Ashley McCall is a bilingual third-grade teacher of English Language Arts in Chicago Public Schools. She asked in a recent post on her blog whether we might seize this opportunity to reimagine schooling for the future, to break free of a stale and oppressive status quo that stifles both children and teachers.
She writes:
“What if?” I thought. What if we did something different, on purpose? What if we refused to return to normal? Every week seems to introduce a new biblical plague and unsurprisingly, the nation is turning to schools to band-aid the situation and create a sense of “normalcy”–the same normalcy that has failed BIPOC communities for decades.
In her memoir, When They Call You a Terrorist, Patrisse Khan-Cullors states that “our nation [is] one big damn Survivor reality nightmare”. It always has been. America’s criminal navigation of the COVID-19 pandemic further highlights the ways we devalue the lives of the most vulnerable. We all deserve better than Survivor and I don’t want to help sustain this nightmare. I want to be a part of something better.
What If We Designed a School Year for Recovery?
“What if?” I thought. What if Chicago Public Schools (CPS) did something radical with this school year? What if this fastest-improving urban district courageously liberated itself from narrow and rigid quantitative measures of intelligence that have colonized the education space for generations, and instead blazed a trail for reimagining what qualifies as valuable knowledge?
What if we put our money, time and energy into what we say matters most? What if this school year celebrated imagination? In We Got This, Cornelius Minor reminds us that “education should function to change outcomes for whole communities.” What if we designed a school year that sought to radically shift how communities imagine, problem solve, heal, and connect?
What if this messy school year prioritized hard truths and accountability? What if social emotional instruction wasn’t optional or reduced to one cute poster? What if we focused on district wide capacity-building for, and facilitation of, restorative justice practices?
What if the CPS Office of Social Emotional Learning (OSEL) had more than about 15 restorative practice coaches to serve over 600 schools? What if we let students name conflicts and give them the space, tools, and support to address and resolve them? What if restorative justice was a central part of this year’s curricula?
What If We Really Listened?
What if we made space to acknowledge the fear, anxiety, frustration and confusion students, staff, and families are feeling? What if we listened? What if we made space to acknowledge the anger and demands of students? What if our priority was healing? Individual and collective. What if we respected and honored the work of healers and invested in healing justice?
What if our rising 8th-graders and seniors prepared for high school and post-secondary experiences by centering their humanity and the humanity of others? What if healthy, holistic, interconnected citizenship was a learning objective? What if we tracked executive functioning skills and habits of mind? What if for “homework” families had healing conversations?
What If We Made Life the Curriculum?
What if we recognized that life—our day-to-day circumstances and our response to them—is curricula? It’s the curricula students need, especially now as our country reckons with its identity. What if we remembered that reading, writing, social studies, mathematics, and science are built into our understanding of and response to events every day?
She goes on to describe how this reimagining could infuse the school and the curriculum and the way teachers teach.
School reformers and billionaire philanthropists say they want innovation. Do you think Bill Gates, the Waltons, Eli Broad, Reed Hastings, and their friends would fund districts that want genuine innovation of the kind Ashley McCall describes?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Beautiful. I encourage everyone to click the link to the full post. The final section, Let’s Stop Policing Our Imaginations, is the most important and a call for teachers, parents and policymakers everywhere to think big.
Job one is to get rid of federal micromanaging, Devos & Trump and Republicans who think the requirements in ESSA are fine and that the Secretary of Education should approve any reimagined schemes for education.
This is a lovely article for blue sky thinking but it also assumes a high degree of teacher autonomy that rarely exists in public schools. I am also reminded of life-centered curricula of another time, especially the issue-centered work of Hilda Taba.
Agreed, the micromanaging must stop. I need to know more about Social Emotional Learning, SEL. I need to know its origin, its history, and who is funding its promulgation. There seems to be a grassroots movement supporting it, among teachers I know and in this McCall post, but when I research SEL, I come across all kinds of astroturf organization buzzwords and fake research: college and career readiness, employability, ROI. Groups claim that for every dollar invested in SEL, eleven dollars are added to the economy. I smell a billionaire.
As a teacher who always advocates for more teacher autonomy, I am concerned that SEL has been built into the class schedule for online instruction this semester, here in the second largest school district in the nation. As a privacy advocate, I am terribly concerned about asking students to share private thoughts and feelings online. My local teachers union agrees with the always top-down heavy district that SEL must be taught while we’re online for the pandemic. What happened to letting teachers decide what should be taught? Where is all this coming from? I don’t know what to think. I need a research expert. Please help.
