Marion Brady is an educator who has argued for many years that subject-matter based curriculum is wrong. He thinks we need to change our ingrained ways of thinking. He asks for your advice:
Brady writes:
In 1966, the Phi Delta Kappan published an article of mine criticizing the traditional “core” curriculum adopted in 1893 that organizes most of the middle school and high school day. I suggested an alternative organizer.
In many more journal articles, in books published by respected presses, in chapters in others’ books, in nationally distributed op-eds and newspaper columns and in countless internet blogs, I’ve continued to argue that the core curriculum is the major academic reason for generation after generation of basically flat academic performance, and that a simple, cost-free “fix” for the problem has revolutionary potential.
Pushing back on my contention—at least for the last 25 or 30 years—is a corporately engineered campaign to privatize public schooling without triggering the public debate such a radical change in the bedrock of democracydeserves. That campaign’s wrong assumptions—that the core curriculum provides a “well-rounded” education, that competition is the main motivator of performance, that standardized tests measure what’s important, that rigor must replace “low expectations,” and teachers are the key to improving the institution—lock even more rigidly in place a 19th Century curriculum.
What’s wrong with the core?
There are eighteen items on my list of problems with the core and the way it’s usually taught. For brevity’s sake I’ll address only one of them—the one noted by dozens of well-known and respected thinkers and studies conducted by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Association of American Colleges.
That #1 problem: The world the core curriculum is supposed to explain is systemically integrated. The core curriculum is not.
In his 1916 Presidential Address to the MathematicalAssociation of England, philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead put it in simpler words. He said the curriculum’s “disconnection of subjects” was “fatal.”
He was right. Wikipedia explains the failure to react appropriately to that information:
The boiling frog is an apologue describing a frog being slowly boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death.
To see examples of how that works out in human affairs, follow any randomly chosen day’s news.
An alternative
Given institutional inertia, educating’s inherent complexity, machine-scored standardized testing, multi-layered education bureaucracies and education policy made by non-educators in Congress and state legislatures, the core curriculum can’t be dislodged. It can, however, be used in non-traditional ways that circumvent the core’s most serious problems.
The core organizes the study of a mix of math, science, language arts and social studies subjects. What learners need that the core doesn’t provide is an “organizer of organizers” that shows not just how all school subjects but all fields of knowledge fit together and interact to create a whole much greater than the sum of parts. Lacking that master organizer, a few schools use interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary studies and project learning, but those can’t be standardized to create the “subjects” that education bureaucracies require.
An organizer of organizers
Fortunately, an organizer of organizers doesn’t have to be invented or developed. All normal humans are born with brains that do that in the manner of the group or society within which individuals have been socialized. To solve most of the core’s problems, that master organizer just needs to be lifted into consciousness and put to useful work, something all adolescents are able to do.
Our organizer of organizers is easily understood. When attention is fixed on a matter of interest, five kinds of information integrate systemically to create sense—the same five kinds of information that structure languages, stories, drama, reports, textbooks, school subjects,conversation and so on: Time. Place. Actors. Action. Cause.
Instructional activities that allow learners to discover for themselves the knowledge-creating process and put it to work, move them to levels of academic performance far beyond the evaluating capabilities of standardized tests, and do so with an efficiency that allows the legitimate aims of a general education to be met in a fraction of the time spent on “covering the content” of the core curriculum.
The most legitimate aim of education is saving humankind. Reality is dynamic. Inexorable environmental, demographic, technological and social change create ever-more complex problems requiring new knowledge. New knowledge is created by the discovery of relationships between and among things not previously thought to relate—a newborn’s fussing and the appearance of a nipple; cigarettes and cancer; moon and tides; justice and societal stability; time and space.
New knowledge is essential, but even more crucial is an increase in depth and breadth of understanding ofcomplex reality by the general public. This is the ultimategoal of what we’re doing.
Proof
About a year after publication of the 1966 Kappan article, James Guiher, Vice-President of Prentice-Hall’s Educational Books Division, called. Could he and P-H’s Head K-12 Editor, Mike McDanield, come to Florida to talk?
Long story, short: They came, starting a long-running conversation ending with a project to produce a middle school-level American history textbook and a world cultures textbook consistent with my thinking.
“Rich” concepts (e.g. cultural assumptions, value conflict, social control, polarization, cultural interaction, system change, and so on) organized several weeks of study for each concept. Prentice-Hall’s college-level history and anthropology authors provided unique and engaging primary data for the concepts, and my brother and I wrote instructional activities using their data.
Traditional schooling emphasizes and rewards passive learner recall of information. The P-H project’s primary sources required learners to hypothesize, infer, value, extrapolate, correlate, imagine, synthesize, predict, estimate, generalize, and so on—exercise the dozens of cognitive processes that make routine human functioning possible and enable civilized life.
Every unit culminated with activities requiring learners to apply the concept to contemporary matters.
P-H’s marketing department printed and distributed the activities to middle school teachers nationwide and invited them to write reports about how the activities worked (or didn’t) and send them to inhouse P-H editors.
At the end of each semester, eight teachers whose reports seemed most perceptive were identified, P-H paid for their substitutes for a week, and flew them and us to a resort somewhere to rework, refine, and replace activities.
Thirty-nine middle school teachers participated.
The books were ready for publication in 1976, but a back-to-basics reaction to what’s now called “constructivist learning” prompted P-H’s marketing department to shelve the project, then change its mind and do a small press run in 1977 with no advertising or follow-up promotion.
End of project.
I know of no other curriculum development project that matches in thoroughness our effort to combine what are generally considered “best practices:” (1) A focus on powerful concepts. (2) Deliberate use of learners’ already-known, simple, comprehensive, natural information organizers. (3) Active use of learner firsthand, immediate, real-world experience. (4) Small-group cooperative learning to minimize threat and encourage “thinking out loud.” (5) Intellectually challenging but interesting, unfamiliar primary sources. (6) Correct modeling of the holistic, systemically integrated nature of reality. (7) Extensive writing and illustrating requirements. (8) Traditional schooling’s emphasis on two thought processes—recalling and applying—replaced by work requiring learners to use a full range of thought processes.
Salvage operation
Watching the destructive chaos created by amateur education reformers, ideologues and privatizers, prompted us to ask P-H about copyrights for the instructional materials we’d created.
They gave them to us in May 1990. We updated and reformatted the lessons to adapt them to the internet, put them online, downloadable free of cost or other obligation, and invited users to suggest improvements.
We’ve added instructional materials for general systems theory, world history, civics and science. That’s at odds with our belief that the general knowledge component of the curriculum should be a single, comprehensive course of study systemically integrating all fields of knowledge, with specialized course offerings expanded and offered as electives. However, recognizing resistance to change and existing bureaucratic boundaries and expectations, we’ve used traditional subjects in non-traditional ways to encourage acceptance and use of systemic conceptions of reality.
Notwithstanding the fact that our instructional activities require thought processes too complex to be evaluated by standardized tests, files routinely download by the hundreds weekly without a dime spent on advertising. If officials would remove the artificial performance ceiling created by the limitations of standardized testing and accompany academic work with exercises to improve classroom culture, we believe the ability of the young to cope with the messes they’re inheriting will be maximized.
Request for Advice
I’ll be 95 years old in May. My brother, Howard, 86. We’d like to donate our work—free of cost or other obligation—to an institution, organization or other entity on condition they create a suitable website, keep the activities downloadable and free for teachers to use with their own students, and encourage their continuous improvement, including across cultural boundaries.
If you a have suggestions for contacts who might be willing to talk about accepting what we’re offering, we’d really appreciate hearing from you.
Marion………… mbrady2222@gmail.com
Howard……….. hbrady1@cfl.rr.com
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My SUNY Press book, What’s Worth Teaching? Selecting, Organizing, and Integrating Knowledge, was published in 1989 and co-published by Books for Educators. The link below is to a pre-publication review by Philip L. Smith, Editor of the SUNY Press series of books Philosophy of Education. Smith is now Professor Emeritus, Ohio State University. https://www.marionbrady.com/articles/WWTReview.pdf
A revised version titled What’s Worth Learning? published by Information Age Publishing, is now free for downloading: https://www.marionbrady.com/documents/WWL.pdf
Links to illustrative instructional activities:https://www.marionbrady.com/documents/samplecontents.pdf
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I LOVE Marion Brady’s work. He should donate his work to ZINN Educational Project.
And …. how about letting school districts and teachers know about Brady’s work. I am gonna send an email to my school district. Who knows if this will matter, but doing this anyway.
In the fall of 1995 I had the pleasure of being assigned to teach the 10th grade Honors World History Humanities course at my high school. There was almost no curricular oversight for this course so I took an approach based on my own liberal arts background. I broke the course up into four thematic units: Culture, Creativity, Conflict and Conscience (Yes, the head of our history department got a chuckle over the alliteration). Instead of a chronological review of isolated cultures, we explored human progress by comparing actions from various civilizations in response to common challenges and the resulting consequences to those civilizations. In a traditional mode I had the students write a short essay every week based on content we were covering in the class. We also created board games exploring religion, trade, and human migration. We watched films that explored the different themes. We read books beyond the history text. I wish that I could have taught this for many years, but I was working on an administration degree and the popularity of our art program, my primary subject, demanded that I teach studio full time. As my career progressed in administration I learned that it is how we learn that matters and our relationship to that learning, not memorization of content. Students who tend to be successful in traditional curricula and standardized assessment have a brain and social experience that work well with memorization and standards thinking. The majority of students in school become bored or worse, disengaged, because our curricular structure is not conducive to exploiting diverse experiences or approaches to learning. I can’t recall where I read this, but I do remember reading that curriculum is not a primary driver for academic success. The ongoing concern I encountered from teachers was student motivation. If we allowed students to explore interests and challenged their conclusions to make that exploration meaningful, we would have a more vibrant citizenry.
“but I was working on an administration degree”
That was your first mistake! (Yeah, I fell into that trap also but escaped before all the life was sucked out of my brain and body.)
“Students who tend to be successful in traditional curricula and standardized assessment have a brain and social experience that work well with memorization and standards thinking.”
For some yes, for many others no!
