Beginning the (Writing) Curriculum Writing Process

This summer, before enrolling at either UCSD or Stanford,* I'll be teaching creative writing at Punahou.  While they do have some resources for me to work with - a poetry and short story book that they usually employ in the course - the curriculum is more or less mine to write.  This is both a blessing and a curse.  Pedagogically, it's always easier to teach when the curriculum is laid out in front of you first.  On the other hand - and considering I do have some free time between now and when the course begins in June - the opportunity to actually craft a curriculum according to the principles I learned as an LDT student is exciting to me.

* Yes, my California voyage continues.  But it is coming to an end soon.  I'll be spending the next two days on UCSD's campus before flying home to Honolulu on Friday.

As Director of NALU Studies, I did have a lot of control - in theory, anyway - over curriculum.  In practice, however, three things got in the way of engaging in actual good curriculum design.  First, the turnaround from my arrival on the job and the running of our first session was about a month, hardly enough time to craft an intelligible curriculum that covered almost 100 contact hours.  Second, while I am comfortable with the scientific concepts we were teaching, I am not enough of an expert in marine biology to develop a strong, holistic set of lessons.  Third, and most importantly, rather than building from scratch, we were working from what I would say was a deeply flawed blueprint.  There were plenty of good activities in the curriculum, but no organizing principle (the same could, I suppose, be said about the organization as a whole).  The result was an aimless collection of "fun" things for the kids to do, but the learning that went on was, frankly, minimal.

So how to avoid those pitfalls in this situation?  Well, for one thing it helps to be starting from (ironically) a much stronger position.  Of my three main problems at NALU, the first is not an issue because I'll have much more time (and no directorial duties to get in the way), the second is not an issue because I'm much more comfortable teaching writing than science, and the third is not an issue because I'm largely building from scratch, with the aid and input of teachers who do know how to write good curriculum.  Which is all to say the situation is, if not ideal, pretty darn close.

In the ideal case, then, how does one go about writing a (writing) curriculum?

To begin with - and this is the most important bit, actually - it's essential to define a core purpose for the class.  As in many aspects of life, a clear and succinct and specific goal at the outset of the curriculum design process will make the rest of the work go better.  While this may seem obvious, it's harder to do than it sounds.  The temptation is very much to jump in and start thinking about all of the cool activities that fit into a creative writing curriculum, all of the interesting ways of using technology, and all of the good assignments the students can complete.

The problem is, if you start with any of those things, you lose sight of the bigger picture, and while the student might come away with any number of particular skills, you've done a poor job shaping the overall experience.  Better to pick a focal point for the course as a whole, and to ensure that every activity, technology, and assignment fits into that paradigm.  That way, students can still take away particular skills as they suit student interests and the vagaries of the high school attention span, but even the least engaged student should come away with that central lesson, an "enduring understanding" that lasts far beyond the final day of the course.

A good enduring understanding, then, is like a mission statement.  It is a concept or question sufficiently broad and deep to serve as an organizing principle for, in this case, five straight weeks of four-hour-a-day lessons.  Too much breadth and depth, however, will lead to the same disorganization that occurs without that focal point.  "What is good writing?" for example, is probably too broad a question to organize this class around, whereas "readable grammar" is too narrow and extremely boring.  Somewhere in between, there's a good enduring understanding waiting to be uncovered.

Actually, the biggest challenge, at this stage, is not finding an appropriate enduring understanding, but finding one and sticking with it.  It's all too easy to come up with concepts and ideas that are "enough but not too much."  The problem is that it becomes extremely tempting to try to tackle too many central themes in a single class.  The result is, predictably, a return to the "this lesson looks good" model of curriculum, wherein every day of the course is compelling (to the teacher, anyway), but for so many different reasons that the student's experience starts to lose cohesion.  Incidentally, this is what is wrong with most current standards: there are too many core ideas.

Once I do boil the course to its core, the next layer to apply is assessment.  How will I know that the students know what I want them to know?  This is a sticky question, and while in creative writing there are particular accepted norms for assessment, it's important to make sure that what I do fits well with what I'm trying to teach.  It's really easy to teach one thing and to test for another.  The current manifestation of the standards movement, again, often makes this mistake by asking students to learn certain material, and then testing them on how well they take multiple choice tests.  As a result, more and more schools are doing more "test taking training," which is a waste of instructional time that could be used to teach students to think.

