Why Are Some Curriculars “Extra”?

Three R'sIt’s difficult to question things we don’t realize we assume. For example, few of us ponder why we easily trust our family doctor to diagnose pretty much ANY part of our body, internal or external, except our mouth. Our mouth, it seems, is so darned complicated and unique compared to, say, our aortic valve or epidermal sheath, that only SPECIAL DIFFERENT OTHER TYPES OF DOCTORS can even LOOK at this oral outlier.

The sole exception involves gagging you with a stick while you say ‘aaahhhh’ – a breach of etiquette required to view your throat (which doesn’t even count).

We don’t really think to question it. That’s just how it is, was, and always shall be. Except it’s not. It hasn’t been THAT long since your local barber would be as likely to pull your troublesome tooth as trim your sideburns. It was all above-the-shoulders care – why limit yourself?

Factory EducationSchool is rife with these sorts of assumptions. We simply MUST shuffle students from boxed area to boxed area in slightly-under-an-hour increments. We have roughly the same number of kids in each class, one subject per teacher, and at some point papers of various kinds must be placed in baskets to “grade.” Eventually, all experiences must reduce to a number between 1 – 100 and one of five letters, none of which can be ‘E’ because that’s stupid and wouldn’t tell us anything – unlike, say, ‘C’. 

It’s really rather bizarre.

But these things are at least being discussed, and challenged. The sense that we’re missing something isn’t new, but the subject does seem to be heating up lately, thanks to a variety of issues – Common Core, Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind, anything involving Bill Gates, Jeb Bush, Arne Duncan, or Michelle Rhee. If those don’t get your panties in a wad, I could add TFA, charters, vouchers, or Virtual Embezzlement… those oughta do it.

The ease of utilizing blogs and social media probably hasn’t hurt. Teachers can rant and share and question with a comfortable combination of anonymity and familiarity – and with peeps from around the edu-niverse. I myself have a lil’ blog which is more or less education-focused. You should check it out sometime. 

Something I don’t hear questioned much, though, is the nature of our ‘core curriculum’. Sure, the specifics vary from district to district, and grade to grade, but it’s generally assumed that all students need Math, English, Science, and – time permitting – some kind of History or Social Studies. Ideally they’ll get a little Art, something Computer-ish, maybe even whatever it is we call “Home Ec” these days. But the Big Three-and-a-Half remain constant across an otherwise fractured edu-nation. 

Marching BandAnd if students behave, and keep the right letters on their weekly personal-reduction-to-a-point-value report, they may be allowed to play sports, or participate in drama, or band, or debate, or cheer, or dance, or some other ‘extra-curricular’. 

We call them that because they’re things going on OUTSIDE the curriculum – outside of the presumably important, useful, REAL purpose of school stuff. 

That’s the thing I’m surprised we don’t question more often. What makes these things ‘outside’, compared to, say… Physics? Algebra? State History? What makes some classes ‘curricular’ and others, well… ‘extra’? 

If you’re failing Algebra, you can’t play Basketball. But if you’re failing Basketball, they don’t stop you from going to Algebra until you get your game back on track. This little motivational system only works one way.

Why?

Algebra is important, but so are athletics. If our goal is “college, career, and citizenship ready,” Basketball is far more likely to help you with the latter two. Algebra wins for the first, but mostly that just means that doing math qualifies you to do harder math. 

Girls BasketballMost of these kids are never going to be professional athletes. But neither are they likely to become professional mathematicians, or chemists, or historians, or novelists. The skills and knowledge gained in each of those realms nevertheless serve a larger good. They help to form a fuller, better, hopefully somewhat happier person.

The sorts of life skills learned and practiced in a strong band, drill team, or competitive speech program are just as applicable to career and personal success as anything covered in English class. If we’re hoping to produce team players not afraid to take risks, our girls’ volleyball team is way ahead of, say, AP Physics.