There is nothing inherently wrong with memorization nor with standards. (What? Swacker is saying that standards can be a good thing? Must have a covid infected brain, eh). The problem lies in how those concepts are used. . . or should I say misused and abused.
I agree. I don’t see a problem with standards, it is just that that a currently created with no feedback from practitioners. Although I have sometimes wondered if my administrative experience sapped the grey matter from my brain, I have to say on balance that my experience was mostly good. This was particularly true when I was trusted to make decisions for my students. This of course was not always the case, especially toward the end of my career. I have no regrets for my work or effort. II am terribly worried about the direction of public education leadership and the lack of teacher support today.
Diane, Marion, and Howard: In my view, the news today is filled with people who express (without knowing it) an ABSENCE of the kind of education you write about in your note and that generally shares the same decades and timeline (50+ or so years?).
We have a good re-spiriting of political activism . . . needed in a democratic environment. However, that activism doesn’t know its own democratic roots; some is actually malevolent; and generally, but also factually, it has no depth of meaning to inform it; and so, such minds and spirits must rely on whatever their early haphazard habits can supply. (Potluck, indeed, in our time.) Often that turns out to be an extreme and adolescent selfishness and several forms of racism (group bias) coupled with, again, the absence of development, habits of self-reflection, and a habituated love of learning that might cure it.
The U.S. Congress is now sporting several people with such absences and “thinking problems,” some of whom are certifiably insane; and the “disease” is spreading to all of the State governments as we speak. And of course, it’s fueled by big and not-so-dark money informed by the moral and political LCD, reactionary, so-called philosophy of people like Ayn Rand.
It’s not that STEM curricula are totally wrong, but rather, as your note suggests, that their over-emphasis has pushed what is essential to the core over the cliff leaving the fullness of children’s creative intelligence, especially their motivation to learn, splattered on the rocks below to be washed out to sea with the next tide. What is left on top is not pretty.
We are experiencing the rise of the shallow spirit.
I think you are right if you mean that a full “core” education, though not a guarantee, is the place of real hope. But even good leadership has to be met with a spirit who can understand and admire it, and not consider it a threat in true Trump-like fashion. As you well know, what took decades of absence to manifest and become powerful today has its correlate timeline . . . to manifest as a good core education, optimally, will take time.
I am “only” 75′ but with you, I am aware that the core threads are inborn; and so, I remain hopeful that there is a self-strengthening and self-correction also going on as we speak and, indeed, we can recognize it in some who still have power and the inclination to take us in a better direction. My hope is that they can hold up as we go through this strange time.
Catherine Blanche King
This is a good point. However, what I notice is how many of those people who demonstrate an absence of that kind of education were educated in the 1960s, 70 and 80s, before anyone heard of “Common Core.”
And I notice how many of our young people seem to be able to think critically and recognize what is true, despite being educated in the Common Core era.
nycpsp– All, right up to today, were and still are taught via a division of education into siloed disciplines. Then, as now, there have always been many people able to think critically and recognize what is true– both young and old. They got that way by using their “organizer of organizers” as Brady puts it, i.e., their brains. Restructuring ed in the way described here could advance this kind of learning into K12 grades, jump-start it in children of relatively uneducated parents, spread it among lackluster students by engaging their interest. This would result in more and better learning/ thinking spread to a larger proportion of the population.
NYC public school parent: It’s about people, and so trends and numbers become important for analysis where the anecdote is also important, but can also be quite misleading. Remember that the nation is split but in many different ways. And no education now or during the 50’s etc., was lockstep or universally the same. CBK
Diane
This column is a keeper (as most are) and one to share widely.
I’ve been at this for decades. I now work with colleagues and principals who could have been my students (well, some were). I apologize to them often for sounding like the old guy telling stories (not the proverbial principal/superintendent war stories and innovations) – but the “back in the day” TEACHING stories. Before this era (1983 onward) before the political and corporate interest in meaningless data and making learning something tangible to scripted, regurgitated, and ranked… back then we…
We used national professional standards (NCTE, NCSS, and others) woven within interdisciplinary units (not politically and corporate driven “core” standards in isolated lessons)
We used concepts, advanced organizers, relevant themes (not “themes” like today), and other means of organizing content and allowing student choice and interest and built-in critical thinking
We taught “Unified Studies” (English, reading, social studies, history, humanities, environment…) in junior high (yes, still junior high then) right out of Gordon Vars Common Learnings, George Melton, and others’ means of organizing the year, units, and lessons.
We took field trips – not as many as 6th grade teacher in … 1963… when we took over 10 field trips to investigate city and public services in action (and had to write about the and forecast) – but we took trips including hearing Buckminster Fuller speak about geodesics and community interdependence and more)
We had built in higher order thinking and “you figure it out” lessons because content was an exemplar of an abstract relevant concept
Writing this I still sound like one of those old guys talking about the good old days – – – but they WERE the good old days. Curriculum was not a regimen of isolated, compartmentalized, scripted, boring, culturally irrelevant corporately compiled material. And learning was… actual learning and thinking and doing and meaning-making and definitely nor “for the test.”
In his book, Mr. Brady mentions that lead-glazed earthenware and lead pipes might have contributed to a long-term dumbing down of Romans that in turn contributed to the collapse of the Western empire.Wouldn’t it be interesting if the preservatives and food colorings in cheap snack cakes and jerky snacks at least partially explained the 74+ million Americans who voted in 2020 for the guy who thought that stealth airplanes were actually invisible?
Ofc, lead in food and drinking water is not THE REASON why Rome, in the West, fell. There are lots and lots and lots and lots of reasons for this, and one has to, as well, think carefully about what one means by “fell.” This points to an issue that teachers must keep in mind when using project-based approaches. You have to delimit the thing and to provide essential knowledge up front, but be careful to warn your students against glib syntheses. To fascists, history is SIMPLE. To those who actually know something, it isn’t.
With his six pack a day addiction to Diet Coke and his love for cheap fast food, I’m sure he has “pickled” his body and brain with preservatives from the “food industry”. He is likely “preserved” for years to come in his altered mental state.
I’m talking about “the guy”.
You mean He Who Shall Not Be Named [in an indictment]?
Hi Bob . . . long time no see. But to your note, I knew it was bad, with the bleach and the magic marker (and on and on and on); but I didn’t know about invisible airplanes. Did you know that Marjorie TG is not a real person but a figment of a comic’s imagination, sort of like Texas’ dress code for women? CBK
As he typically does, Trump repeated this again and again, saying that you could be standing right next to them and not be able to see them. LOL. “Incredible, right?” he would say., LOL.
Hi, Catherine! Hope you and yours are having wonderful holidays!
Or whatever is in those square pizzas they serve in school cafeterias…
I started teaching in 1970 and retired in 2008. The ’80s and ’90s were a most productive age for public schools and teachers. It was an age in which teachers were encouraged to use evidence based learning in their classes. States and districts encouraged professional growth and supported teachers in their work. Teachers were valued and considered essential to providing students with what they needed to best serve themselves, their communities and the future. Activity based learning was encouraged, and students were engaged and taking more responsibility for their learning. Teachers were in control of instruction, and they used flexible groupings within classes to accomplish their goals. Students flourished as they learned both content and skills. Teachers used a variety of in class ways to assess student learning. While standardized testing may have been used as a litmus test, there were no public floggings based on scores.
By the late 1990s many districts were embarking on project based assessments, but the test and punishment agenda of NCLB drove most of these progressive educational ideas off the cliff. Teaching and learning have been going down hill ever since moving toward the great void of cyber instruction.
Retired: “It was an age in which teachers were encouraged to use evidence based learning in their classes.” What a concept. We should try it. CBK
All my life, I have been in the thick of the battle between traditionalist educators, typically on the right, who support traditional curricula and “fact-based” approaches, and progressive educators advancing theories about project-based learning, constructivist learning, discovery learning, and “skills” practice. Three comments:
NB that Mr. Brady’s sample class projects always begin by giving the kids facts to work with and think about–news they can use. VERY important. So, these things have to be balanced.
If you look closely at people performing skills at a high level, you find out that these skills require a LOT of both descriptive and procedural knowledge, some explicitly learned, some implicitly. In fact, that’s what a “skill” actually is. Someone has learned explicitly and acquired via experience, a body of knowledge, some conscious, some not. A lesson that doesn’t teach or provide structured opportunities to attain this knowledge, so that kids who didn’t have it before walk away having it, has FAILED. I know that David Coleman has decreed that literary texts are of minor importance, but at the risk of challenging Lord Coleman, appointed by Master Gates DECIDER FOR U.S. EDUCATION, I’d like to at least mention the opening chapter of Sherwood Anderson’s odd and wonderful novel/short story anthology hybrid. Winesburg, Ohio. It’s called “The Book of the Grotesque.” It tells of an old man who was found, when he died, to be in possession of lots of little slips of paper, on each of which was written A TRUTH and, if I remember correctly, a name. The old man’s thesis: When one adopts a single, absolute TRUTH and lives by that and only that, one becomes a grotesque.
There’s a danger inherent to integrated systems model that should be kept in mind by educator’s using it: You don’t want kids to walk away from a steady diet of these lessons thinking that it’s an easy matter to draw grand syntheses from a few facts. There’s a word for that: hubris. See, for example, Bill Gates or the tech mogul character in “Don’t Look Up.”
And yes. Impart knowledge to your students. Give them opportunities to apply it and, in the process, acquire other knowledge.
cx: by educators using it
Here’s one way to teach that, which I’m sure Mr. Brady probably describes somewhere: After kids have finished the project, give them one or more additional facts that they didn’t have before that change the situation.
progressive educators advancing theories about project-based learning, constructivist learning, discovery learning, cross-curricular education, and “skills” practice.
I can only speak as a parent.
What I learned in the 1970s was TERRIBLE. My kid’s supposed “Common Core” curriculum is 100x better than what I got.
I really don’t care about labels. All I know is that whatever kids are learning in middle and high schools today is far better than what they got in the 1970s. I don’t understand this supposedly ideal time in the past where the curricula is better. I was parent through all kinds of different math ideas (Everyday Math, etc.) and through different science and social studies and writing and reading ideas.
