What I'm Doing

School starts on the 13th. I've just arrived in my village, my classroom has yet to be cleaned up and arranged, the smartboard still needs hooked up, and I'm pretty sure I have all of my textbooks and supporting materials. The question is: What in the world am I teaching? I know that I'm teaching a 9th grade, 10th grade, and British literature courses, but what are the particular passages I'm supposed to teach? What skills should I be focusing on?

Luckily, I was able to learn how to access the district's curriculum maps during my time at the inservice. I’m excited to say that I’m in love with my curriculum or at least how it is set up. As my site administrator told me: the curriculum is set up the way it is so I can have more time making the lessons fun rather than worrying at four o’clock in the morning wondering what I'm going to teach. For someone who has stayed up until four o’clock in the morning finishing up lesson plans, I just about cried when I saw that everything was already planned from August to May. All I have to worry about was the execution of the content and lessons, and differentiation of instruction. It’s still a bit of work, but now I don’t have to figure out if I want to teach the ellipsis first or the colon. The curriculum isn’t necessarily a script though; there is wiggle room for me in case I feel there is a better story or better way of going about teaching the skill for the day.

When my site administrator was telling me this, I remembered a huge revelation I had in one of my education classes. Language Arts education is moving from a content-based education and is moving towards a skills-based education. That is, I don’t really care if you’ve read To Kill a Mockingbird, but rather I care if you are able to explicate the themes from the novel, from other novels, and other genres of literature. This isn’t to say that reading To Kill a Mockingbird isn’t important. It is an important American novel (although stay away from Go Set a Watchman). However, being able to say that you’ve read To Kill a Mockingbird doesn’t really do anything for you in the long run except make you sound like some kind of literary snob. Being able to apply different skills for analyzing literature, applying writing and speaking skills, and applying reading skills are important for everything you read.

Of course, I’m not doing any sort of literary analysis while reading Game of Thrones. I think I’d much rather suck on a bucket of dried seal flipper (which tastes like fish flavored jawbreakers in case you’ve never had it). But we write every day. We talk every day.  We listen every day, although maybe not as much. These are skills that I teach, and I can teach them by using any good novel, poem, short story, novella, flash fiction, script, play, prose poem, or graphic novel. But then there’s the topic of teaching the different genres, but I think I’ll save that for another post in the future.

In short, I'm not worried. I'm not in a panic. I'm not even sweating bullets yet. I'm enjoying my time in the village, and also enjoying putting my class together. We'll see how I feel come Wednesday though.