tracewalker’s blog

    During this past school year, I taught English II, the state-tested sophomore year of English, largely without a complete map of when I would hit each objective.  My district was in the process of composing its first ever pacing guide, and my peers and superiors often had differing opinions about how to proceed.  In the third week of school, my principal told me that I was to teach only grammar for the first nine weeks, which I dutifully began to do.  However, during a meeting with the administrators at my district's central office during the fourth week of the term, I was shown the finished district-wide map, which turned out to differ somewhat from my principal's interpretation. As the year wore on, I met with mentor teachers at the district's other high school, who tried to steer me towards their own plans of action, which also differed from the district map in some ways.  It wasn't until the third term, with the state writing test looming upon us, that I discovered that the district map gave the bizarre directive to teach essay writing in the fourth nine weeks, after the writing test would already be over. I realized, somewhere around this time, that I was on my own to map my curriculum sensibly, and I did my best to cover what was left in the time remaining.
    Mapping the English curriculum offers distinct challenges from the other disciplines. These challenges come in several forms.  Mathematics teachers can reasonably teach new types of content in a specific order.  Math skills, generally speaking, either build upon one another vertically or have no bearing upon one another at all.  As is also true with history courses, the textbooks themselves may offer a logical course of study, so that I would be surprised if teachers of these courses worry much about the order of their units.
    English, however, is not simply cumulative.  The four competencies of the Mississippi curriculum - vocabulary, reading, writing, and grammar - may be discussed in isolation but are truly learned in combination by most students. Even a glance at the suggested teaching strategies attached to the frameworks suggest that the objectives are inseparable.  Vocabulary objectives are to be taught in the context of text study, grammar objectives are to be taught as editing skills during the writing process.
    Furthermore, the English skills studied during the elementary years do not differ significantly from those studied in the secondary school.  Students are reminded of the same topics year after year, which places the burden of novelty on the teacher to structure the year according to increasingly difficult, but interesting, texts and writing assignments. The teacher is given two textbooks of such length that simply planning to work through both from beginning to end is largely impossible.  Instead, the "curriculum" in an English classroom must be constructed by painstakingly culling selections from the textbook and uniting these selections into cohesive units which cover all four competencies.
    Some of the confusion I experience in this regard may be the fault of the MS frameworks themselves.  Although I haven't had the chance to study any other state's frameworks thoroughly, I suspect that a more rational vertical alignment and integration or definition of purpose is possible.  But I also wonder whether the entire concept of an English curriculum in isolation from other academic goals doesn't need rethinking. 
    English is the medium, or the primary medium, of our thought, and we do, of course, possess the ability to reflect upon this medium, but there is not necessarily a single "English" purpose, as there is a purpose for the study of math, history, and science. English, in other words, is not a body of knowledge in the same way that the other arts and sciences are.  Instead, the topics we today understand as English would seem to correlate with what classical eduction would refer to as the knowledge preparatory to the activity of learning. To this end, the introduction of text study prior to the complete mastery of grammar would seem to be irrelevant.  Not that no books should be read, but that the purposes of reading be cast with sensitivity to cumulative goals is what I'm suggesting.  In the present case, the Mississippi frameworks seem to require the mastery of far too many objectives at every level of development, resulting in the extremely mediocre attention paid to each. 
    Writing the curriculum map for the Holly Springs Summer School's Middle School English course has been enlightening and rewarding. It has been the first time that I could, with the benefit of some knowledge and experience, reflect upon the logical connection between the framework's objectives, and I am eager to discover how my choices play out over the summer.