What I came to realize is that the labels were meaningless. Some ways of teaching worked for some kids and some worked for other kids. And once kids reached high school and even middle school, the ideas of Common Core really didn’t register much. Maybe they do in some schools. All I can vouch for is that the classes are so much more engaging and interesting now than when I was in high school.
I lived in a state where there was no such thing as Regents or any exit exams in the 1970s. But in NY, students were taking Regents exams and I remember relatives who lived here talking about them. I don’t really care whether or not my kid has to take Regents Exams just like kids did in the 1970s. But I do care that their classes are far better than what I got.
Maybe I’m missing something.
But I think that there is a reason that it is the middle aged and seniors where Trumpism is most prevalent, while our young people seem to be able to think. Maybe the education is better now. The mandating testing in 3-8th grade has been horribly misused, but the education kids are getting in the classroom remains quite strong, in my experience. I salute teachers for that, but I also know the curriculum is a whole lot better than it was in my day.
Well, if that’s the case some places, it’s a testament to teachers actually teaching DESPITE the Common [sic] Core [sic] and the testing.
Most of the best textbook writers and editors I worked with have quit in disgust at being forced to generate trivial, convoluted Common [sic] Core [sic] practice exercises in lieu of genuine, coherent curricula. I’m one of those.
Are you talking about K-8? What kind of school would have their teachers use practice exercises as their curricula? Even when my kid had to do test prep in elementary school, it was limited. The vast majority of time was spent learning things that were far more interesting than what I learned. So I concede that there might be schools that are that lousy, or teachers who are that lazy, but that is not required by Common Core.
I believe that all curricula are bad in the wrong hands. People develop curricula they think is great,with the best intentions,and they assume it is going to be used that way. Project based learning? I have seen teachers assigning kids to group projects with almost no guidance from their teachers during the process. I have seen teachers who are engaging in the classroom but they leave their students to do a “project” together for the next few weeks on their own. That works for some kids and is a nightmare for others.
I grew up having one boring science textbook, one boring American History textbook, one boring Reading Textbook. And I took Iowa tests every year. When I first heard of Common Core, I thought it was a way to address the fact that there were plenty of schools out in flyover America where kids didn’t get anything but that for 12 years.
I have never seen a good teacher who used Common Core practice exercises in lieu of genuine curricula. I have seen good teachers and bad teachers and lazy teachers and teachers who struggled their first years and got better. I have seen teachers who were bad for some students and amazing for other students. That is the one thing that has stayed the same from when I was in school to what I see now.
Back in my day, I was expected to develop my own curriculum. Therefore, having a background in Astronomy and Physics (as well as an intrinsic interest in ‘human learning’, culture and psychology), I felt I knew a bit about the history of physical science. And, so, I couldn’t see how a ‘business major’ manager who writes ‘curriculum’ for textbook companies could help my students more than I could, unless (of course) the desired outcome was to make students more malleable and ignorant.
The real problem is that our society has driven people such as myself out of the classroom. Poor benefits, constant criticism from people who know very little either about the subject matter or understand the massive amount of energy needed to ‘parent’ about 90 students (in my later years). I went to ‘private education’, but found myself teaching rich kids (nice kids, mind you, and many were pretty bright, unlike their parents in most cases). But, even there, the ‘management mindset’ crept in over time. And, so, I ‘retired’.
Who do you think writes that ‘Core Curriculum’? It’s textbook publishers. They want profit.
NYC, every textbook publisher of ELA materials, print or online, now begins every development project by making a list of CC$$ skills in a spreadsheet that will record where that skill is taught. The tail wagging the dog. The era of coherent curricula is gone. Instead, one gets random snippets of random text and CC$$ exercises on these, strung together loosely, with almost no actual content. Oh, and lots of graphics. This is true of both online and print texts.
Daedalus,
You sound like a great teacher. I didn’t learn anything from the science teachers I had in the 1970s — before Common Core.
Go to any large public high school today and you will find some of the worst science teachers (many there from decades ago) and some of the best. Are you willing to fire all the bad ones? You think they are bad because of Common Core?
Not all physics teachers can develop their own curriculum. The one I had in high school in the 1970s taught me nothing. We had a textbook that was purchased from a textbook publisher that taught me enough to memorize what I needed for the tests and then forget.
I don’t think that has anything to do with Common Core. It probably has more to do with how difficult it is to teach teenage students who aren’t interested in physics.
Daedalus
having a background in Astronomy and Physics (as well as an intrinsic interest in ‘human learning’, culture and psychology), I felt I knew a bit about the history of physical science. And, so, I couldn’t see how a ‘business major’ manager who writes ‘curriculum’ for textbook companies could help my students more than I could, unless (of course) the desired outcome was to make students more malleable and ignorant.
yes, yes, yes
You brought to your teaching actual knowledge and empathy for your students. There are really important lessons to be learned here.
Those who knew what they were talking about used them only as ‘supplemental material’, if at all.
I was told by my administrators and my Dept. Chairperson that I had to stick to the assigned textbook. LOL. For most of the year, they stayed in boxes. I think I took them out, perhaps, three times, to have the students read a particular selection from them. I taught from paperback novels and plays and handouts and photocopied activities I had put together and my own notes and online resources that I would post on my class websites.
Well, NYC….
I’m not so sure I was ‘great’, however I tried to tailor my lesson to what I thought would impact a particular student. This meant plenty of ‘lab time’, ‘working in groups’, and different courses to serve the needs of different students. It also meant that I needed class sizes of no more than 20 or so (no big lecture halls, and I knew that).
All kids start life with a keen interest in trying to figure out how things work and how to predict (and, if possible, direct) the future. That early curiosity is killed, systematically, by what is sometimes mistakenly called ‘education’.
The word ‘Education’ comes from the Latin root for ‘drawing out’. An ‘educator’ is someone who ‘draws out’ from within a student, not a ‘teacher’ who shoves stuff in. There’s a huge difference, and the ‘Common Core’ definitely ‘shoves in’. It teaches obediance to authority.
As a ‘science guy’, obeisance to authority is anathema. Only by rebellion against ‘accepted wisdom’ can any progress be made.
Bob, this is a wonderful essay.
“all future teachers need lots of experience with mentored practice teaching.”
But what about current teachers? You have high standards: “First and foremost, future English teachers should develop a wide-ranging familiarity with classic literature (with the canons of American, British, and world literatures), with YA literature, and with the common structures and archetypes of folk orature–nursery rhymes, charms, songs, legends, tall tales, myths, folk tales, fairy tales, and so on. The future English teacher should be widely versed in all three and in the Stith Thompson Motif-Index of Folk-Literature and the Aarne/Thompson/Uther Tale Types Index. In addition, the following are all, I think, important for the future English teacher to learn:” (it continues with many other good ideas).
But how many current teachers who have taught for decades don’t have that? And how do we know whether or not they have that knowledge? How do you know whether the mentor teacher is any good?
When I first started teaching, there were lots of older women who had gone into teaching because opportunities in other professions weren’t as open to them then. Many of these women had formidable brain power and learning. My essay is directed toward what I think should be in a program for future English teachers. As you can see, such a program would differ vastly from those that exist today.
Few now do. But I’ve met some.
A place dedicated to learning must be staffed by learned people.
When I started interviewing for teaching jobs near the end of my career, not a single administrator asked a single question related to my knowledge of my subject. It was as though this weren’t at all a consideration, not at all among the qualifications for the job.
I got the teaching job I landed, however, because one administrator–not at the school level–learned that I had written a lot of textbooks and had worked for E.D. Hirsch, Jr. So, this one person cared that I knew something. LOL.
To a “science guy, obeisance to authority . . . anathema.”
Amen to that!
It’s a sad day when the statement “Back in my day, I was expected to develop my own curriculum” is considered anything but absolutely normal and universally presumed. Not directed to anyone in particular, just an observation about education in general.
Amen to that, Greg.
I went to a public high school in the 1970s. A few of the classes I took: wave motion (physics), Russian history, paleontology, drama. There were lots of wonderful, innovative experiments back then. Flexible-modular scheduling, for example.
OMG where?? My high school schedule looked something like this: English 1, English 2, English 3, English 4 (with the only differentiating being “Honors”) American History 1, American History 2, American History 3, American Government (I remember getting to college and being so impressed that anyone had taken the exotic “European History”. The idea of any history beyond American and European was not even on my radar.) Biology, Chemistry, Physics (All sleep-inducing classes out of a textbook, where I memorized what I needed to know the night before a text and promptly forgot it).
In elementary school our district experimented with new ideas where students learned math and english at their own pace using “CPL cards”. It was less boring not to have to sit through classes but the material was as dull and unengaging as ever.
This was in the midwest.
There were plenty of extracurricular activities — sports, school plays and musicals, marching band and chorus. And some good teachers who engaged the classes. But never had the kind of classes that you are talking about.
I went to high school in Bloomington, Indiana
I think that they gave biology credit for the paleontology and physics credit for the wave motion.
How do you know later, corporate-directed curriculum is ‘better’? Is our society ‘improving’? If so, in what way? And, to the individual, what is the purpose of a ‘society’?
I don’t understand why anyone is under the delusion that the textbooks used in the 1970s were not “corporate-directed”.
We learned the “approved” US history. The reading textbooks I used contained the “approved” stories for young readers.
I wasn’t under some delusion that Common Core would change that. I did believe that Common Core was developed to expand the curriculum beyond the dull and boring memorization of facts curriculum that the 1970s textbooks we used taught.
It was misused, but I have seen project-based learning also misused. I saw the Lucy Calkins reading program misused. I have seen math ideas come and go since before Common Core.
Teachers didn’t always teach from corporate-produced textbooks. Those who knew what they were talking about used them only as ‘supplemental material’, if at all. When I started, there were no good ‘Earth Science’ textbooks, so I wrote my own. Same with Physics, although there were some pretty good ‘reference’ texts. Later I found a text on ‘conceptual physics’ which I loved (and used in a ‘physics for art majors’ course), however textbook companies ruined that book, so I had to go back to my old notes.
