Inspired by the Curriculum Death March, a year in my life that helped me to see the edge on the curricular sword, I am taking a short break from tips to explore an idea.

Bureaucrats, school administrators and politicians often seem to forget we need to “sell” education to our students. America’s students are not cooperative, little sponges waiting to be filled with the water of knowledge. They are not vessels into which we can pour English when the whim strikes us.

Current educational strategies based in “rigor” and “raising the bar” miss at least one critical piece for teaching and learning: At least at first, slower may produce better long-term results. Teaching content should be subordinate to inspiring interest. Once I have sparked student interest, content will follow. In Spanish, doing group projects and having a good time working on theme-based units while adding words and phrases naturally works better than plowing through long, obligatory textbook chapters. Educators know this from classes and professional development seminars where they are taught various methods to engage students in foreign language instruction. But teachers can only employ those methods when they are allowed time and flexibility to do so.  When higher-ups demand that students cover over 300 pages of a history textbook in their entirety over the course of one school year, they risk creating students whose main goal in history class is to get out of history class.

Too much rigor and shoving up that damn bar can lead to disaffected students who are spending most of their class period waiting for the bell to ring.