There are even, apparently, entire classes devoted to – get this – LEADERSHIP. Who knew?

The value of individual effort and responsibility combined with teamwork and group accountability – the drive to be the best one can be while maintaining appropriate sportsmanship – overcoming adversity – recognizing that struggle produces progress – the power of setting both short-term and long-term goals – adapting quickly and capably when things don’t go according to plan…

Are these things really so much less important than learning to factor binomials or identify regions in which the Afton point seems to have replaced the Clovis?

I’m not dismissing the importance of content knowledge in a variety of areas – I love my subject and if granted my boon would elevate it to the number one priority for all school children everywhere in the world.  Heck, I even value learning for learning’s sake – it’s fun, and fulfilling, and just plain good for us. It also makes us less useless, and hopefully a tad less odious.

But I’m just not convinced our current caste system of subjects is nearly as obvious or necessary as we think.

STEM CarI sat in yet another #STEM breakfast recently and heard extolled the glories of project-based learning with clear assessments whose rubrics were known in advance and a process built on collaboration – what the rest of us might call ‘band rehearsal’, ‘theater’, ‘competitive debate’, or ‘football practice’.

In this case they meant mostly science-y stuff, which is all wonderful and good. But we already have classes where students do those things. They’re just not allowed to keep doing them unless they pass Science.

Are we currently turning out a generation so fluent in algebra, world history, chemistry, and grammar that it would be tragic to risk any of it in exchange for a few life skills? Are we so certain that kid who finds his calling in Theater Production would have totally aced that Old Man and the Sea quiz if he hadn’t been wasting his time doing something that might lead to employment in a field he loves?

I’m not suggesting we do away with the cores. I AM suggesting we expand our idea of what constitutes a ‘core subject’ and do a better job exploring to what extent stuff kids actually want to know and be able to do can be utilized as more than a carrot or a stick to navigate them through the things we think they simply have to know whether they want to or not.

I am suggesting we’re vain to think we know exactly what will or will not be ‘good for them’ long term, especially when their gifts and inclinations suggest otherwise. I am suggesting that we cannot equip a generation to be flexible and adaptable and useful by cramming them all into the same Enlightenment-era curricular mold, enforced through a factory-model school system.

I’m suggesting we question our assumptions. 

{NOTE: This is a reboot of a previous post. Like your mom.}

Related Post: First Class, or Coach?

Related Post (From “The Disappointed Idealist” Blog): Academic vs. Vocational – Why Does It Need To Be A Choice?

First Class, or Coach?

Film Projector & ScreenTeachers who also coach – or coaches who also teach ‘real’ subjects – get a bad rap. When you see a teacher on TV or in movies who’s being played for laughs, it’s almost always a coach (and a history teacher at that). I’ve several times been at the front of the room leading brief introductions at the beginning of a workshop when some well-intentioned dear lady will give her name, and where she’s from, and lament that besides herself and maybe the new teacher next door, her department is all coaches, so…

Obviously we’re supposed to know the rest, and nod sympathetically. Except for the third of the room who coach various things.

So… awkward. Often the phrase “Some of the Best Teachers I Know are Coaches” makes an appearance. Next time I’ll have to ask it how “Some of my Best Friends are Black People” is doing these days – it’s been too long.

Is this fair? Is this one of those things with enough truth to sustain itself, although no one wants to come right out and say it? Is this yet another flaw in the public education system, begging to be addressed by a Gates Foundation grant or some sort of higher-standards legislation?

I haven’t done a formal study or anything (hey, some of us work for a living), but I’ve worked with and around a wide variety of coaches in a rather large district for 15 years now. I’ve been nominally “in charge” of a number of them as Lead Instructional Motivated Curriculum Alignment and Assessment Facilitator. (We haven’t used simple names for things since the late 90’s – no one actually knows what any given room or title actually indicates anymore, so we wander around confused much of the time.)