Daedalus says “Teachers didn’t always teach from corporate-produced textbooks. Those who knew what they were talking about used them only as ‘supplemental material’, if at all.”
That’s what I see today! My experience in the 1970s was science teachers using the corporate-produced textbooks as the main material, while my experience as a parent is the good teachers using it as supplementary material.
Isn’t it really about the teacher?
Totally agree with you about textbooks, Daedalus. No teacher actually worth his or her salt (from the Latin, salus, referring to the salt ration that Roman soliders would receive), needs a textbook. It will be, at best, one among various resources.
nycpsp– I answer you below under ‘general comments’ to get more margin space
I’ve honestly never understood the need for a textbook in English/language or social studies classes. I don’t trust a teacher who would use one voluntarily. My philosophy is and always has been: books used in class should be relevant to the students 20-30 years from now if they are still on their bookshelves. No one reads an old textbook for anything other than historical research purposes.
GregB,
I got ALL my K-12 education through textbooks in a public school in the 1970s/early 80s. One that was considered reasonably “good” at the time! I had no idea there was anything better until I got to college, and even then I associated that “better” with fancy private schools and public schools in rich suburbs of big cities.
I didn’t really pay much attention to education until I had a kid enrolled in a NYC public school. And I was happily surprised to find out how much better it was. Sure there were flaws and I complained about things, but compared to the kind of education I got, it was far more than I even knew was possible.
I guess it depends on your perspective. But from my perspective, the 1970s definition of teachers “designing their own curriculum” where I grew up seemed to be teachers deciding which chapters in the textbook would be assigned reading as homework and how many of the questions at the end of each chapter had to be answered, and whether those answers had to be in full sentences or not. American History never seemed to get much past WW II — we were lucky to hit the 1950s and never got as far as the Vietnam War.
No doubt I am forgetting some more interesting parts of high school, but I grew up assuming a “good” school was one that gave each kid their own textbook and it was in reasonably good condition!
In fact, my classmates and I would always look to see which students in older grades used our textbooks when we got them the first day of school. There was a big square stamp on the first page with many lines, where kids signed their names and the year. It was always fun to find some much older relative who had used the same book 8 or 10 years earlier. Those textbooks got years of use!
Maybe my public school was a terrible school with terrible teachers, but when I was growing up, parents didn’t think so and the teachers no doubt thought they were doing a good job! They taught reading, writing and ‘arithmetic’ well enough, and for most of us, that was the basics that prepared us for higher education. Students who pursued hard sciences or higher math no doubt had more of a learning curve.
In the early 1980s, when I first started teaching, our department meetings were places where we shared lesson plans, discussed innovations in pedagogy and curricula, planned courses, and voted to adopt materials. In the 2000s, when I returned to teaching, they consisted of the Department Chair reading out this week’s list of mandates from administration. Period.
But it doesn’t seem as if schools use textbooks the same way as they did. Are you talking about high school students being given textbooks for their entire English curriculum? That seems odd and not the experience I have seen here.
And I can’t imagine any Social Studies textbook in the Common Core era being worse than the history textbooks I had. Dull repetition of facts.
I know people complain about AP classes, but I was impressed that students read and analyzed documents, instead of memorizing dates and facts.
I wrote a long reply to you about the classes kids took in my high school that it held up in moderation. My high school didn’t offer any of the courses you took. I wish it had!
^^I intended this as a reply to your 3:12pm post, Bob. The one that began: “NYC, every textbook publisher of ELA materials, print or online, now begins every development project by making a list of CC$$ skills….”
Yeah. People have to work REALLY hard to make history as boring as most K-12 textbooks do. Here’s why they are as they are: there are enormous pressures on textbook companies to tell, somehow, the story of a nation or of the world without saying anything that might possibly offend anyone. And, there is pressure to cover everything that’s in the state curricula AND all the special feature stuff that the state guidelines say the texts must contain. So, every bit of color, of vitality, of the real, is removed, and topics are treated in vague, broad generalities. One paragraph on the Vietnam War. Next topic.
When I first started in textbook publishing, we would write coherent units on, say, The Elements of Poetry or The American Transcendentalists or Writing a News Story. The last 12th-grade British and American Literature textbooks I used contained almost no actual teaching about movements, styles, literary techniques, literary history, the accomplishments of a great author. Or, at best, one would get a couple vague sentences about one of these things that would then be interrupted by some ephemera from a current-day online newspaper and practice exercises on CC$$ skills. The thing looked as though it had been designed by a gerbil on methamphetamines. All curricular coherence and depth, gone.
These texts were collections of CC$$ practice exercises thinly disguised under misleading titles that suggested that substantive material was being taught.
Bob,
That does sound horrible. Is that really the norm for what 12th grade English classes are? It sounds like something that would be offered to kids in remedial English. Is that kind of textbook typical in 12th grade English classes in some states?
I was describing Pear$on’s My Perspectives literature series. These big textbook programs cost many, many millions of dollars to produce, so they typically reflect standard practice–what the audiences (now, school districts almost always make the adoption decisions) want.
What they want NATIONALLY. The textbook companies typically put out “state versions” for the bigger states, but these are almost exclusively the same book with a different cover. references to the state standards sprinkled throughout the Annotated Teacher’s Edition (ATE), some state-specific marketing material at the beginning (again typically in the ATE), and, in some cases, a couple state educators misleadingly presented as though they were authors of the program.
As though there were something called “Texas Algebra,” as opposed to, say, Algebra.
You could read the entire unit on the American Transcendentalists in the “My Perspectives” lit series and encounter NONE of the ideas that informed the transcendentalists or that they espoused and no material on what they were reacting against or on their enduring influence on American ways of thinking, except, perhaps, that they liked trees.
Years ago I saw a film called Idiocracy. Well, that’s what a textbook in an idiocracy looks like.
Hi Bob, just checking up on all the entries I missed in this thread the other day. Your entry above that begins “You could read the entire unit on the American Transcendentalists in the “My Perspectives” lit series…” gave me my first belly-laugh of the day! Thank you!
OMG Bob, ‘gerbil on methamphetamines’ totally describes the textbooks used in midsch/ hisch [‘13/’14-‘19/’20] for my longtime French & Spanish tutees. And they didn’t even have the excuse of trying to align to CCSS. World Langs mercifully continues to follow the eminently well-put-together ACTFL stds. This has to be about competing with the internet.
The language texts are REALLY bad. The flow of teaching on any topic is interrupted every few seconds with some stupid “special feature.” Horrible.
A sane high-school language arts teacher will try to get hands on a class set of a college-level language text and not use the complete garbage created by the textbook companies.
How did we get to the place where textbooks are that weirdly discontinuous? (What I call the Monty Python “And now for something completely different” approach to education?) Well, state departments of education started passing textbook guidelines. Must contain cross-curricular activities. Must contain higher-order thinking skills activities. Must contain critical thinking activities. Must contain [extend the list to 1,000 or so textbook features], and textbook companies started competing with one another by larding their texts with these. And the marketing people started dictating the textbook contents, and there would be meetings, and every one of these marketing wizards would have ideas about what was hot on the educational carnival midway this season (Must contain flipped classroom activities. Must contain online video extensions. Must contain socio-emotional learning activities. Must contain large graphics with mostly primary colors). And ALL this stuff would be thrown in.
We hold (Did you know that Thomas Jefferson invented an automatic letter copying device? It’s pictured here.) these truths (Truth tables are used in logic. Al-Farabi, pictured here, is considered, in the Islamic world, the father of logic. Critical thinking: do you think it is logical to jump off a bridge? Why, or why not?) to be (Peer Response: ask your neighbors what they would like to be when they are adults. Having trouble with this assignment? Check out the online Occupational Outlook Handbook published by the Department of Labor) self (Socio-emotional Learning: A positive self-image is important. Brainstorm a list of ten of your most admirable characteristics. A personal characteristic is called a trait. Remember: you are special.) evident (Like detectives, historians use evidence. Look at this diagram. What clues can you find suggesting that the people in this village depend on the ocean for their livelihoods?), that all (Group activity: The word potpouri comes from French words meaning “rotten pot.” It was a sort of stew into which you could put ALL the leftovers. It’s now used for a collection of dried plants, including flowers. Make a potpouri with your neighbors.)
[end of lesson]
Fascinating material here. I believe that integrating the arts disciplines into the K-12 curriculum and include as a part of that process provide for teachers to collaborate across and through their disciplines. As the children grow up they can choose to concentrate more fully on a given art or two. Creativity and collaboration will be a part of their educational experience at every grade level as will be their thinking skills, their drive to learn more and explore relationships across the content of their curriculum. Studio arts, theatre, dance, music are rich sources for strong intellectual development along with performance within the areas. Challenging teacher to compare and contrast their disciplinary approaches and to discover and articulate the commonality of content…does rhythm for example play a role in their work as it does in dance and music…start there. What can they learn from one another and share with their students as they progress?
These are my thoughts about improving how we teach and what we teach. The Arts must be a part of the Liberal Arts to educate our children. Maurice Eldridge
meldrid1@swarthmore.edu
Maurice Eldridge—I so agree. My husband and I were fortunate to be part of a 60-yr public elemsch tradition where the parents and teachers collaborated to create an ‘original’ play [usually a rip-off of some existing musical, embellished with timely local references/ parodies]—the annual fund-raiser. We were involved for over a decade, and learned how a play brings together every conceivable talent—arts to sciences to crafts and more– from the participants, while creating a wonderful community/ team sense as all work together to meet the goal. We ended up speculating on how maybe one whole middle-school year should be devoted to such a project involving all the students in that grade.
Amen to this!
I think some of my posts sound contrarian and I want to clarify.
I agree that there are bad things about today’s curricula. But we need to stop believing there was some halcyon day in the past where it was ideal. Maybe it was good in some select, likely affluent, school districts or big cities. But many students were experiencing a K-12 curriculum that was worse than what is offered today.
I often wonder if the Common Core curriculum would have been much better if there was no state testing. The original ideas behind it seemed good, but testing seemed to warp the intention.