SEL is a miasma of mush. It’s a fuzzy idea that’s spawned a bunch of slapdash, first-draft curricula that are utterly unproven and probably result in zero value added. But it sure sounds wonderful! It’s another nail in the coffin of real education in our benighted country.
SEL is exactly what Gates wants to see practiced online. It’s the foder for machine learning for AI. Keep it offline.
“What if we remembered that reading, writing, social studies, mathematics, and science are built into our understanding of and response to events every day?” –Ashley McCall
This was a consistent theme from my high-school students, who were extremely frustrated by what they saw as an irrelevant curriculum. Once, in class, a bright young woman said, “We haven’t learned how to do taxes, how to buy a house or a car, how to make a website, and when we try to talk to teachers about this, they say, ‘Shut up and do your square dancing, shut up and factor your polynomials.'” The class erupted, with students clamoring over one another to agree with her and provide their own examples.
Now, of course, kids are still kids. They can’t be expected to understand why we choose to teach them what we do, but I always felt that it was my responsibility as a teacher to talk with them about why it was valuable for them to learn what I was trying to teach them–what was in it for them. And if kids are old enough to ask this and other questions that matter to them, we have a responsibility to listen and engage them on these questions. So, for example, at the beginning of the year, knowing that I was going to be spending a lot of time teaching them how fiction works and how to produce fiction of their own, I typically did at least a day on why people tell stories–what roles these play in our lives, on how central storytelling is to our everyday functioning and understanding of the world. My theme: mastering storytelling and how stories work will make you much more powerful.
Teaching how to do taxes would be pretty pointless because it changes every year. Does anyone actually do their own taxes anyway? TurboTax and other electronic apps do it pretty quick and easy and they’re sure to cover all the bases, rather than you having to read through 3,000 pages of tax law just to make sure you’re getting everything.
I do wish schools would cover the basics of financing – mortgages, interest rates, etc., not to mention teaching and practicing negotiation skills. My husband managed to get a car that was sticker-priced at $41,000 down to $29,000. I’m such a rotten negotiator I’d probably end up paying $45,0000.
And I agree with your student that web design and coding should be part of the high school curriculum – they’re almost as necessary skills as typing was in my day (especially web design). It’s not easy to find outside classes that teach those skills and the ones I’ve found are usually insanely expensive, so unless families can afford it or unless kids are savvy enough (and have the resources) to surf around and figure it out themselves, kids are likely to be SOL.
Dienne, I put the question as it was put, in class, by my student.
Having kids take consumer/household economics classes in which they have to do things like use Excel to prepare monthly budgets for life on their own five years after high school, using actual prices in the community, is valuable, I think.
omg dienne I have a husband like that. We’d pull up to one of the strip of car outlets and you could practically hear him purr as he eyed the squad of young salesmen pouring out the front door toward us. I think you have to be born to it.
Dienne, food for thought there. I never liked the way practical-life applications got shunted off into non-college-track long ago. Many of the skills you list change even more rapidly than taxes, and every year sw does more for you & you need to know less, just like w/Turbo Tax. Still, there’s great value in learning the basics in hisch, so that you grasp what the sw’s doing for you. Walk through a 1040 in pencil, so you get a gist for what’s taxed here– follow up w/intl differences in taxation/ distribution of national wealth. Learn to do simple loan amortization by hand– surely that’s still done in math? “Coding” per se I’m less sure about, but at minimum there should be a study of binary logic trees and how they translate to basic computer functions. I think there’s also a place for MS Excel apps– again, starting by hand w/something useful [e.g. budgeting as Bob suggests], then transitioning. [I’m not sure how web-design is crucial but I’m an antique].
dienne: At one middle school I taught at, the 8th Grade Math Teacher was a whiz. Every year, she’d have the kids do a huge project–play the “Game of Life,” whereby they were leaving as adults, some had a spouse or a family, & each had budgets & salaries to work from, had to figure out monthly budgets, use %ages for sales, mortgages–everything you wrote about. They really learned a LOT*.
Unfortunately, due to unending “standardized” test prepping throughout the year (the tests were administered in March or April), the project started late, & became more rushed than it should have been, so some of the fun and learning were lost.
