is a hole, or something is moved by too quickly, I can adjust to meet the needs of my kids.

Materials are not made for specific states, nor for your specific kids. You need to teach the standards. You also need to meet the needs of your kids. If you don't do either of those then you aren't teaching. If you use the materials then you need to make them your own, with your style and knowing what will work in your environment. Otherwise what are you, a script reader? Perhaps a warm body? Teaching is an art, largely made up by the personality and knowledge you bring on a daily basis.

I love teaching. Sometimes the semantics make me crazy.

Sub plans for yourself

I'm in the midst of prepping for a short leave of two weeks (possibly less). My wife and I are expecting out first child which is incredibly exciting. Simultaneously I am incredibly nervous about leaving my classroom. The only time I've had a substitute is when I was a new teacher visiting other mentor teacher classrooms. Otherwise, 1 day with a sub? No more than 2.

I love my grade level and want the best for my kids. Just doing worksheets or busy work is unacceptable- as it always should be! So how do you make sure the sub helps your kids get to where you want? That is the big $1,000 question.

My plans have my objectives and have an overall layout. I've broken down tasks that I might have kids do seamlessly. Instead I've built in extensions to keep kids moving and interested. Our work is with the colonies, so they'll do some additional research beyond the textbook in graphing population growth among other things.

The irony in this is that the leave was to start last week. Instead I've been using the plans. It helps me see where my planning needs some work, and how I could do things differently.

We've Got Issues

We're in the midst of our 5th grade CBA- curriculum based assessment. In this they need to select an issue, research it, analysis positions, and call for action. The project is ambitious, but worthwhile. My understanding is that some classes will do this as a stand alone assessment, and it will take 2-3 days.

I've taken to teaching this as a unit on issues. We'll discuss issues in our local community, go through what stakeholders are, and determine how we filter out information. We started earlier in the week by looking at a road near school that is ridiculously busy yet had no sidewalks. Instead it has a painted line as separation- helpful I suppose. We went through why this is a problem, who might care, and what could be done. Afterwards I modeled using search engines and our research databases (god help me if we type I the question again!!!).

How is it going? We're slowly moving the horse. Some are really pumped, and want to employ all of these skills. Others say "I'm not sure what issue to do can you pick one" or "there aren't any issues that impact me." The latter of those statements is particularly frustrating. They will say that we use too much paper or that school lunch doesn't taste good and turnaround to say those issues aren't a big deal to them. I will steer them into a choice between issues and let them do the rest, as it isn't my project (I already know that I can think about issues). My focus needs to be on pushing all of them, even those disinterested, to analyze information and explain. You can't say what should be done just because you think it sounds good!