Good teachers are good teachers whether they have to teach out of a 1970s textbook or a Common Core one. Textbooks have always been flawed, albeit in different ways. State testing has gotten in the way of learning. But it is important to evaluate students’ learning beyond simply letting their classroom teacher be the only arbiter. Sure, most kids don’t need it, but how do you find the ones that do without finding some way to make sure that learning struggles are recognized?
State testing has never helped to identify learning struggles in any way that is helpful to the classroom teacher. Common Core testing does nothing to inform practice in the classroom. My focus as a special education teacher was to meet the child where they were, not force them to perform to some arbitrary standard. How do you teach canned curriculum and follow the prescriptions of IEPs? Answer, you can’t! Law required that I teach to the needs of the child. I remember a math class I had that gave me a totally inappropriate textbook far beyond their understanding. Unfortunately, all but one of the kids had “advanced” to the next year by memorizing algorithms and the places for which they were used with little to no understanding of the concepts. They had no idea why any of it worked, but if you put a particular type of problem in front of them, they knew the steps to “solve” it. If you remember the mechanical way we were taught to do long division, you know what I mean. It wasn’t until I was asked to teach math that I really dissected the process and understood it myself. As you can imagine, I spent most of the year on helping them to understand what had only been surface manipulations of concepts.
This comment has really wandered around, and I am not sure what I intended to express anymore, but I know that those teachers who have been well supported have learned how to “teach to the standards” on paper while teaching to the kids in practice.
speduktr,
I agree with all of your good points. And teaching special education students and all students should be about meeting children where they are, not expecting them to all be in the same place.
I was just thinking that there was a time before Common Core where kids took state tests or (in the old days) Iowa tests or some other annual tests and those tests were used as simply one way to help inform parents and teachers about where a student is. The student was not simply his or her standardized test score, but it was another way of evaluating what might be a student’s strengths or weaknesses. It wasn’t perfect. But it also didn’t seem to be used politically to hurt schools. It was just another way of getting insight into a student, on top of the classroom teacher’s own view of the student. Those kinds of tests didn’t influence the curriculum or judge teachers. They were simply another way to see if a student might be slipping through the cracks.
speduktr– the details in your post got me thinking about some of the great teachers my kids were fortunate to have. My eldest had a wonderful but bizarre brain: he could explain in a couple of brief sentences to his math-handicapped mom what quadratic equations were—the concept, how to work them, what they were good for—but due to various LD’s couldn’t write one through for the life of him. (The opposite of the students you describe here LOL!) Thank god a terrific 8th-gr teacher took him under her wing; he was able to pass the dreaded final exam. She wasn’t his SpEd teacher, just a math teacher who understood, like you, how to “meet the child where they were.”
nycpsp– yes, those Iowa-type tests were a good tool. In the ‘90’s/ ‘00’s, my kids took that or something similar every 2 to 3 years in K-8. They were helpful especially for my middle son (the other 2 had IEP’s which meant detailed annual review of progress). By the second one you could see broad areas of strength and weakness, & interest, which helped a lot in selecting courses for middle school. Then it was in my head, so I knew something was off when in 9th/10th he started sliding in those areas of strength/ interest. That helped me start jawboning. I got him to agree to try our “Project” school-within-a-school, which transformed his hisch experience.
nycpsp– rest assured, our discussions would be diminished without your ‘contrarian’ input. I always find your posts help me refine my ideas. And I especially appreciate hearing regularly from a mom of NYC pubsh students—which my kids would have been, had hubby’s co not relocated [I found that move hard!]
IMHO, CCSS suffered from the get-go by the [Gates-funded] sw/hw-focused stds movement, and you can look at the make-up of the CCSS working group that developed them to see the influence– the majority were from stdzd testing cos; the 2 bona fide Math/ ELA K12 teachers refused to sign off on the results. There is no teasing out of the standards from the aligned tests that came onboard within the year of the first draft’s issue. I believe you have been swayed by the PR/ advertising that CCSS promoted “critical thinking.” NYS ed standards pre-CCSS were good. So were the stds of many other NE states who’d always had high ed achievement pre-CCSS. Our NJ stds in particular were far, far better. I remember reading that NH was in the midst of a very productive re-write of their state stds promulgated by teachers — which was stopped cold by CCSS state buy-in.
Granted there was positive buy-in from many teachers nationally—but from states that had paltry/ poor stds beforehand. What they were welcoming were—standards; guidance. I’ve always wondered why their states didn’t just adopt the [pre-CCSS] stds of higher-ed-achieving states. By 2009-2010, those were accessible online, & as far as I know, free to be adopted.
bethree,
Thanks for that insight. I didn’t necessarily think that CCSS promoted “critical thinking”, but I did think it was an attempt to make the curricula that I experienced better (and it did). But somehow it seemed to make the states that were already doing a good job worse! Which is terrible. Not sure where the unions were, but I think many good people with good intentions did not realize how CCSS could be misused.
But as I said above, my point of comparison was a public school education that wasn’t as good as CC, with all its flaws. Freshmen in high school now already seem a lot better educated than I was when I was starting college!
“not sure where the unions were”
They took the Gates cash and bought in with ZERO thought beyond the level of the accompanying CC$$ hype.
The material AROUND the bullet list of CC$$ “standards” for ELA hyped the teaching of substantive, challenging texts. But the “standards” themselves were just another bullet list of skills, and those were what mattered because they became the basis of the tests, and school and administrator and teacher and student ratings were all based on the tests. And so the curricula devolved into thinly disguised test prep.
But here’s how little David Coleman, appointed by Master Gates Decider for the Rest of us, understood about U.S. education. If you read the material around the bullet list, it calls for reading of substantive, classic texts and for “close reading” of those texts and suggests that these things weren’t being done and that Coleman was bringing the magic tablets down from the mountain. But almost every 6-12 school in the United States was using a hardbound literature anthology at each grade level, and the selections in those texts were about 90 percent the same from one anthology series to another, competing one. And ALMOST ALL the selections in those anthologies were canonical, substantive, classic texts–“The Monkey’s Paw,” “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and so on. And each selection was typically followed by CLOSE READING questions, organized sensibly with factual questions first, analysis questions second, and synthesis and evaluation and extension questions third. So, following Bloom’s taxonomy.
But Coleman clearly DIDN’T KNOW ANY OF THIS. He was like some transplant from the 18th century who had never seen cars telling automobile manufacturers that they would work much better if they had wheels on them. LMAO. His bullet list of “standards” was almost content free. But there was an exception in the Lit standards for Grades 11 and 12. The last of these called for teaching in English classes at those grade levels “foundational works in American literature and history.” At Grades 11 AND 12. So, HE DIDN’T EVEN KNOW that in almost every high school in the U.S., Grade 11 was an American Literature survey course that included foundational documents like the Declaration of Independence and selections from the Federalist Papers. And he didn’t know that Grade 12 was typically a BRITISH LITERATURE survey course. He could have learned this if he had bothered to talk to any high-school English teacher.
The guy was PROFOUNDLY IGNORANT of the thing he had been appointed Lord over. LOL.
My point is that Coleman didn’t have a clue that this stuff was already being done. That every grade was using a lit anthology, that every lit anthology was a compendium of canonical classic works, that every selection in each of those anthologies was followed by step-by-step, graduated, guided “close reading” questions. He thought, in his ignorance and arrogance (what a toxic cocktail) that he was sharing GREAT REVELATIONS. LOL. Btw, I wasn’t a fan of the lock-step series of taxonomically ordered questions after EVERY selection or of the fact that these typically consisted of 10 questions for each selection. Obviously, what a student might need for one selection is not what he or she might need for an entirely different sort of one.
But the practical upshot of the testing based not on that material appended to the bullet list of “standards” but on the bullet list itself is that the list became THE DEFACTO ELA CURRICULUM. Insane. And thus the profound devolution of U.S. ELA pedagogy and curricula that has resulted from the Coring of our schools.
If Coleman had arrived on the scene and said, “All these lit books contain almost exclusively substantive, classic works. I think we ought to have more pop culture stuff that kids analyze, so they can cast a critical eye on the actual world they will be living in.” and “All these lit books contain these “close reading” materials, but there are lots of ways in and out of literary works than the New Critical close reading one,” then he would have been interesting to listen to. But the latter would have required that he actually know something about approaches to literature, stuff like these approaches:
NB: These are academic theories, but you can take elements of these approaches with particular works with very young kids.
Bob,
That is terrible. Why do outrageously unqualified people get taken seriously? I never get it. It’s as if the news media are the adults fawning about the emperor’s new clothes, too insecure about their own position and knowledge to point out the emperor is stark naked.
nycpsp@ Jan 2 3:47pm– “Isn’t it really about the teacher?” Sort of. It is about establishing an environment in which good teachers can flourish, and mediocre teachers can become better. A system designed around that would attract and keep professionals like Daedalus and Bob Shepherd, and use them for mentoring others as well. What distinguishes yesteryear from pubschs since ‘90’s is the gradual intrusion (and in recent decades outright micromgt) by govt on teaching flexibility via top-down ed policy. As well as adding a bunch of additional responsibilities unrelated to good teaching in the classroom. We’ve cut back on both freedom to teach well and the time required to do it.
We are always going to vary from region to another. My ‘60’s K12 for example benefited hugely from being in a small city dominated by an Ivy League and another good private college. That meant there was a large pool of excellent potential teachers– highly-educated spouses of PhD students and professors, people working on advanced degrees part-time, alumni who ended up settling in the area, etc. Plus a community that prized education, participated actively in pubsch policy & their own kids’ eds. Our teachers could run circles around pedestrian textbooks, used them only as supplements, and were never stymied by interfering admins or top-down standards.
I hate that you had stultifying pubsch teachers/ curriculum in your area, in your day, and am glad pubsch did better by your kids. You might question, though, whether that has anything to do with the materials the teachers had available to them. Your kids are benefiting from one of the biggest pools of competent, highly-educated people in the world. Had you done K12 in NYC your experience might have been similar to theirs, no?
bethree,
Very likely my experience would have been different in NYC. But from talking to my friends, I can also see that the high schools where I grew up are also better.
I understand that people who grew up with engaging advanced teachers think AP classes are worthless. But those of use who understood that not everyone lived in a place where Russian literature and any class different than “English 4 – Honors” was not available have a different point of comparison.