I’ve led professional development in various guises across multiple states over the past ten years, and inevitably a good chunk of the teachers I meet either are or know coaches. It always comes up. We talk. I learn. Often, pastry trays are involved.

Remember the Titans CoachingI don’t coach myself, nor am I qualified to do so, but I have seen Remember the Titans about 19 times. I thus consider myself supremely qualified to make some confident statements about coaches who teach, and teachers who coach (and come to think of it, I’m pretty sure these are the same thing). I’ll number them to lend artificial authority to each statement.

(1) Coaches coach for the same reasons teachers teach. Most public school educators signed up because at some point they wanted to help kids. They wanted to make a positive difference in some way by getting involved.  We’re idealists at heart – or were, before the acronyms caught up with us and stomped the last bit of hope out of our calling. Teachers who are tired of being stereotyped as unable to get ‘real jobs’ or assumed to have gone into education because they simply weren’t qualified to do anything else should stop doing the same thing to the folks who teach next door to them in the morning and coach in the afternoon.

(2) Successful coaches are usually successful teachers. The time demands of coaching may limit the extent to which they labor over their grading or lesson plans after hours, but that’s true of many good classroom teachers with ‘real lives’ outside the classroom. Some may even lean a little heavily on more orthodox lessons and strategies. But few effective coaches are ‘dead weight’ in the classroom. The skill set and mindset of the two are simply too closely aligned. And the guy who is faking his way through 1st – 4th periods with worksheets and VHS documentaries is probably not accomplishing much on the field, court, or ice either.

Coach & Student(3) Coaches are evaluated publicly and often by the performance of students who may or may not be demonstrating what they’ve actually been  taught. Annoyed by those good ol’ boys who are obviously given classes during the day simply to fill the slot and justify their position? Frustrated at how impossible it is to push a coach with mediocre classroom skills aside to make room for a ‘real’ teacher? If your tenure and paycheck (the one used to buy your kids clothes and food and such) relied largely on how things go Friday night, I suspect you’d be easily distracted from that flipped-model inquiry-based cross-curricular collaborative journey you were trying to scaffold. You might even make a few calls to your staff and revisit some plays or other logistics. This is not a ‘coach’ problem – this is a structuring problem.

(4) Coaches work long hours for pitiful stipends. You remember when you sat down that one afternoon and started trying to figure out how much you, as a highly qualified classroom teacher, actually make per hour? Coaches learn not to do that math – especially that ‘how many kids do I have multiplied by what babysitters charge’ version that’s popular from time to time. Many of them are keeping much longer hours for much less per than you or I would tolerate if it were our Lunch Duty stipend or Safety Training Coordinator compensation.

(5) Thank god for kids in athletics. They may or may not be my shining academic stars, but discipline problems they are not. An email or phone call to their coach solves almost any problem – academics, attendance, or attitude. I wish I could require ALL of my students to be involved in extra-curriculars.

Coach Pointing(6) Coaches will mess with you by playing to your preconceptions. I see it all the time in workshops – the self-deprecating humor, the inside jokes. Maybe this is merely a ploy to lower expectations (especially on those required in-district days), but I suspect it’s usually just amusing to watch the rest of us be all smug without admitting it to ourselves.

(7) Coaches understand vertical teaming better than we do. They’re also far more likely to spend hours evaluating and analyzing their own performance and that of their kids with game film, statistics, or other unforgiving rubrics. The focus on individual responsibility within effective group work is a staple of most team sports – they don’t even work otherwise – and is applied to Those of the Shorts & Whistle just as consistently as to those in their care. And ‘grit’ – that most recent breakthrough suggesting that giving up every time something is difficult is NOT a great life plan? Yeah, old news on the court, field, or ice.

I’m not suggesting we ignore legitimate problems. I am suggesting that there are times that, instead of pushing our coaches to attend more PD, we should be asking them to lead some of it. We’d probably all be better off.

Pouty Coach

Related Post: “Extra” Curriculars