Content and Character

I teach a class for undergraduates who are on their way to teach in public elementary schools. Last week, the Director of Curriculum and Instruction for LAUSD came to talk to the class about the new Core Content Standards, an attempt to create --- against all odds --- a set of national standards. She gave an excellent presentation which was well-received by the students. It was, obviously, all about the content --- the what --- of teaching.

This week, I spent the first half of class going over the 10 most important points that I took from her presentation: backward-design, text-based interpretation of literature (rather than reader response), evidence-based writing with a purpose (rather than merely responding to prompts), teaching clusters of standards within a subject and clusters of standards across subjects, and so on.

In other words, my students had experienced a full class-and-a-half of presentation and discussion about the importance of content, how to think about it, how to plan for the presentation of it, and how to help students learn how to grapple with ideas rather than just taking in information.

After the break, we turned to a discussion of the reading which led, in a not entirely linear way, to my asking them about the teacher(s) that they really remembered. Several volunteered stories about those teachers they remembered, all of them with a kind of enthusiastic fondness. Then I asked them what characteristics seemed to be common in all these stories; the answers came quickly; about this they didn't have to think: warm, caring, happy, enthusiastic, energetic. In other words, all strictly personal characteristics.

Not a word about mastery of subject or skill in the techniques of delivery; nothing about either content or method.

What they cared about had nothing to do with content and everything to do with character.

Those who do not live in the world of public schools and who don't pay much attention to public schooling as a political issue will not be aware that ever since the publication of the federal pamphlet "A Nation at Risk" in 1983, the several states and later the federal government have devoted tremendous amounts of time, money, and human capital to the process of defining what the content should be. First the individual states defined their own academic content standards and now, with the new Core Content Standards, there is something very close to a set of national academic content standards.

How to reconcile this very focused emphasis by all those responsible for creating legislation regarding public schooling with the very real life-experience of my students?

How to reconcile my own stated and oft-argued position that not only content but a very specific version of content is necessary for the development of good individuals and good citizens with my students' implicit position that what matters is the person of the teacher?

Mostly I'm going to leave this as a question, but I will say this. I think my students may be in tune with a deep truth: that elementary schools teach reading, writing, and computing, at various levels for various students; and that secondary schools provide a place for individual development by providing reasonable safety, by providing opportunities for participation in academic and other activities, and by otherwise staying out of the way. Outside of that we may have far less control than we like to think we do.

Just in case someone wants to take this as a rejection of the importance of the academic and the intellectual, I will make clear that it is not. By temperament and training, my interest is in helping students to think for themselves which requires real knowledge, not just information but deep understanding. I'd like to see much more of this than there is currently.

But imagining that we can define curriculum and then get certain predictable results --- a la the industrial model --- is, I have come to think, foolish.

But being the kind of person who touches the hearts and minds of young people, touches them with warmth and kindness and caring and enthusiastic participation in their lives at school, is not only wise but priceless.