“My ‘60’s K12 for example benefited hugely from being in a small city dominated by an Ivy League and another good private college….Plus a community that prized education, participated actively in pubsch policy & their own kids’ eds.”
Yes, fine, but I bet a close look at any community like that today would reveal that the schools also don’t rote teach from the kind of textbook that Bob describes, just like those schools in NYC don’t.
The biggest change, in my opinion, is that the schools that weren’t like that in the 1960s (which I suspect was most of them) offer a lot more to students. I suspect (but don’t know for sure) that if you actually looked at what those schools taught in the 1970s and now, the curriculum is actually more engaging and less what what people in the 1960s and 1970s textbook industry thought kids should know. Despite Common Core.
People here hate AP classes, and I really don’t get it. They are comparing to some halcyon past ideal that most students didn’t get, and I am comparing to the reality of what I got. When de Blasio announced AP for all — meaning that even students who wanted that who attended a subpar high school could get it — I didn’t see the problem. Again, I don’t think the reality is that the vast majority of teachers in public high schools have the kind of background that Bob talks about and have the time and wherewithall to be designing their own engaging curriculum, and revising that curriculum every few years. (Because as we have seen with the admirable book series A History of US, even what was okay 15 or 20 years ago needs to be examined.)
I think my kid got a pretty good education. That’s despite all the various Math curriculum changes in elementary school that happened before Common Core. Those kinds of changes have always been a problem.
I don’t believe it matters what “curriculum” is used to teach 9th graders who struggle with reading comprehension and aren’t already well-versed in the basics of math and writing. There is no magic formula.
So I feel as if so much time is wasted on discussing the specifics of what works for the half of students who have the academic proficiency to learn via many ways of teaching, except those who offer up these “new” and “better” ideas push false narratives about them being some magic formula to teach the students who struggle to learn. While the real needs of those who struggle to learn are ignored. If those students have affluent parents, tutors do the job of teachers. If those students are the poor and disadvantaged, there isn’t any magic bullet. But it wasn’t like there was some halcyon day in the past where students who struggled to learn ever got what they needed. Those old curricula didn’t work for them any more than the new one did. The only difference is they could drop out of high school or graduate without being ready for college work and no one cared.
Another very big difference between yesteryear & today is that our economy had long offered viable living-wage job opportunities—with career paths—to the 30%-50% who then did not pursue post-hischgrad ed. While it is absolutely true that there was no “halcyon day in the past where students who struggled to learn ever got what they needed,” it was not necessary nor even considered realistic. Today thanks to govt econ policies since ‘70’s—& partly due simply to tech advances—it has become necessary. And we are still trying to figure out how to do that, with little help from govt. In fact fighting uphill against a society that leans toward underfunding access to the necessary ed, while blaming pubsch ed failures on teachers or students, without looking for systemic solutions.
I kind of love the approach recommended by the Brady brothers, and am very happy they have made their long studies and applications available to all– and that people are clearly taking advantage of that, as evidenced by the downloads.
But I have my reservations. I keep thinking back to a post of Bob Shepherd’s a while ago, where he was contrasting ELA publishing-house ‘consensus’ on how to teach K12 lit, vs CCSS-ELA. He spoke of a consensus that incorporated long-honored practice/ content, but continually evolved over the decades, reflected in a tradition of textbooks that died with Common Core. (Hopefully he will chime in & point us to a blog entry.) That’s how I was taught ELA: it fit with my talents/ proclivities, and pointed me right toward what I wanted to think about and do in life. I can’t quite picture how I would have been able to delve into lit/ language in the same way, had it been a sub-category under “a matter of interest” focusing on time, place, actions, actors, cause.
Yet I agree with Whitehead’s pithy “the curriculum’s disconnection of subjects is fatal.” The panoply of liberal-arts courses I took for my BA revealed certain obvious connections—you can’t miss what’s going on in the plastic arts vs poetry through the eras, or how Zola or Rousseau works relate to contemporaneous history/ philosophy. But it wasn’t until a grad-level FrLit course sr yr that I recognized I had slim historical grounding to back up what was going on in “Gargantua & Pantagruel”, and hadn’t even thought to connect it! That was a hole I’ve spent decades repairing [lack of historical/ political/ philosophical underpinnings needed for a full grasp of lit].
So: I find it hard to admit one should give up on diving each academic discipline for its own sake during K12. But I’m willing to consider a compromise. 5 pillars: math, science, ELA, soc stud/ history—and a year-long integrational course organized around “matters of interest” that pull in the other four. Starting as early as you want– I say, 3rd grade.
But how do you teach a student to read and write? To use evidence to support the ideas that the student is writing about? I can understand why Common Core developers thought that was important. How do you get a kid to think about numbers and their relationship to one another? I can understand why the people who created the widely reviled Everyday Math curriculum thought they were doing something important. And it is important, even if they failed. The 5 pillars sounds good – but isn’t the devil in the details?
In my experience, there are teachers who are wonderful at making material come alive and teachers who aren’t. And in college, a professor who can give an engaging, thought-provoking lecture or lead an incredibly insightful discussion are wonderful.
But those people aren’t necessarily good at teaching a 7 year old who struggles to read or understand math. They aren’t necessarily good at teaching a 14 year old the specifics of writing a research paper or even how to think of approaching a research paper. That’s the boring stuff but it’s also the important stuff. It is about understanding students who need help to do that and how to reach them. All the brilliant physics lessons in the world are useless if a teacher doesn’t get how to reach the kid who is totally and completely lost and needs a different approach.
Such kids need VERY small classes–basically, tutorial, and lots of other stuff that I address in that essay.
How do you teach a student to read or write? I was lucky, because all my public school teachers from grades 1-9 valued writing and especially reading, they made it a habit. And in college we didn’t do anything but read and write. Grades 10-12 in a Catholic high school are a time better left forgotten. But the older I get and the more experience I had, I realize how great and relatively normal and unspectacular my schooling through 9th grade was in eight different systems. That was because it was all about reading and writing in English, social studies, and other non-science and math courses.
I am astounded by how teachers today are forced to discount both. I still can’t get over the fact that my son at an AP government exam with nothing but multiple choice questions. And that there are students all over the nation doing the same, getting college credit, and then skipping it entirely in college. I have known about this intellectually for years, but it never ceases to amaze. They will make great little future fascists of America.
GregB,
I think there is still a concerted effort to teach kids to read and write now. It is just tested more, which perhaps is a bad thing.
When I was growing up, the only standardized tests we took were Iowa tests — fill in bubbles — and SATs — also fill in bubbles.
The NY State tests changed from being bubble tests (except in 4th and 7th grade) to having students write a lot more with Common Core.
AP History and English exams have writing in them.
Not sure I took many essay tests in high school. I definitely took the kinds of tests your son took in his AP Govt exam.
What makes you think teachers discount reading and writing today? I don’t see that at all. Maybe at some schools.
Isn’t it the older generation that is so willing to embrace fascism? Isn’t it the younger generation that is questioning and demanding real answers?
The NY State tests changed from being bubble tests (except in 4th and 7th grade) to having students write a lot more with Common Core.
Not so. The ELA tests in the lower grade levels (I’m not talking about the Regents here) had precisely the same format before and after the Common [sic] Core [sic]. Mostly multiple-choice questions and one or two short writing prompts, depending on the grade level. The only differences were that
a. A new multiple-choice test question format was introduced–EBSR. I won’t go into the stupid details of this question format.
b. The distractors in the MC questions were now supposed to be “plausible,” and the correct answer was supposed to be the “best ” one. Talk about a recipe for disaster.
Admittedly my current observations are based on what little I see through my children and occasional interactions with other students, teachers and parents.
Some general comparisons to the “good old days” and now: Reading books over the holidays was expected pretty much every year. Just a short book or a few more for the summers. I often could get out of those since I was switching systems, but still read them. We knew we would have book reports on assigned or self-chosen books, we knew we would have term papers, essay questions on tests were normal, and we were expected to share a bit of our knowledge with classes. None of that is happening at this apparently well-respected, small public school system.
Also, I don’t think the generational divide is as significant as you assume. Look at the leftie old fogies here, for example. And my experience with the young teaches me that they are young, idealistic, have shallow roots to their beliefs (very shallow), and are more malleable. If you look at the history of Gleichschaltung, Stalinism, Peronistas, or Pinochetism as examples, the one lesson they teach is that those on the left or middle very quickly got in line and did what was expected of them. We romanticize acts of resistance, but they are, in reality, few and far between. Youthful idealism takes a back seat very quickly once they realize they might put themselves, their family or their friends in danger for expressing themselves. As for the older generation, if they have pensions they rely or anticipate relying on, their activism will be muted quite quickly if their financial security is at risk. And in that case, the ability to read and write will be considered overrated.
Bob,
I agree with you — the multiple choice section of the Common Core exams is uniquely terrible. Shockingly so. I always thought the intention was to guarantee enough students tested poorly no matter how good their reading comprehension was. And I was certain that the only reason they could get away with that was because private school students did not take the same state tests. There is a good reason why the first strong opposition to state tests was in good suburban public school districts where parents knew their kids didn’t suddenly become low-performing students.
I always thought it was obvious that Arne Duncan and his band of privatizers wanted to make it easy for charters to make inroads with affluent parents so the privatizers could undermine the higher performing public schools the way they undermined lower-income public schools in larger cities. Arne Duncan isn’t very bright — one of those overeducated privileged guys who can’t actually think very well. And he didn’t realize that affluent parents wouldn’t buy him telling them “who do you believe, these wonderful common core test makers, or your own lying eyes?”
And the SATs and ACTs – despite being multiple choice – were not nearly as bad as the state tests since private school students took them too. In fact,when private school students started taking the ACT more frequently, the College Board seemed to have made the SAT more like the ACT so as not to lose market share. The intention was not to prove how lousy the education of students who took the SAT was — that would have made private schools look bad.
As soon as a standardized test is required of ALL students — which includes the affluent private school students — the powers that be agree that it really doesn’t have that much meaning. That’s what happened to the SAT and AP exams.