As someone had commented on an earlier blog post, real teaching & learning had been relegated to maybe 2 months (& our school year started in mid August & ended at the end of May).
Thus, as we’ve consistently advocated, future school plans (&, also, for remote learning), **NO.TESTING.EVER AGAIN.
What if schools focused on the whole student, eliminated test and data collection and funded schools equitably? What if schools were integrated and all types of young people learned to respect each other and enjoy each other’s company? What if schools had the money to repair their aging physical plants, enough money for smaller classes and wrap around services to help students with family and social-emotional problems.
Schools, particularly in urban areas, have suffered from systemic disinvestment for many years. Imposed standardized testing has made schools serve the state more than students. We need to leave teaching to the teachers. Teachers should be collaborative so they can learn from each other. Technology should be deployed by educators to assist teachers, not supplant them. What if students had privacy rights?
The curriculum should reflect the needs of the students, and it should in part reflect the needs and interests of the community. Students need a lot more content that that which can be found in the community. They need a broad content rich curricula that respects the community, but also embraces the world at large. It is unlikely that billionaires would want to fund schools that empower BIPOC students as the wealthy would rather monetize these young people to create additional revenue for the already wealthy.
god, I hope not. What she describes is a progressive paradise, but a nightmare for the rest of us, full of warm-and-fuzzy sounding courses that teach no real knowledge and produce no real change. Let’s just get better at passing on real knowledge, which is why school exists.
Amen.
Ponderosa I agree there’s too much fuzzy thinking in this post. I’d go further & say it’s dangerous to teach from generalized assumptions & back-scale the content to fit. That cuts in every direction. Historians are filling in the gaps left by the American Exceptionalism lens, & other once-PC lenses. But others are anxious to apply current PC lenses. Kids need to read what happened & draw their own conclusions otherwise it’s propaganda & they’re not learning to think for themselves. Easier said than done, I know. E.g., lots of facts relating to classism & racism have only recently been corralled for easier consumption. But teachers can read books like “White Trash” & “The Color of Law,” & fill in some factual gaps missing from textbooks, w/o discussions based on a priori conclusions as suggested here.
The only thing I liked about McCall’s essay were a few specifics she suggested on discussing the pandemic. I think it’s a good idea to let midsch/ hisch studs research current facts, past epidemics/ pandemics, brainstorm solutions about that thing that’s turned their lives upside-down. Better than pretending it’s not happening. Focusing on ESSA testing, e.g., is a way of ignoring reality.
“it’s dangerous to teach from generalized assumptions & back-scale the content to fit”–probably true. I like the opposite approach you describe: teach the facts and let kids reach their own conclusions. We teachers err in thinking that we must teach students the “skill of evaluation” or the “skill of analysis” for them to make sense of these facts. Our brains are built to perform these operations. Our job, rather, is to impart the facts lucidly and then step back and let the brain do its thing. Kids are naturally smart; their problem is that they’re ignorant. That’s the condition that school was built to cure.
I, too, am a strong believer in and advocate of knowledge-based education, as long was we define “knowledge” broadly enough to include not only descriptive knowledge (the who, what, where, when, and why) but also concrete procedural knowledge (the how). However, I don’t think that knowledge-based education and education that engages everyday life outside the classroom are necessarily antithetical. For example, I can imagine a K-8 mathematics curriculum that takes place entirely in a restaurant kitchen. Here’s a recipe for bread: 50 lbs of flour, 33 pounds of water, 1 pound of salt, and 0.6 pounds of yeast. So, how do we generalize this so that we can make ANY AMOUNT of bread? Well, we calculate what percentage each ingredient in pounds is of the flour in pounds. If the flour is 100 percent, the water is 66 percent, the salt 2, and the yeast 1.2. Then, with these percentages, we can calculate the amount of each ingredient for ANY AMOUNT of flour. The practical issue—how do I bake just this much and no more so that I don’t have any waste?—involves percentages, which can be expressed as rations, proportions, fractions. I’ve often thought that one could teach the entire K-12 mathematics curriculum from the deck of a sailboat or from the chair of a state legislator.
