Re: on scripted lessons - from Ed week

[Csubstance@aol.com]

7/19/07

Thanks for sharing this piece, Ken. 

I hope teachers can share some experiences.

Here are mine, first from pedagogy, then more generally from recent Chicago 
stupidities.

When I taught literature in Chicago (for nearly three decades), I prepped 
every book I had my students learn every school year. at least seven different 
times I taught Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" to AP English students, and not once 
was it possible to use the same "script" precisely the same way from one year to 
the next. It's even ridiculous to think so when we're dealing with real 
children, not fenders on the Chicago Ford assembly line. For example, for several 
years, the "romantic" students in the AP class were on Anna's "side" in the 
conflict in the book. Then, one year, we got two guys who were very bright, biker 
types wearing heavy metal tee shirts. Both had been through divorces in their 
families.

When it came to that part of the discussion of the novel, they called Anna a 
"whore" and asked the class to imagine what it must have been like to be her 
son. It was powerful stuff, and "worked" in the course of the class.

I taught "Romeo and Juliet" more than 20 times over more than 20 years, from 
the days when we had to take field trips to a local cinema to view the movie 
version to the VCR days. Even after all that time, there was always something 
"off script" for each and every day. 

The concept that a teacher should follow precisely a script is nonsense. 
Every class has different learners learning at different speeds. And from 
different points of view. 

Like so many nasty things that are being peddled out of corporate "school 
reform" since the onset of our long horror with NCLB, scripted lessons are 
anti-teacher and anti-child. The fact that they were used (and "failed") as far back 
as the Lancaster schools in England. Read "Hard Times" for a look at those 
lesson types, and watch Mr. "M'Chokumchild" -- that's right, Dickens named the 
teacher "Choke the Child" -- doing the lesson on Sissy Jupe. Every tyrannical 
capitalist idiot from Gradgrind (Hard Times) to Lou Gerstner has the same wet 
dream fantasy of reducing children to fenders and teachers to assembly line 
workers. We have a duty to resist, because it's not about the education or human 
children, not in 1840 for the children of the "hands" in Hard Times and not in 
2007 for the children of America's cities. 

Chicago tried scripted lessons nearly ten years ago when Paul Vallas was 
"CEO". There were notebooks for every subject, every grade of elementary school 
(in Chicago, almost all of our elementary schools are K-8). The things generally 
fizzled out, leaving behind closets full of useless junk (except for the ring 
binder notebooks).

A scripted curriculum has to be accompanied by a bunch of "Script Police" and 
principals who are willing to go along with such nonsense.

My eldest son, Dan, just graduated from high school (Chicago's Whitney Young) 
and did quite well. (E.g., he "passed" 11 Advanced Placement exams; nine "5s" 
and two "4s", other similarly good numbers, plus baseball and some theater). 

Not once during 12 years of public schooling in Chicago was he subjected to 
scripted lessons

Next year we're optimistic he will be able to weather his first year of 
college at University of California, Berkeley, where he has received some nice 
scholarship assistance.

My middle son, Sam, just finished kindergarten, where there is some pressure 
on the teachers to use scripts, but no so nutsy that the class is stifling. In 
fact, Sam was able to bring his tadpole into the class and "teach" about how 
it was morphing into a frog (it was about halfway there) and everyone seemed 
to really learn something from the lesson (most notably, Sam, who learned so 
much by practicing how to present the lesson and involve his fellow 
kindergarteners).

The parents with whom we are now working would not tolerate that kind of 
nonsense. We're already looking towards the future with some DIBELS trepedation, 
but I think we can deal with that in an appropriate manner soon. 

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance  <BR><BR><BR>**************************************<BR> Get 
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