Life Outside the Curriculum
“My teachers could have written with Jesse James for all time they stole from us…”
~Richard Brautigan, “Trout Fishing in America”
My classroom is often a bit of a mess—a mass of sprawled bodies scattered around like casualties of battle, ensconced in various states of slothy repose, on and over the armchairs, couches—and often each other. It may look like sloth, but generally the kids (8th grade and freshman boys) are quietly engaged and productive in whatever dreary task I plied upon them.
Until someone brings up some aspect of school injustice.
Then it spins and turns into collective rants against the injustices cast by us teachers against them. For the most part, it is myopic and self-serving commentary, but there is always some kernel of truth in the sincerity of their complaints, for, no doubt, we expect a lot of them: we steal their time in all variety of thoughtful ways, artfully designed and full of earnest intent to better them in some way, shape or form and mold them into some configuration of a student who makes us proud to be their educators; hence, we teachers get pissy when things don’t go as artfully as the plan.
Somewhere there is a disconnect. Somehow our expectations are not in line with our students, and they are frustrated. And we are frustrated. Something is wrong with the system.
The truth is that we are Jesse Jameses stealing their time–their most precious and fleeting commodity. To paraphrase Henry David Thoreau, we are “trying to solve the problem with a formula more complicated than the problem itself.” Our schools have become labor camps with an incredible assortment of add-ons: committees they should join, service learning they must do, philanthropy they must engage in, speakers they must hear, and outside projects they must dutifully complete.
And all of it is outside the demands of a rigorous (or so we believe) curriculum— outside the demands of homework, sports, musical performances, outside tutoring, and beyond the expectations, rife with pressure, from family obligations. We celebrate them as individuals while expecting them to be obedient and acquiescent students, and therein lies the crux: we are robbing their last gasps at childhood. There is little time for them to grow like the weeds they are. We raise them and teach them to be crops brought to market and sold to future schools.
Is this the generation we want to create? Is there another way? A better way? Is there a healthy balance between weed and fruit?
Yes, there is—and to quote Thoreau again: “Simplicity. Simplicity. Simplicity.” Put all things needed in the basket of curriculum. Prune away what is not needed. My students are willing—and they have proved themselves dutiful—to do whatever is asked of them within the curriculum, but they smolder with rancor when they smell the odor of artifice. They intuitively sniff out the good from the bad. If something is worth doing, it is worth being taught within the confines and the expanse of our classes, not as one more obligatory dish to add to the feast of the day, for there is little day left before the night, and the thief of time lurks in the shadows, waiting.
As teachers, we may be willing to sway and even bend, but we seldom break out of our habits; we rarely agree to cut back on what and why we teach, and we rarely admit that less is more, so we teach the hell out of our packs of students and preach that there is still more that must be done; there are more notches to notch on your achievement stick; there are more ways to bolster your fledgling resume, so come early to school; learn to be a philanthropist; stay late and prove that you embrace service; give up your lunch and learn and respect and embrace diversity; skip recess; go to the Makerspace and embrace design thinking; wow your class with up a better presentation—and then go home and do the real work—forty minutes, at least, for each class. After all, we only have you here nine hours out of your day… And the homework is due tomorrow. No excuses. Be sure to do some outside reading, too. Everyone should love reading.
No wonder there is grumbling. No wonder our students feel marginalized. No wonder that the totality of expectations seems—and is—oppressive. No wonder that they cling to the draining minutes and the dwindling vestiges of time to simply be the kids they are. Irrepressible, irreverent, and incredible…
At the same time, kids need guidance. Kids need structure. They need to see the blueprint being built. Kids need to be held to high standards of conduct. They need to do the work they are asked to do, and they need to figure out what needs figuring without some tutor prodding them out of a state of torpor.
We teachers and administrators need to look at the days we design for our students and create curriculums that work in ways that enlighten without deadening the spirit and clogging the drainpipe of time. We need to accept and acknowledge that we are not the totality of their education. Everything does not need to flow from us. School can and should be a more simple affair. Yes! Demanding moral conduct, based on enlightened and progressive values, is a given, but we should not presume to be the guardians of the totality of their ethical lives. We need to assume that moral values are taught and practiced and embodied by our students’ parents and guardians. It is almost an anathema to say, but we hobble our students with constraints more than we unshackle them from insistent drudgery.
What we teach, what we practice and what we cultivate must grow from a thoughtful, embracing and invigorating curriculum, taught by teachers who give a damn and know what they teach, but above all, who know their students and who appreciate and respect that we—the proverbial we—cannot do it all. And neither can our cast of young scholars, but some things we can do incredibly well, and whatever the bent of genius of an individual teacher, I say, “set them free!” In the long run, those teachers are the life-changers and authors of lasting and effective pedagogy, and it is those teachers who are remembered and revered for giving truth to the lives of their students.
Oh, but that is fun and easy and invigorating to pen to this page. I am, though, a curmudgeon at heart and sense the bad as early as the good. Freedom is a fickle beast, and I have an instinctive aversion to progress for the sake of progress, especially if it strays from teaching enduring and proven basic skills. My school is an incredible school, and it has freed me to follow my chaotic genius, which, for better or worse, reveres the old as likely as the new and, like any teacher, I am convinced that what I teach is what my students should and need to learn. And they learn. Or so I convince myself…
Most of my students are raised by parents who are insistent to raise well-educated children, and they are willing (and sometimes barely able) to pay the price for that education. Their children are coddled and cajoled to be good students and good persons, and, by and large, they meet with uncommon success in their future lives. I can’t help but think, however, that it is a part of a caste system, a subtle tool that benefits the few and that the education is necessarily incomplete. We have an increasingly diverse community in my school, but not real diversity—diversity that mimics the reality of the real world; hence, we embrace diversity as an ideal more than we reflect diversity as a messy mix of reality.