Which is to say, the pitfalls here are not inconsequential.  Assessment is, in reality, perhaps the most important part of the curriculum design process.  Without assessment, it is impossible to know whether or not all of your cool lessons are really working, whether your students are really engaged, and whether the enduring understanding of your course is really being understood.  Good assessment design and alignment, then, will be a big part of my own work in shaping my creative writing course.

Once you've answered these two questions - 1) what do I want the students to learn? 2) how will I know that they've learned it? - the rest of the curriculum building process becomes, if not easy, at least a lot more enjoyable.  Instead of wracking your brain, trying to figure out how to fill the time, or trying to decide which awesome lessons to employ and which to cull, the process is much more, for lack of a better word, mechanical.  Look at your daily lesson.  Does it fit with the overall goal of the course?  Will you be able to tell if it sticks?  If the answers are "no" and "no," there's probably no reason to do it, regardless of how cool it is or how fun it sounds.  Basically, the process comes down to a truism: it's easier to meet your design needs when you know what those needs are.

Now, that's all well and good in the ideal case, but what about reality?  No plan survives contact with the enemy, and that is equally true in curriculum design.  In my own rather limited experience, even well-laid plans require good execution pedagogically, and require vast restructuring (to say the least) sometimes when the actual students in the class have interests and learning needs that diverge wildly from those you anticipated while writing the curriculum.  Which is not to say that writing the curriculum in the first place is a waste of time, but rather that, like any writing, it's a mistake to get too attached to what you write.  The other lesson, here, is that the enduring understanding - the core of the curriculum - is doubly important when reality sets in, because it gives shape to those on-the-fly adaptations that must be made.

I'm sure that, as this project evolves, I'll have more to say in this space, since this blog is a kind of long-term creative writing project of my own.  While I may not be able to share student work, I can assure you that - given my pedagogical biases - it's very likely I'll be completing the assignments I give, and that those assignments will end up here.  Stay tuned.

The Plunge

This space is likely to be quite barren for the next two weeks while we run our next NALU 102 session.  As many of you know, I recently took over for Manning Taite as Director of NALU Studies, a small non-profit that runs science education courses for at-risk kids.  I'm sure I'll talk more about my experience in the last month as Director, and about the organization as a whole, in the future, but for now I just want to let my few readers know that my regular schedule of one or two (or, on occasion, three) posts a week is on haitus until late October.

In the meantime, make sure to watch some playoff baseball for me, and send your good vibes to Windward Community College in Kaneohe, Hawaii, where our brave students are about to embark on one of the most challenging and fun courses they've ever taken.

Lazy

Lazy is one of the most pernicious words in the English language. Often the most devoted, hard-working people are labeled "lazy" on those occasions when they are not actively trying to accomplish ever more. It's an odd and vicious cycle, where those hard workers learn to call themselves "lazy," even when they are most definitely not. I've certainly had a number of friends - and I'm sure you have to - who call themselves lazy despite generally getting work done on time or early and taking on more projects than is required.

It would be easy to chalk this up to the centuries old Protestant Work Ethic, which accounts for the general tendency for Americans (and Europeans) to work exceptionally hard because, ironically, that would demonstrate their worthiness for Heaven. That is, everyone's spot in Heaven or Hell was predetermined, but you could tell based on a person's earthly success, and so Protestants - despite determinism - worked really hard to prove that they were predetermined.

It's a little lazy (see what I did there?) to attribute the modern distrust of laziness to Luther and Calvin, however. Surely there's some influence, but fewer and fewer people are being brought up in Protestant households, and the iron grip of dogmatic determinism has significantly loosened over the last hundred or so years.

No, I think that our revulsion for laziness - and yet our willingness to call ourselves, or friends, and people we've never met lazy - must come from something more immediate. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what that is, and I don't believe I can tease it out just by speculating, but I have a couple ideas which are probably not totally true. More importantly, however, I want to defend laziness, not as a way of life, but in the kind of moderation that should accompany most of what we deem vices and virtues.

