While the big C is taught explicitly, little c curriculum registers through more nuanced and insidious practices. Oftentimes, what is not being said or shown tells as much of a story as what is. And this is the first aspect to the little c. It often operates through a lack of presence. The failure of minority representation in much of the literature in English class or significant figures in history class that reflect the diversity of our population is just one instance where little c curriculum prods its ugly head. This failure within the big C curriculum implicitly teaches little c stuff, in this case – that some bodies are valued more than others.

Modes of teaching are another place where we see the little c curriculum pop up in the daily learning of children. The style of teaching in most traditional schools is befitting to particular cultural groups and, to be quite honest, alien to others. This leads to particular bodies feeling even more so marginalized and psychologically distances them from conservative institutions, like school. Because schooling operates within a particular cultural order, students who are more comfortable in cultural environments that are different from your average classroom must adopt cultural cues in order to survive. Commonly, this is known as “code-switching” and students must learn this aspect of the little c curriculum if they have any hopes of being successful socially and academically. This little c is also taught on a daily basis; through implicit means such as dress codes, communication between teachers and student groups, and subjective school rules.

Regardless of how detailed our lesson plans are, when it comes to curriculum, we are all teaching two sets of it. The little c is an important aspect of the learning process that all youth must partake in. As educators, we must make sure to check our biases, privileges, and be aware of the things that do not necessarily pop up in textbooks and through our lessons.

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What is Success?

Is success measured by students getting A’s or passing a state-wide exam? Success in the educational system implicates the “system” itself through perpetuating the norms associated with academic excellence and achievement. The problem with this lies in the system’s inherent insistence that it promotes an agenda based on meritocracy. “Well, education is the great path to success because through education everyone can make it because everyone starts at the same place.” Thus implying that one’s merits or “success” is solely attributed to them.

Not the case.

The educational system has been flawed since the days its main use was to serve the industrial revolution and it continues to be flawed to this day. Instead of equipping students with the necessary tools to understand society and benefit from it, we are “building people” to serve the “system”, the institution, the ones who essentially run society (perhaps a post on this will come later this fall). If the paradigm of education continues to maintain this status quo reality and serve the purpose of creating generation after generation of workers through the use of provisional self-esteem (you did well on this set standard measurement, you get an A. You didn’t do so well on this “universal” measurement, you get a C), then the point of what success really means is mute.

Not everyone starts at the same point. Some are more advantaged than others. Some have flawlessly inherited the ways in which education attempts to normalize a particular brand of “student” and others are starting from points well below 0. If success is tied to the notion that our meritocratic system is just, we will continue to run on the hamster wheel.

School and “The Real World” reveal two different realities

Success in school is arrested by a traditional dichotomy. Students either pass or fail; when they do the former, they succeed. That is generally the notion of success in education. Does this happen in the real world? Think of any successful person in society. Did they become successful because in one fell swoop they either passed or failed? No. The entertainers, innovators and creators who are all household names are successful today only because they failed. Some failed more than others. But they had an intangible trait that is missing when we in education talk about success. What they all possessed was resilience. To be truly successful, in school and in the “real world”, one has to be resilient. In education, this trait is most often glossed over. Where we lack is teaching students that it is okay to fail. We teach kids that a step backwards is a bad thing. Before we change curriculum to appease “success rates” we must have a candid conversation about what resilience must look like in the classroom.

Success looks like resilience. Counterintuitively, success looks like failure at times. If we do not dare our students to step out on a limb and not be afraid to try, we are playing a simple shell game when we talk success. Suturing success with resilience is imperative for progressive pedagogy. Without it, we will continue to be the big hamster on the wheel.

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In education, we tightly suture the term “relevance” with “relatedness” or “relateability”. And from this, we form a dichotomous logic that denounces any form of course content that is not relevant to students’ lived lives. We think that if a question, task, or project is not related to some aspect of our students’ lives then they will somehow be less engaged and won’t be grounded in their learning as much as if they had a task that was “relevant” to them. Sorry to say, this logic is flawed.