I have seven well-educated children. My four boys had a mixture of elite private schools (because I work at an elite private school) and public schools, whereas my three girls spent all their school lives in a small public school in the small mill town of Maynard—a town that is not the envy of the wealthy surrounding towns of Concord or Sudbury or Acton that squeeze its small borders, yet even as a teacher of some thirty-five years, I would say, “Come to Maynard. Here is true community. Here is unabashed and natural diversity. Here are basic skills taught well, though you might not know it through the flopping of disgruntled tongues. For the most part, here are parents that embrace the reality of small paychecks, multiple jobs and tough daily choices. Kids learn grit because it is a gritty life, not because grit is taught as a value to learn, but because they are allowed to fail as readily as they are encouraged to flourish. Still, the odds are always stacked against our kids. It is tough to say to our children (my children included), “Yes, this school offered you a good scholarship, BUT, we still cannot pay for that school, unless you want to hobble your future with debt that will take years to repay,” So, all of my kids (so far five of them) enrolled in some UMass or another, and, lo and behold, they have some slice of the American dream. Their intellects are yet intact, and the future is still bright, and they truly did it on their own.
My apologies: I am a wordy and rambling writer. My own students would admonish my lack of a unified theme, my intrusions of personal bias, and no doubt, my lazy adherence to a singular topic, not to mention my lack of rhetorical techniques.
I actually began this essay as a plea to simplify education, to think outside of the proverbial box, and to find ways to give time back to those restive students who have huge reservoirs of energy, intent and excitement to explore their own potential, their own passions and their own perspectives. I am a traditionalist at heart. I want schools to get back to teaching time-tested skills that lay a lasting foundation that shore up the dreams students can build their futures upon. If I am a radical in any way, it is to thresh the wheat from the chaff and to see with clear eyes the purpose of our pasture. The values and morals we wish to instill should be modeled on the actions and ethos of a vibrant school community and the local community, not as a series of moral scriptures and political dogma inserted into another long day. Schools need to create possibilities, not conformities. Schools need to be launching pads, not factories of conventional thinking. Schools need to trust the wisdom of parents and recognize the parameters of what can and should be accomplished in any given school day.
Above all, we will not survive as a country unless we give students what they truly need.
A paradox of education is that the more you offer, the less you accomplish. We can’t assume that breadth will ever equal depth. There is no reason that schools should sharpen and hone every tool in the shed, for that labor, spread broadly across the table, brings diminishing returns; instead, choose the most useful tools and focus our pride and effort on mastering what those tools can do—and whatever time is left outside the curriculum should be given back to what most interests our students.
Let’s figure out ways to help our students become really, really, really good at something. But that also means we need to give them the time and freedom. It means potentially missing out on all the add-ons that fill out an increasing bulk of the day. It might mean they miss the the walk for hunger; it might mean they miss this or that speaker, or the workshop on sustainability, or conflict resolution, or white privilege.
Or it might mean they lead the walk for hunger, or they are the speaker telling their story of discovering racial inequity. Or it might mean they are part of a movement to unmask white privilege and show us—me—what white privilege really is. Or how we are screwing up the planet. Or how sexuality identity is not a choice.
It might mean they become incredibly good at soccer or archery or chess. It might mean they grow a Youtube Channel with a million hits. It might mean they can rip out every Led Zeppelin riff with blazing speed. It might mean, god forbid, they become world-ranked gamers, fishermen, meme-makers or avatar aficionados.
It will give annoying, over-bearing, hovering (and generally wealthy) parents even more time to mold and morph their offspring into some perfected version of something—some kid with perfect SAT’s, impeccable musical virtuosity, and a portfolio of essays ripe and ready for the admissions process, a history of philanthropy and good deed doing, and athletic prowess in an obscure sport.
.
It will, however, be a huge pain in the ass for working class parents who will shudder at the thought of of their feral, unkempt children being furloughed too early from school—freed to roam the streets, freed to smoke legal weed, freed to have sex, freed to snap, chat or pop for even more hours of the day. For these parents, who are often too busy and frazzled to parent, it is critical that their workday more or less mirror the school day—and a teacher, god forbid, needs to work a full day for an honest day’s work.
So, damn… this is a conundrum. It is great sport for parents to criticize schools and teachers and administrators; nonetheless, it is high treason to question any aspect of how that parent raises his or her child or children, but that trust has to start somewhere; that trust has to be embodied and embraced in some way, shape or form somewhere, and that trust has to begin by giving it to our kids. Some will certainly fail. But they will probably fail anyway. Some will be slow to adapt to opportunity. But that is on them; if they squander opportunities now, they may well learn much from it in the future, and it will guide them in their newly invigorated lives! But some many will soar. They will realize unimagined majesty from their efforts. They will learn about choice, priorities, perseverance and vision.
They will not become punks. They will not become anarchists. They will not squander the magi’s gift.They will, inevitably, become our future, and we need to give them the reins of that future.
Give them that future now. Blemished, broken and bankrupt as it seems.