As a starting point, I think we do have an extremely strong cultural stage set up for hard work. Watching the news, or any television show, or even browsing the Internet, it's hard not to find examples of hard work, not as exceptional, but as an expectation that simply cannot help but be met. Hard work is the status quo, everything else is an incredible, unbelievable, awful, society-ruining vice. That watching TV or browsing the Internet is usually not work only drives the point home: look at how much other people do.

Ultimately this account of laziness is highly personal, because we cannot help but compare the vastness of the work everyone else does compared to the extremely limited amount of work we individually do. That there's something of a fallacy here doesn't affect us overmuch because, frankly, we're mostly a bunch of egomaniacs who believe that we should be able to do more than not just anyone else, but everyone else. How disappointing to see that that's not true, and how much easier to our self-love to attribute it to laziness than to lack of ability. I could ____ if I wanted.

More than that, however, I think our notions of hard work and laziness come from the extreme competitiveness of our educational, economic, and political models. Even though cooperation and collaboration have become more and more prominent buzzwords in recent years, we remain an inherently competitive society. Consider that standardized tests are scored by percentile. Consider that we class people primarily by socio-economic status, and apply a kind of innate superiority to people who have more money. Consider that the almost universal organizational structure in the business world is hierarchical.

Competition, of course, has its virtues, but so does cooperation. To use a trivially simple example, if four people on an island each try to horde the limited available food, they won't last long. If they instead divide their efforts, so that one person builds fishing nets while another plants and tends crops while yet another does the fishing and the last does the cooking, well, then they're getting somewhere. Of course, cooperation is, as I said, smiled upon in the modern world to a point, and no one would deny that small groups of people ought to cooperate. The problem is at a larger scale, where the narrative of human-beings-as-innately-greedy has led to the notion that, ultimately, you simply have to build a competitive system.* It's not a matter of morality or effectiveness, it's simply a natural outgrowth of human nature. Laziness, in that account, becomes a deadly disease that will not harm you as such, but rather will put you so far behind all of the non-lazy people that you're liable to suffer and die. No wonder "lazy" is such a bugbear.

* There's a little ironic laziness in the competitive model of capitalist economics, which is that, at its core, it says that the less we mess with competition the better off everyone will be. It's so much work to try to influence the actions of large groups of people anyway that we might as well just let it be. In practice, of course, this never happens; the primary function of most companies, governments, and schools is to try to influence large groups of people. But apparently that influence should never, ever happen in certain, particular ways; namely, in the form of the government influencing business. I guess I just don't get it. Anyway, since we're obviously not better off in a competitive system at a small enough scale, there must be some kind of point at which cooperation stops paying off and competition starts working. Perhaps we need just a couple more billion people, and then we'll be there...

I would argue, on the other hand, that entirely too much work gets done in the world, and we would be a lot better off if there was more laziness to go around. Don't get me wrong, I don't believe that we need a whole class of people who sit around doing nothing all day.* Rather, it makes much more sense to me to structure a society - or, at a smaller scale, a company, an organization, a school, or a life - such that there is ample opportunity for laziness to go along with hard work. It turns out that free time, during which we have the chance to be lazy, can be incredibly important to our emotional and spiritual well-being, and that we might work more effectively when we do work if we're not working 12 hours a day.

* One of the fundamental (and most hilarious) disagreements in our political spectrum is over who is lazier, the poor or the rich. Broadly speaking, left-wingers think that rich people are lazy, while right-wingers think that poor people are lazy. Never in question is how incredibly irresponsible and unethical it is to be lazy. The question might as well be: who is moral, the rich or the poor? Show me someone's villain, and I'll show you their political leanings.

I know, I'm expressing things that we started to figure out a hundred years ago, but it strikes me that we forget easily, or that we forget to apply that lesson widely enough. For example, when we hear a story about a young student working a full time job in addition to going to school so he can pay his own way through college, we are filled with admiration for his virtue, but for some reason we don't find fault with a social, economic, and political structure that makes such fundamentally needless hard work necessary and expedient. And you will not convince me that said student will be better off in life by virtue of his job at a 7-11. The laziness he was robbed of cost him how many books, how many love letters, how much time listening to or writing music?