You know what’s more relevant to kids? Checkers. A game that has no “real world” connection and no use, but kids love it. You know what else is relevant to kids (or at least the kids in my class the last few years)? Playing a game called “Bump” where four or five kids throw a tennis ball to each other and while they do that their feet must be in the air. They literally stand in a circle and catch and simultaneously toss a ball while jumping. If they have the ball in their hands while on the ground, they are “eliminated”. THAT is relevant to them. And do you know what is most relevant to kids? Success. Knowing something or being an expert at something is relevant to kids. Why do you think they play the same game or watch the same movie over and over again? Most kids play video games all day because there is some reward at the end; some new level or some prize, not because it is “relevant” to their lives.

My point is that educators/adults need to slow down when considering and implementing new policy that speaks about students without hearing from students. Most adults don’t know what’s cool or relevant to kids. They write these long-winded math questions about rock bands thinking that students will be more “engaged” when they read it. Most students couldn’t care less what the question is about. They only ask, “What am I going to use this for?” when they are struggling. They are struggling because the way we are teaching the content is wrong. We are teaching wrongly when we assume that bringing in some relevant content is a magic wand to student engagement.

When students understand something, it becomes engaging and relevant. Thus, teachers need to focus more on the structure of the lesson and not on the actual content of the lesson because teaching relevance is a myth. (That may be a stretch but at worst it’s misunderstood). The obsession over teaching relevance needs to stop because we don’t even have the right definition of relevance in the first place.

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It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that every teacher teaches with the “burden” of getting through curriculum. It also wouldn’t be a stretch to argue that the curriculum currently prescribed cannot be adequately covered in 10 months of school. Teachers adapt by skimming over parts of the common core and going deeper into others, teaching topics that they have a passion for, and being flexible to students’ needs. But unfortunately, when that end of the month (or curriculum unit) comes, it usually signifies test time and we move onto the next “strand”. Under the pressure to cover curriculum, we move on whether students “get it” or not. And we do this primarily because we have to write a report card at the end of the term or year. We have to show proof of what we did with our students.

I asked several teachers how not writing a report card would change their practice. Some pointed out that they would slow down and teach according to student needs (what a novel idea!). Others suggested that they would, “teach what they wanted to teach and not what the curriculum dictated as important”. While this idea has the damaging potential to re-create provisional self-esteem and privileges the teacher once again in the power dynamic of the classroom space, teachers who are engaged with the material would also exponentially benefit student learning.

No report cards would change my classroom immensely. It would afford the opportunity to truly co-create an educational environment where kids would enact agency in their learning. We could establish relevance and engagement in a way that goes beyond what any burdensome report card produces. No report cards – fine, we can introduce peer reviews and grading, that way the teacher is not the sole authoritative figure dolling out some final piece a paper that is supposed to mark their idea of how they think a kid did throughout the school year.

If used correctly, a final pass/fail letter could be a great move. Our current system is intrinsically flawed anyways. So despite the political maneuvers between government and teachers’ unions, below the surface this “no report card thing” marks a tremendous opportunity to re-examine the paradigm of education and how we demarcate student success. Not having a traditional report card is unfortunate for the children who are programmed to base their academic validity on a letter grade or a percentage. But despite its shortcomings, it is also a unique opportunity to explore how the politics of accountability and traditional forms of professionalism impact how teachers teach.

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The quicker you realize that your long term plans depend more on the dynamic of your classroom makeup than anything else, the easier your “teacher life” will become. Honestly speaking, making a plan for the month, 6 weeks, or a term, is like picking the fastest lane when you’re driving during rush hour. You often make decisions to switch lanes based on what you see right in front of you but the ebb and flow of traffic can change every quarter mile. Making timelines and annual plans for curriculum delivery is a practice of optimism. You might plan to get a specific writing unit finished in 6-8 weeks but some years it may take 10 weeks, while in other years, it may take 12. With some classes, that same unit that took 8 weeks last year may only take 4 weeks this year. As a new teacher, you must keep in mind that mapping out units and long-range curriculum plans are simply that: plans. They are estimations, not some authoritative standard that you must live and die by.