Bob, you’re keeping the hippie education dream alive. As a practical matter I’d say your vision here is too ambitious. How many teachers could pull this off? Why can’t we ever just say “Eat your onions, kids”? “Study hard and learn this stuff. It’s hard, but it’s what you have to do.” We can’t, and that’s probably the main problem with American education: the lack of self-discipline in kids, as well as society’s unwillingness to let teachers do the disciplining when kids’ self-discipline fails. So kids like the ones you describe revolt…and win the revolt. A very Pyrrhic victory. Unfortunately we have many adults who think such a failure to transmit knowledge is A-OK.
It strikes me that this critical theory claptrap is both the fruit of Americans’ ignorance and the cause of our continued failure to support knowledge-teaching in schools. It’s such a simplistic world view: the only country in the world is the US. The only evil every committed is racism. The only thing we need to know about is anti-racism. Like all fundamentalisms, it’s a huge oversimplification, but that’s appealing to people who feel overwhelmed by the complexity of the world. These Leftie fundamentalists are as intimidated by knowledge as the Creationists; ergo their vehement support for schooling that doesn’t entail much knowledge-transmission, but rather a schooling that reinforces their comfortable world-view.
Well, you’ve hit a sore point with me here, Ponderosa, for my sympathies lie with those who are attempting to do something about the breathtakingly pervasive sytemic racism in this country, and I believe that it’s pretty basic to understand that poverty is the number one educational issue in the country, this being a simple matter of the hierarchy of needs. If you want to fill the mind, you’d better fill the belly first. And as Andre Perry puts it, if you want kids to act like middle-class students, you better make sure that their parents have middle-class money. I spent a lot of years developing African-American literature programs that despite their merits had all the success of a lead zeppelin, even though they were, having been produced by me, very much knowledge-oriented. Why? Well, those programs hit the market in the middle of the obsession with purchasing test-prep products. There simply wasn’t the money for such material. But I learned a lot, doing those programs, and it wasn’t pretty.
I have seen several very intelligent teachers pull off a “hippy” curriculum before test and punish, although this type of teaching is more suitable to elementary, not secondary schools. It does take a super-talented, creative teacher to pull it off though. Even then, there is still a need for content beyond the community.
I agree it’s doable, just like batting .500 and getting 50 homers a season is doable. But we can’t build an education system on the assumption that all teachers will be superstars.
“hippie education dream”
Your intolerant slip is showing. Better tuck it back in before it snags on intelligent argument.
One of the impossible burdens placed on American public school teachers today (but not teachers in India and other countries): having to manufacture student motivation. When will we learn that teachers cannot do this alone? We are hobbled by a chronic tendency toward utopian thinking.
Teachers can’t motivate anyone to do anything. Motivation is INTERNAL. Teachers can inspire and encourage but they can’t motivate.
I absolutely believe that our job is to nurture intrinsic motivation. I also think that one thing we have fundamentally wrong in our approach to education is the reliance upon extrinsic motivation techniques such as grades. Very interesting research has shown what commonsense teaches–extrinsic motivational techniques are actually demotivating for cognitive tasks. What we teach in the hidden curriculum baked into our system is “This stuff is so uninteresting, so unengaging, that we have to punish or reward you with sticks and carrots to get you to do it. Here, a great video on this topic, which, if I were teaching future teachers, would be shown them on Day 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Sure, Bob, we can nurture, encourage, help, support, facilitate, but it has to come from INSIDE the student. I agree with what you said.
So, what motivates people, including little people, intrinsically? That’s the BIG question. Well, people are strongly motivated by social sanction, both positive and negative. They are motivated by autonomy. They are motivated by novelty. They are motivated by self-regard. They are motivated by accomplishment (having made something–the IKEA effect). A few, off the top of my head.
Mamie, I always drag out this example. Suppose that you have lots of money and a housekeeper. And you follow the housekeeper around continually saying, “No, use this much water to this much soap in the bucket. No, start at that end of the table and work to the other end. No, move the cleaning cloth in large circles, like this.” Do it the way I tell you, and you’ll get paid. Don’t do it this way, and I’ll dock you.” Blah, blah, blah. How motivated will that housekeeper be? Everyone wants to take pride in his or her own work. You can’t crush that and crush autonomy and micromanage everything and expect people to do their best work. People just aren’t built like that.
Read the chapter in ”Slaying Goliath” about the power of intrinsic motivation.
Extrinsic motivation actually depresses the desire to succeed. When people work for rewards, they stop working when the rewards are no longer there.