Yes, Bethree. This project-based, syncretic approach is an essential PART of an overall curriculum, but as the sole approach, it’s a recipe for disaster, just as expecting kids to discover everything is a total disaster. OK, kids, your task in this class will be to make all the discoveries made in physics over two millennia. Uh, no. Better: OK, now we are going to do a lesson on scientific discovery, organized in such a way that you will discover the answer for yourself rather than simply be taught it. It makes no sense whatsoever to expect kids to “discover” the whole of introductory arithmetic, geometry, algebra, statistics, trig, and precalculus on their own. LMAO. That’s just idiotic.
My oldest daughter had such a discovery math program for one year. Here’s how she described it: we all go home and fumble around and don’t figure out how to do the problem. Then, we go into class and the teacher tells us what we should have done. At the end of that year, all the kids’ math scores dropped precipitously, and the district, which had just shelled out tens of thousands of dollars for those new textbooks, collected them all and threw them out.
“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” –Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science. HarperCollins, 1966. P. 15.
It’s a BIG mistake to treat one pedagogical approach–one tool on the belt–as the only one.
Total constructivism is like sending students into the dark without a candle. Students will waste a lot of time hunting. Some learning should be teacher led with flexible groupings. Project based learning works well when students have a foundation in the subject matter, and they are asked to apply or expand on what they have learned. It works because it builds on what is known, and it engages the whole student. It is active, not passive learning that often leads to deeper understanding that will stay with student much longer than any information acquired from a computer screen or worksheet.
This project-based, cross-curricula stuff is really valuable. I love pizza, but I’m not going to eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day.
Agreed. It’s a shame to ruin a good and important idea by overdoing it.
My advice to educators: don’t eat ideology for breakfast every day.
I’ll have to admit, my eyes glaze over and I lose interest in discussions about teaching methods. I get it, but I think sometimes it loses sight of its goal. Although I haven’t been in the classroom in decades my professional life, in retrospect, has always been education related. I have tried to explain something to some audience and/or work with others to do so. And my advice to them is always, Don’t overthink it. Just go out there, look ’em in the eye, and explain why you think something is important and what you think is important and encourage them to make their own decisions about it. That should lead to good questions and discussions. Try to make it as interesting as possible at least once a week. Take the foot off the gas every now and then and enjoy learning with your class. That’s teaching. Don’t overthink it.
Now, it’s easy to be pithy if you don’t have a large class of kids, inadequate facilities, supplies, and administrative support, or are expected to teach out of a box, so to speak. Like me. But that’s why small class sizes are key (no more than 1:15, much less for children with special needs), why teacher autonomy with an engaged support network, and taxpayer investment is key. Then you guys can have all the discussions you want about methods. Just keep doing a good job and come see me if you need something that I might be able to help with.
Different strokes. I find few things as fascinating as discussions of pedagogical techniques and curricular approaches. The fascination of what’s difficult, as Yeats put it.
But yeah. Even the secret decoder ring doesn’t make teaching from the box acceptable.
I support more teacher autonomy and smaller class sizes – especially for at-risk, high poverty schools. But I do think there needs to be some — probably different — oversight of teachers administratively. A teacher with 15 students has a better chance of being able to address their struggles, but only if that teacher wants to do so.
I have seen teachers in classes of 32 who understood how to do that, and teachers in classes of 15 who did not. Teachers have different strengths and weaknesses, but we do have a rather strange system where sometimes teachers have tenure and are teaching a class they aren’t really prepared to teach. I have seen teachers who parents assume are great because their kid loves them, but that’s because the teacher doesn’t teach and just makes it easy for kids to get As. (That definitely happens in college, too). Not sure how to address all of this, but even in my limited experience, I can think of two instances where it took an enormous effort (and years) trying to replace a teacher who should no longer be teaching. The teacher wasn’t a danger, but also should not have been teaching. I also recall a new young teacher who was dreadful for the first two or three years, and became a great teacher, so I understand the difficulty of all this and recognize there are no easy answers.
NYC, if I am a high-school teacher, I will have 5-7 classes, epending on the school. If I have 32 students in each class and assign them a 5-page paper to write, I have a couple excruciatingly badly written novels to take home and edit. Impossible to do well. Impossible to give each paper the attention that it actually deserves.
Definitely different strokes, Bob! That’s why I admire you and others who walk the talk. Your eyes would glaze over if you had to do some of the stuff I have to keep up with. Plus I can never get anyone to engage in a serious discussion of the evolution of soccer tactics over the past three decades and how Americans can’t seem to catch on. Got a couple of hours? Now that’s fascinating!
soccer. this is some sort of sporting activity, correct?
Should discovery activities be PART of a mathematics curriculum? Absolutely. Should the entire curriculum consist of these? Well, that’s INSANE.
Bob,
I agree with that. I guess what I meant is that there are teachers who have class sizes of 15 who still wouldn’t give good feedback. Small class sizes are important, but so is having some oversight of teachers. I know that is probably an impossible task and there are bad teachers at private schools, too. But I just want to put in a parent request not to simply say teachers designing their own curriculum without oversight is a great idea. I respect those teachers who can and should do that, but I also believe that alone doesn’t make someone able to teach students who struggle (even in small classes). And two incredible teachers my kid had were not anti-standardized testing (although this was some years ago) but both of them inherently understood how to reach kids who didn’t easily grasp new material. Having also witnessed some eager and hard-working teachers who were simply terrible at that, it’s something I value a lot in a teacher. Even though those teachers tend to be overlooked because they may not be charismatic nor do they design their own curricula. But they also seemed to teach with a clear understanding that no single curricula – including one they designed themselves – works for all kids.
But we may be discussing this at cross-purposes. To me, there is a vast difference in teaching the basics to elementary school students and physics to high school students. And there is a big difference between teaching math to well-prepared high school students and those who haven’t mastered the basics. I just think the art of teaching is complicated because that art isn’t about the teacher alone — it is about whether that teacher is meeting the students where they need to be met and understanding that even if most students respond positively, what happens with the struggling students.
The so-called “best” charters don’t even bother — they just pronounce their teachers great and blame it on the student when their system doesn’t work for that student. It’s all justified because some kids do learn fine under their system, and they pretend the others don’t exist or label them as “bad”.
having some oversight of teachers
Teachers today are micromanaged to death, to such an extent that almost no one can stomach the job anymore. If you want professionals in the job, then you will have to give them quite a bit of autonomy. If you want people to do precisely what you want them to do, period, then you will have to hire people incapable of getting other jobs who will settle for being treated as automata.
Which is why it is critical that the most meaningful change in our schools policy has to be focused on preparing, supporting and paying teachers who can impact content at an intellectual level. Top down instigation of curriculum and teaching strategies simply runs off our best.
“ Which is why it is critical that the most meaningful change in our schools policy has to be focused on preparing, supporting and paying teachers who can impact content at an intellectual level”
No question, but it’s going to be a steep hill to climb.
Start with the changeover to a corporate, top down managerial approach that really took hold starting around 2001 (and is still prevalent).
Add to that the “personalized learning” subscription based computer programs that relegate the teacher into a role more as a monitor than educator. These models have gained more prominence and acceptance during these two years and counting of pandemic chaos.
Don’t want to be a pessimist. I’m actually much more of a problem solver than doomsayer. But it’s important to understand the forces your dealing with when confronting an obstacle.
Believe me, my eyes are wide open. I worked in two districts: The Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools where the motus operandi was to jump up and down to get the attention of Bill Gates et al while developing a top down Broad operational dystopia and Huntsville, Alabama where my way or the highway was the leadership model. If governments, local, state and federal simply continue our one size fits all approaches to curriculum and instruction while ignoring the expertise of teachers on the ground, then public schools will continue to struggle. My response above is based on what I saw while leading the school house. Teachers are the key to student success. This requires a supportive and collaborative professional environment that allows them to focus on their students. As you write, how we get there will be a profound struggle to convince policy makers that they must change course.
I worked in corporate management for years, prior to becoming a teacher, Paul. I admire and respect most of the admins that I’ve worked with in the NYCDOE. I know it’s a hard job and am more than aware of the obstacles faced when the orders coming from “above” are less than stellar.
Sorry if I came across as anything other than an interested member of the conversation. I couldn’t possibly agree more with your post.
preparing, supporting and paying teachers who can impact content at an intellectual level
yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!!!!
And, imagine a neurologist whose every patient thought that he or she knew how the job ought to be done and in her face about this. It’s kinda like that.
Neurologist was a bad example. Think Ben Carson.
I like the idea, but there would have to be a LOT of content training for teachers. I am certified to teach history, geography, and civics. I am well-read, so I am passable in other disciplines, but certainly not to the level of my specialties, and most teachers that I know outside of social studies sadly have no CLUE about history, so there would have to be a LOT of training for those of us already in the field.
And with the ever-diminishing number of people training to be teachers, that’s a heavy lift.
I’m not saying Mr. Barry’s ideas are bad; quite the contrary. But you’ve got exhausted, over micromanaged teachers right now, so to shift a paradigm in this climate is a big ask.
Just my two cents’ worth from someone on their 21st year in the classroom.
I’m seeing varying opinions about the effectiveness of the educational model(s) from the ’70s/’80s, here.
What’s ironic is that this was one of Gate’s “selling points” for the Common Core rollout. The vast differences in educational expectations, administrations, and outcomes from town to town, city to city, state to state would be addressed with this national “Common Core” set of standards.
He even took it one step further, saying that, as a result of this new national mandate; all schools would be on the same page, throughout the school year. If Raymond leaves Iowa City for NYC on 3/22, his parents can rest assured that the new school he attends will be teaching the next appropriate lesson on 3/23.
High expectations, indeed. Point is that there were (and still are) variations in the administration and “success rate” of educational models. Whether the CC made a positive impact on that is open to debate.
The fascists always insist on uniformity. I’m with the poet Theodore Roethke:
“I long for the administrator who will pound the desk and say, ‘It’s about time we had a little disorder around here.'”
Right. A well educated and informed public is not necessarily in the best interests of those who are in power. That’s one of the stumbling blocks, isn’t it?
I can see Brady’s curriculum being “tinkered with” and used in elite private education settings, though…which would defeat the creator’s initial purpose.
