The Twilight Years
Curriculum development, like many things, is a cycle. When I first started my job, we were towards the beginning of the cycle. I got to see many projects develop from an idea ("Let's write a unit for third graders about light!") all the way to a finished product ("Wow, we wrote a 600-page behemoth of a teacher's guide. Could this break someone's foot if they dropped it? Should we consider additional insurance?"). Along the way, there are several months-long stages of research, brainstorming, drafting, writing, teaching, rewriting, testing, crunching data, revising, throwing out hours of instruction and starting over, fighting with the Paranoid Publishing Company, etc etc etc. It took a team of 15 people about six years to develop twelve units for the elementary grades. A few months ago, the entire cycle was complete and -- lo and behold -- there was the finished, published Giant Curriculum Project. (Incidentally, all of our materials stacked up weigh about 76 pounds and are almost exactly the same height as a three-year-old. Don't even ask why I know that. Thank god we're going digital.)
Not content to rest on our laurels, or even take an afternoon off, we launched ourselves right back to the beginning of the cycle. Now we are developing new materials for grades 6-8. Yes, folks, that's middle school, which Matt Groening appropriately dubbed The Deepest Pit In Hell. And the reason I am telling you about all of this cycle business is that I am back in the teaching part of the cycle, where I have not been since early 2007. In curriculum development lingo, this stage is called "pilot testing" and it means that we try out our ideas on some unsuspecting class of local schoolchildren. Which is why I have spent the last two weeks teaching a class of eighth graders.
First of all, there were thirty-seven kids in the class. Welcome to California. I swear, there were students stuffed in every corner and nook in this very tiny classroom. As soon as I thought I'd accounted for everyone, more kids seemed to sprout up in places I hadn't been looking. But, thankfully, they were quite well-behaved. Eerily so, even.
I co-taught our newly-minted (like, the day before) lessons with a co-worker whose previous experience has also been mainly in 1st-2nd grade. We were completely amazed at what these tall, adult-like beings could do. They can follow multi-step instructions! we exclaimed after the first lesson. There was no crying, or even danger of crying! we marveled. Sure, a couple of them looked like they were high, but at least they weren't flinging boogers at each other or obsessively playing with the velcro on their shoes! Their worst offense, according to my co-worker, was "discussing attractive forces other than gravity." Of which there seemed to be an abundance. It is spring and they are 13, after all.
I spent days mentally preparing myself for the lesson I was going to have to teach that was about the discovery of Uranus. I also had to explain how Neptune was discovered because of its pull of gravity, which made the orbit of Uranus irregular. Yeah, you try saying that with a straight face. (I also spent some time plotting to kill my co-workers for thinking this was a great example.) But, discussing this in class wasn't a problem at all. No one even looked like they were going to laugh. I was floored. (I did use the alternate pronunciation "URINE-us," but that's hardly better, now is it?) One girl did say to her neighbor, "Why did they call it Uranus anyway? Was the guy who discovered it just perverted?" But thankfully, no one else heard.
The really amusing thing to me was that half the class looked like they stepped out of "Twilight." Remember the Little Beacon of Death? This class had two, and they were old enough to dress the part. Black eyeliner, boots, skinny jeans, disaffected scowls. One of them drew a diagram of a black hole on the first day and is apparently reading A Brief History of Time. I am pretty sure she was not challenged in our class -- but she did, according to the classroom teacher, participate more than usual, so that's something. Also, there were two kids named B. One had the stereotypical shaggy hipster haircut and looked down a lot, so he became (privately, of course) "emo B." The other one was "enthusiastic B. who sits by the door." (It's hard to learn a lot about 37 students in 45 minutes a day when you only have two weeks.)
But, despite the hormones and the emo, things went well. I learned that the death knell in a middle school classroom is silence and lack of eye contact, not crying and rolling around on the floor. I learned that I am going to have to learn a lot of unfamiliar science content really fast or I will never be able to lead a discussion with older students (even though ostensibly I am there to teach reading and writing -- but of course you can't do that without a reasonable grasp of the ideas and, I discovered, confidence that you know what you're talking about). I learned that getting kids productively talking to each other is key to keeping them engaged. I learned that, while middle schoolers can do a lot of things, there is still much that they need to learn to be successful in school, and that it might actually make a difference if we teach it to them. (Okay, I already knew that.) I learned that we can all be adults and calmly discuss Uranus. So, I will try to write more lessons that will be interesting, engaging, and appropriately challenging for these very tall, very emo little proto-adults out there. I am sure I will miss the mark a lot, but that's why we have the rest of the cycle to work on it until we get it right.