Parental expectations are an extrinsic motivator that seems quite effective in many countries. O-Level exams in Britain and their analogues in other countries –tests with high stakes for students –are an extrinsic motivator that seems quite effective in many countries. To discount the value of extrinsic motivation does not make sense to me.
Ponderosa, please read my chapter about motivation in “Slaying Goliath.”
Let me know what you think.
Agreed. But what motivates the person to be a housekeeper in the first place?
The point I’m trying to make with this analogy is that under such circumstances, the housekeeper is likely to quit if he or she has any alternative, given the strong motivation to keep his or her kids from starving, so powerful are the innate pride that people take in their work, however “lowly” in the eyes of the world, and the need people have for personal autonomy. These things are built in, unless they are beaten out of people. This is one of the many issues that I have with top-down Deformist micromanagement of teachers. You don’t get the best out of people by doing that.
BTW, that chapter in Slaying Goliath about intrinsic v. extrinsic motivation is brilliant and extraordinarily important.
Agreed, Bob. I guess I was trying to say that people will put up with a lot of things if they feel internally motivated by what they are doing in the first place.
Unfortunately, in education as in politics, one encounters a lot of straw man argument. Whenever I bring up this issue of intrinsic v. extrinsic motivation, people immediately assume that I am a “hippie educator” who advocates the sort of approach described by A.S. Neill in Summerhill. But what I actually advocate for is structured guidance in tasks designed to be intrinsically motivating and to convey real knowledge. And I also think that there a situations in which straight-out directed instruction, delivered by the teacher or by students or by outside experts, are quite effective. But the bottom line for me is this: Our prime directive as educators must be to produce life-long, intrinsically motivated learners. School should not be this thing that we do at the beginning of our lives and then are done with. People should be schooling themselves as long as they are breathing.
Ahhhh…that crazy little word “should!”
Ponderosa, “Parental expectations are an extrinsic motivator that seems quite effective in many countries.” This is such a thought-provoking comment I’m on my third attempt trying to respond. I think first off, they cannot be called extrinsic. They are part of the parent-child bond, imported into the child’s psyche. For better or worse, our expectations of ourselves are a product of parental expectations.
What do we really know of the effects of high scholastic parental expectations in other cultures? Pretty much only that they average higher PISA scores. [Segueway to the usual comparisons of #Nobel prize-winners, strength of economy etc]. But just take your assumption that students in India arrive at school highly-motivated– teachers don’t have to “manufacture motivation” as here. A little research shows that rural sectors, and poor sectors in general in India have significant ed-motivation problems. Though a high %age are enrolled, there’s up to 25% absenteeism, and learning levels are low [e.g. 60% 3rd-graders can’t read at 1st-gr level]. Govt has actually been experimenting w/ extrinsic rewards ($$, toys) to address this.
Any observations we make at this end– of X-culture-Americans– are skewed by which classes/ personality types emigrate and why. For at least 3 generations, the striving that characterizes emigrating families will help them do better in school than average American kids, whether their American teachers employ extrinsic rewards or not.
Here’s a practical problem with the kind of additions to curriculum that Ms. McCall envisions–ones that engage the community outside the classroom. I raise this not in disagreement with Ms. McCall but as an issue to consider. Administrators live in constant fear of losing their jobs. If parents get upset about something, this is threatening to administrators. So, they tend to look askance at projects that involve people outside the school. Even something as simple as having students gather oral histories from elders in their communities about instances of racial injustice can end up being fraught with controversy. All it takes is one parent writing an angry letter to the school board asking, “Why is my child being taught to hate the police?” because the student collected a story of police misconduct to cause many administrators to become alarmed. We do a lot of talking about community involvement in schooling–and many schools have graduation requirements that include community service–but the more we engage students in social justice issues in their communities, the more the problem I raise will present itself. What to do about this? Well, one possibility is to make sure that such projects are well-planned and then vetted by committees of administrators and teachers before being implemented.