A paint brush is an awesome tool. But one shouldn’t try to cut potatoes with one. Mr. Brady’s projects are one tool in the toolkit. Turning these into the entire curriculum would be a disaster.
His releasing them to the public domain is awesome. Much respect to him for that, as well as for the quality of the projects themselves.
Cross-curricular integration is sometimes of value and sometimes not.
gitapik– THANK YOU for bursting this particular bubble so hilariously: “If Raymond leaves Iowa City for NYC on 3/22, his parents can rest assured that the new school he attends will be teaching the next appropriate lesson on 3/23.”
This old chestnut gets pulled out of the bag every time somebody wants to tell you how badly we need national standards. It comes up whenever JQPublic calls into a CSPAN Wash Jrnl show on some aspect of public schooling. I guess many people remember that one awful time when they moved, and the school was way ahead/ behind of where they were. (Where did I put my violin?) Our good friends moved from NJ to FL in 2000 (kids were entering 7th & 4th grades)– FL pubsch simply had them both skip a grade, big wup. Like having national standards would have changed that.
bethree5:
Right…? Unreal.
I was not surprised that this was an actual selling point of Gates. As you said: it had been said before.
When our society started becoming more mobile, in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s (aka: “We need you in our Phoenix office by next week, George! Your wife and kids will love the desert!”), the parents started to get a taste of your friends’ NJ to FL jolt.
So: time to take the car in for a small repair:
“No worries, George. We’ll just install a new National Standards transmission. Good to go, buddy. Enjoy Phoenix!”.
I hadn’t begun teaching when I first caught wind of this “concept”…but could smell a rat, all the same. I’d been teaching for about a decade when Billy started bleating the same tune. And he had the money and timing (“THE GREAT RECESSION! “) to actually try to make it happen.
The fact that it failed, with all that influence and state budgets’ needs, speaks volumes.
Regarding Mr. Brady’s appeal for assistance:
I think that it would have to come from progressive philanthropic sources (the profit margin will be smaller due to the free distribution of materials) and/or very well organized non-profits.
Not so sure how well it would catch on in the area of public schools, though, considering how much easier it is to quantify and qualify through the Big Data model that’s gained such strong traction. So much is now based on this system, socially and economically. I’d love to be proven wrong, as I’m fully on board with him…but that’s just what I see as a current reality.
I used a token economy in my classroom, which included checking account ledgers. The kids earned “money” through participation (academic, social, and chores) which would automatically be entered into their “accounts”. They could buy or save up for food or “items” (my kid’s old toys, games, and stuffed animals for instance). We would discuss reasons for purchase or saving, depending on the items, before transactions were made.
The ledger was great for accurate math skills but went way beyond when it came to decisions on spending. Especially when we’d have open classroom discussions.
All that went out the window once the Common Core was rolled out. Although Gates said that it wouldn’t dictate curriculum…well…it did. Market force number crunchers did and still do prevail.
I remember the moves to organize required college classes around a humanities theme rather than the strict divisions of western civilization. These humanities classes were fascinating and provided western cultural literacy in a broad sense of the arts, history, philosophy and science in a couple of semesters. There are several serious problems with this model (I realize this may be very different from Marion Brady’s way of envisioning curriculum, but it does pose similar philosopho-centric, ethno-centric, religio-centric, lingo-centric and innumerable other -centrisms). From which perspective is the organizational “method” coming. We cannot dismiss the serious cultural barriers that exist across the globe; nor can we forget the massive impact of colonialism on even thinking in these broad ways. Yes, we are not talking about creating a curriculum for all schools everywhere on the planet, but we are talking about schools in a poly-cultural society.
Balancing the global, international, national and local needs of schools in our society is probably not exactly what Marion Brady has in mind. How have I attempted to create something beyond the ever-shrinking boundaries of our access to challenging curriculum? I’ve always brought linguistics, social history, science and other subject areas into my high school English classrooms partly because I reject the idea that I’m teaching literature in a vacuum or in some movement that selects the “classics” from “popular” canon (we cannot even speak without using these loaded words). I’ve worked with teachers in other departments to do this whenever possible. Clearly, the historiography and the philosophy of history on which textbooks are based are largely determined by factors such as appealing to the political thought of a given state or locale. Usually, without any room for controversy or further research. Finally, everything we teach belonging to today and yesterday, which are fluid things, belongs to history and will be turned from events into words and ideas and set into a context that depends much on the observer/participant roles in those cases we face the problem of the observer’s paradox.
How do we enrich the classroom experiences for our students against these suffocating tides? By demanding interdisciplinary engagement by teachers through curriculum. Teacher training needs to focus on this outcome by allowing future teachers to specialize in areas at critical points to achieve the depth and skills needed to probe beyond the most mundane facts to the controversies that are too often papered over swiftly by textbook narratives that conveniently delete many of the most important people and events who are not chosen by historians to tell the conventional stories of history, but by giving access to students to discover the others who are not well-known, but could and perhaps should have become. To do this, however, students cannot be set loose without a strong grounding in research method.
Our students do need a firm grounding in critique of sources from their earliest years. The ability to find information in a digital way, doesn’t relieve the responsibility to test it’s source, provenance and validity. I did this in all my classes, frankly because my father, a professor who worked only in original languages and sources required all of his PhD candidates to do this long before the internet was available. The use of pathos, logos and ethos isn’t sufficient to begin to address the author’s purpose, etc. There must be more than the vague use of three Greek roots.
I see this as an immense problem of epic proportions unless we do the following:
1. Change the way teachers are being trained requiring them to do much more guided research and writing. I know professors are not requiring the kind of research and writing that is needed because of plagiarism. The once-doctoral-thesis-turned corporation, turnitin.com, was created by a graduate of the high school where I taught for 22 years. If used properly, this application enables the identification of plagiarism very effectively. Our schools at one time introduced it to many middle school students through high school students. Unfortunately, the district didn’t fund it; the subscriptions had to come out of the budgets of each school based on the votes of their school site councils which can be quite conservative (and protective of cheating and fudging grades). However, those students who did write papers submitting them to turnitin.com who went on to colleges and universities where it was used, would return to my classroom to tell me they were so very grateful they’d used it so long. The application greatly restricts the most common current forms of cheating such as submitting papers written by others previously, cribbing and most paper-mills. It cannot prevent me from writing your paper and submitting it in your name. Classroom writing eliminates that. We need better trained teachers!
We need interdisciplinary curriculum that leaves no subject area out. In other words, we need to integrate math, perhaps in the form of elementary statistics into the curriculum from the earliest grades because our access to news of the world depends on a rudimentary understanding of statistics. All areas including philosophy, science, history, foreign language and history of the English language, literature, visual arts, music and dramatic arts need to be integrated. Not every lesson, but more often than not.
If this approach is used, then the compartmentalization of ideas becomes a thing of the past.. It’s not the division into subject matter that’s a problem to my thinking, it’s the conscious goal of the fragmentation of thought. There must always be the ability of experts to talk to other experts in other fields with the capability of understanding each other to some extent. When they cease to be able to communicate with each other in meaningful ways on their own subject matter, education has failed.
The utilitarian view of education creates modified robots who cannot think, but only reproduce the thinking of others. This leads to a world with no innovation, no solutions and promoting one thing: profit. If there’s no other reason to learn and practice a job or profession, then Common Core is the right curriculum. It promotes the thinking that is so controlled by digitization through standardized testing which is nothing more that creating a market share that societies depend on. There is no other value to standardized tests than to promote a market share making money for stockholders and maintaining a dependence on the system that provides it. This has never been so obvious as in the utterly lifeless and dehydrated curriculum replete with racism called SpringBoard. The arrogance of power and wealth in the presence of centuries of societies around the world–known and unknown minds is staggering! The abuse of the education of ourselves and our children by Bill Gates and his peers and sell-outs in education should be criminal!
I sincerely hope to understand better what Marion Brady was proposing. I don’t have a clear understanding. Please pursue this further. The collapse of so foreign language departments in high schools is almost complete. This is happening in the face of Superintendent Thurmond’s major move in 2018 to increase foreign language offerings!
Most sincerely!
Emily Brandt
ebrandt76@gmail.com
much of value here!
integrate math . . . in the form of elementary statistics into the curriculum from the earliest grades because our access to news of the world depends on a rudimentary understanding of statistics
yes
When they cease to be able to communicate with each other in meaningful ways on their own subject matter, education has failed
This issue is bemoaned in a wonderful essay by George Steiner in his book Language and Silence. Specialization in academic fields has been so extreme that these have really become Laputas–islands in the air.
A case in point: Linguists now know a great deal about how the grammar and vocabulary of a language are acquired. NONE–I repeat, NONE–of this made its way into the backward Gates/Coleman bullet list of ELA “standards” or into new pedagogical designs of online or print textbooks.
It’s as though we were still using leeches to cure fevers.
I am a retired school librarian. Interdisciplinary teaching guided me through a career that included working K-5 as well as 9-12. If districts invested in school librarians, much of what is being discussed here could be implemented. Consultants cannot do the same work as a colleague who knows curricula and provides support materials to Ts and Ss in multiple media.
Indeed! A good library (not one that has been decimated by parent vandals set upon it by right-wing agitators) is essential.
for interdisciplinary work
In the early 1990s when I was teaching I had a conversation with the new principal in our school who did not see a reason to keep a library in the school. I almost fell out of my chair. When I became a principal, one of the first people I would talk to at each school was the Librarian and I would make sure they knew that I considered the library the brainstem of the school. I wanted a library that promoted student research and investigation. The three schools I served as a principal had librarians who were among the best of my staff. This was critical for our success.
Paul Bonner,
You remind me of the time I went with my grandson to choose a middle school. In NYC, there are no zoned middle schools or high schools. All choice, and a few great schools have 10 applicants for every open spot, while others have none. The first thing my grandson wanted to see in every school was the library. One had wonderful curriculum and seemed very impressive, but the library was a big empty room with few books. He rejected it at once.
Smart kid.
🙂
We had a similar experience with my daughter, when looking at middle schools. Automatic no from her mouth if the library didn’t cut it. I was thankful when she found and was accepted to a great school.