You should refer to these plans from time to time to either speed up or take your time within a unit and to refresh your memory on where you want to be by a certain time in the year. But it is absolutely fine if you are not exactly “on track” with your annual plan (read “estimation”). And this is a good thing. Being responsive to your students’ needs means you are not a robot. Effective teachers are those who are receptive to the needs of their students and are sporadic from time to time. This is what gives meaning to school and life in general. I haven’t met one teacher who, by June, can say they have completed everything that they penned into their long-term annual plan back in August. There probably are teachers out there that can stand behind that but I hope that I am never one of them.

Your plans will indeed fluctuate from year to year, solely depending on the makeup of your student body. The abilities, desires, needs, and motivations of your students will determine the speed at which you cover curriculum and develop understanding of the children whom you teach. If you are feeling the stress of being behind where you ought to be in the curriculum, remember who set those mandates. It wasn’t a group of teachers who sat around and came up with appropriate expectations for a school year’s worth of learning. It was more likely a group of bodies far removed from the classroom who decided what should be taught in a course and how long it should take. That is a system set up for inconsistencies. Once you keep that in mind, you can rest a little easier.

“Sticking to the Script?”

At this time, I am about one month behind where I was last year. With the majority of the school year complete, I am two “textbook” chapters behind where I was with the 7^th grade geography at this exact time last year. I have really done nothing different from this year to last. In fact, in terms of my teaching delivery, it has almost been a carbon copy. I’ve done almost everything the same: lessons, homework, assignments, tests, study guides, classes, and independent work time. But with a different group of students comes a different result. And as a teacher you should not be too overwhelmed by variance.

Educators must humbly embrace the fact that students will indelibly set the pace of the class’ growth, academically and otherwise. Because we are in the business of working with and educating humans (and not robots), the fabric of your classroom will change from year to year, month to month. For this geography class, I could catch up and be on pace with last year if I amped up the tempo a little bit. But there has to be a valid and authentic reason why this class is two chapters behind at this point in time. So speeding up to make sure that every single year you are at the same spot would do nothing except hurt the authentic learning environment that your students have established and are experiencing. It is important to think about and write your monthly, unit, and yearly plans down. But more importantly, you must trust your instincts on a daily basis. Things always look better on paper but teachers, students and classrooms don’t live on a page. So, learn to live with how things are going as far as pace in your class. Because like many other aspects of the growth of a new teacher, sometimes you just have to go with the flow.

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The new sex-ed agenda proposes changes that have parents and conservatives alike frenzied. This is because they are not only proposing educational changes, but they are inevitably offering psychological and sociological changes that, if carried through according to their plans and brought to fruition, have the capacity to change a culture. And kudos to them for this. Finally, someone is standing up and demonstrating an understanding that the way to change a culture is through the education of our newest generation. Trying to change a culture to reflect a new reality of society is something I have little problems with. But the car in which they chose to drive down that road has missed one model in its vehicular evolution. Before stepping onto and into the platform of sexual fluidity I question why this medium has passed over racial indefiniteness all together.

Unholy Matrimony

If you have turned the channel to CNN at anytime in the evening over the last two years you will see journalists, public speakers, intellectuals and academics talking about the context of the “newest” racial strife that has just occurred. At this point, in 2015, is seems as though the psychological and physical racial violence is ceaseless. But instead of Education pushing a radical racial agenda forward toward buttressing the issues that most saliently affect our society, we are pushing an agenda (albeit, important) that is afforded the luxury of disguise. But there is no disguise in skin complexion. Minoritized bodies are not privy to the luxury of being read how they deem fit to be read.

And this is the crux of my philosophical angst with this “brand new” sex-ed curriculum. Regardless of any backlash it may receive, the backlash will not be enough and will not encompass as much powerful bodies to halt this implementation that will inevitably happen come fall of 2015.

Teachers will be trained in this. Which again annoys the hell out of me! How is our already deficient Education budget allotted enough funds to anoint these Health and Phys. Ed. teachers with the training, resources and time to absorb this trending sexuality agenda but there has never been a financial imperative on teaching educators who “teach” in low income neighborhoods, who never grew up nor were ever near low income, minoritized, bodies to appropriately provide, guide, and teach these students? I can’t make a point more salient than that thought. I am not interested in playing the Oppression Olympics. But with this new sex-ed agenda, our educational system is simply proving just how flawed it is. The only question that I am now left with is – what will it really take for things to change?

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