Good morning Diane and everyone,
I’m sorry to say that schools are NOT reimagining education. I’ve read over at least 10 school reopening plans in my area. They’re saying that all educational standards will be followed and met. NYS exams haven’t been canceled. Teachers will have to prepare students for those exams and teachers will be evaluated on how the students do on those tests under these crazy circumstances. If NYSED eliminates those tests, it will provide much more leeway for teachers to teach. I think NYSED should tell schools at the beginning of the year whether these tests will be canceled. Schools are trying to do what they’ve always done only with the protocols and restrictions that are now mandated. I don’t see any real teaching or learning taking place at least until the end of October. Many of us – students, parents and teachers – have to learn completely NEW online platforms in September. Not only that, we have to teach students new protocols in schools. They will have to practice these. Many schools are having separate groups of students come in on different days. So, we are talking WEEKS for all students and staff to learn and put these practices into place.So, just because we are going back in September, doesn’t mean that teaching and learning will be taking place. When students and staff start getting ill with colds, flu and covid, we will have to do most of our work online anyway. It’s going to be a complete mess.
Invalid, pedagogically useless standardized testing is a vampire sucking the life out of U.S. education. Put a stake in it.
A complete mess. Exactly. Are we going to pull out and quarantine and test for Covid-19 every teacher and student who has the sniffles? We can’t know whether this is just a cold or Covid until we do that. What people are envisioning with “reopening schools safely” is just impossible. Can’t be done.
You’ll love this gem from the NYS Ed. Department and I quote,
“Turn desks (including teachers) to face in the same direction rather than facing each other to re- duce transmission caused by virus-containing droplets (e.g., from talking, coughing, sneezing)”
So I will be talking to kids’ backs or they will be watching my back as I talk to the wall in front of me. Are these people serious?
LOL. Don’t look at your class. Some wag on this blog said, a few days ago, something spot on: So, basically, we are being asked to create in a tiny, enclosed space something as closely as possible resembling distance learning. Given that, we don’t we just freaking do distance learning? But in-person is much better. You can smile at kids with your eyes.
Yikes! It seems as though we will never be able to throw off the yoke of standardized testing. Education has existed for hundreds of years without it. If we can only do this one thing, it would be a step in the right direction.
No one should be allowed to reinvent schools unless they’ve first studied the long history of (mostly) half-baked and failed ideas to reinvent schools.
School reinvention is an American disease. We fail to become erudite in the history of education and the principles of good education and then do a slapdash job of reinventing. It’s doomed to fail and it fails. But we don’t learn from the mistake. We resolve to reinvent again. It fails. And on and on. Reinvention goes hand in hand with shallow knowledge and slapdash work. Everyone thinks they know how to reinvent schools; in truth, almost no one does. Reinventors, like Gates and Ms. McCall, rarely understand how ignorant they are.
I’d add that no one who has not carefully studied OTHER COUNTRIES’ educational system should be allow to reinvent ours. I’m dumbfounded by how incurious most American educators are about other countries’ systems.
now there’s a concept: know the history before re-imagining. This has been so painfully left out of invasive ‘reform’ policy over the past two decades
I normally respond to articles like this by saying, “please stop trying to reimagine school.” But I suppose if we are going to take schools 100% online, we are going to need to rework education so that it works best via that medium. It won’t happen immediately, but I expect it to develop over time.
Agreed. I’m hoping one upside of the switch to digital may be that we’re able to have more one-to-one time with individual students.
*WOW!!!!!! *
The vast majority of the responses above are incredibly disheartening, especially coming from people who purport to be teachers and care about children and education. Timidity, rigidity, and lack of even considering imaginative possibilities seem to be the norm. I don’t know if many of you understand that these are extraordinary times calling for extraordinary efforts. Demoralizing and disappointing. Or perhaps denial is more appropriate. Ashley McCall’s point is that we need to pull our collective heads out of our asses and think about how to act until–or if–things ever get back to normal. Seems a lot of you are comfortable having them them there. Heaven help us.
Being a caring, thoughtful teacher requires a blend of progressivism and conservatism. Everyone is always trying to sell teachers something. A little change is good, but so is a little tradition. Teachers need autonomy, and we haven’t had much autonomy for twenty years. I rarely expect all of my colleagues to have to jump on my bandwagon. I might make an argument in favor of an idea, but I expect thoughtful debate, not blind allegiance. Greg, we got this. Do not have blind faith in teachers, but do have a little bit of faith in us.
I’m a math and college teacher who would like to see different courses blended together and have these courses pertain to a human endeavor. An example of this was in the 1930’s my mother, a first grade teacher, based her whole school year on “a trip around the world.
John Jones
Diane, I loved this post as well! This is what I want to do! I am a NYC public school AP and teacher of 26 years.