There's more teaching coming in the fall, so stay tuned.
Not content to rest on our laurels, or even take an afternoon off, we launched ourselves right back to the beginning of the cycle. Now we are developing new materials for grades 6-8. Yes, folks, that's middle school, which Matt Groening appropriately dubbed The Deepest Pit In Hell. And the reason I am telling you about all of this cycle business is that I am back in the teaching part of the cycle, where I have not been since early 2007. In curriculum development lingo, this stage is called "pilot testing" and it means that we try out our ideas on some unsuspecting class of local schoolchildren. Which is why I have spent the last two weeks teaching a class of eighth graders.
First of all, there were thirty-seven kids in the class. Welcome to California. I swear, there were students stuffed in every corner and nook in this very tiny classroom. As soon as I thought I'd accounted for everyone, more kids seemed to sprout up in places I hadn't been looking. But, thankfully, they were quite well-behaved. Eerily so, even.
I co-taught our newly-minted (like, the day before) lessons with a co-worker whose previous experience has also been mainly in 1st-2nd grade. We were completely amazed at what these tall, adult-like beings could do. They can follow multi-step instructions! we exclaimed after the first lesson. There was no crying, or even danger of crying! we marveled. Sure, a couple of them looked like they were high, but at least they weren't flinging boogers at each other or obsessively playing with the velcro on their shoes! Their worst offense, according to my co-worker, was "discussing attractive forces other than gravity." Of which there seemed to be an abundance. It is spring and they are 13, after all.
I spent days mentally preparing myself for the lesson I was going to have to teach that was about the discovery of Uranus. I also had to explain how Neptune was discovered because of its pull of gravity, which made the orbit of Uranus irregular. Yeah, you try saying that with a straight face. (I also spent some time plotting to kill my co-workers for thinking this was a great example.) But, discussing this in class wasn't a problem at all. No one even looked like they were going to laugh. I was floored. (I did use the alternate pronunciation "URINE-us," but that's hardly better, now is it?) One girl did say to her neighbor, "Why did they call it Uranus anyway? Was the guy who discovered it just perverted?" But thankfully, no one else heard.
The really amusing thing to me was that half the class looked like they stepped out of "Twilight." Remember the Little Beacon of Death? This class had two, and they were old enough to dress the part. Black eyeliner, boots, skinny jeans, disaffected scowls. One of them drew a diagram of a black hole on the first day and is apparently reading A Brief History of Time. I am pretty sure she was not challenged in our class -- but she did, according to the classroom teacher, participate more than usual, so that's something. Also, there were two kids named B. One had the stereotypical shaggy hipster haircut and looked down a lot, so he became (privately, of course) "emo B." The other one was "enthusiastic B. who sits by the door." (It's hard to learn a lot about 37 students in 45 minutes a day when you only have two weeks.)
But, despite the hormones and the emo, things went well. I learned that the death knell in a middle school classroom is silence and lack of eye contact, not crying and rolling around on the floor. I learned that I am going to have to learn a lot of unfamiliar science content really fast or I will never be able to lead a discussion with older students (even though ostensibly I am there to teach reading and writing -- but of course you can't do that without a reasonable grasp of the ideas and, I discovered, confidence that you know what you're talking about). I learned that getting kids productively talking to each other is key to keeping them engaged. I learned that, while middle schoolers can do a lot of things, there is still much that they need to learn to be successful in school, and that it might actually make a difference if we teach it to them. (Okay, I already knew that.) I learned that we can all be adults and calmly discuss Uranus. So, I will try to write more lessons that will be interesting, engaging, and appropriately challenging for these very tall, very emo little proto-adults out there. I am sure I will miss the mark a lot, but that's why we have the rest of the cycle to work on it until we get it right.
There's more teaching coming in the fall, so stay tuned.