You see, the problem is that we tend to equate free time with accomplishing nothing. On the one hand, it would be good if we accomplished less, as a society, because then perhaps we would use fewer resources, stop having so many kids, and generally do a better job not of saving the planet (because the planet is fine), but of saving ourselves (because we're in a lot of trouble). We've always been a hard-working, competitive, quickly-expanding kind of species, and like Douglas Adams's favorite bird, the Kakapo,* now that we've got global environmental, economic, and social crises, we're just doing the stuff we've always been good at - which is the stuff that got us in trouble in the first place - with even more fervor.

* The Kakapo is a flightless bird from New Zealand that, finding itself suddenly in danger of being eaten by rats, dogs, and other carnivorous animals after the arrival of Europeans on their island, promptly died off because they were really only good at mating slowly and being completely unafraid of other species. Suffice to say, mating slowly in the face of rapid predation hasn't worked out, nor has sitting around and waiting to be eaten.

On the other hand, terms like "accomplishment" are a bit loaded. For my own part, some of my favorite accomplishments have nothing to do with work that was assigned to me, or things that I had to do in order to forward my career or life goals. And I don't just mean things like keeping a blog, being married, or reading good books, which we grudgingly tend to admit are worthwhile pursuits. No, I mean lazy stuff like sleeping in, watching every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and beating Knights of the Old Republic as both a light side and a dark side Jedi. Even though I acknowledge that I'm generally intellectually involved in those pursuits, I also know that, by almost any measure, they're a complete waste of time. Supremely lazy, you might say.

Except that the whole point is for those things to be a waste of time. What I have "accomplished," in each of those cases, is having fun. Some people have fun by working and then working some more, I'm told, but I don't totally buy it. Hard work for the sake of hard work may be rewarding and therefore fun in a certain way, but most meaningful work is also draining. Interacting with people all the time is hard, and solving problems that effect other people puts you in a precarious emotional position. Without a chance to sit down and turn your attention to something other than all the work you have to do - without a chance to be lazy - there is no subconscious processing, no emotional, physical, and spiritual recharge, and no chance to find those little nuggets (because even Star Trek has its moments) of wisdom, humor, or information that can completely transform the way you approach a sticky problem.

Lazy is not a way of life, as I said, but it is much more useful than it seems. As John Dewey says, the point of education is not to prepare people for jobs, but to prepare them for free time. Likewise, Bertrand Russell would say that the point of society is not to ensure that work gets done, but rather to ensure that everyone has a chance to not work sometimes. If we get into the way-back machine, Aristotle says that the point of philosophy is not to make laws, but to make laws unnecessary. Idealistic? Perhaps, but it sounds a whole lot better to me than feeling guilty for living a balanced, sustainable, and enjoyable life.

Stress as a Choice

It is not uncommon, just about everywhere, to hear people talk about how stressed they are. This usually stems from having too much to do and not enough time to do it, and manifests itself as a self-fulfilling inability to actually be productive. While stress certainly has external contributors, I believe that it is, at its heart, a personal decision about how to respond to those external contributors. Without going into psychology or trying to dissect that, I think it's fair to point out that there are many people who feel overwhelming stress when they have fairly little work to do, while others skate by whistling and smiling despite working almost non-stop.

Choosing stress, however, does not strike me as a conscious decision. Few people would say: "Oh good, I have enough to do now that I can start feeling stressed about it." Granted, there are certainly people who need the threat of a looming deadline in order to actually complete a task (similar to the people who need the threat of a torturous afterlife in order to be moral?), but that, I feel, is a different kind of stress than the crippling, miserable, and unhealthy stress that is so prevalent. Indeed, I might call a deadline motivation, and while you might say that's just the same thing as stress, I would say, in response, that that is my point. The words we choose to describe a similar phenomenon tell us a lot about our intellectual habits.

What is the original of this choice, then? Why do so many people choose stress? Being unconscious, I suspect that stress is a habit started very early in life. Children who have stressed parents are probably quick to learn stress themselves, and are likely to respond in concert. Add to that our achievement-driven academic system - which rewards neither intelligence nor effort, really - and you have children at every tier of the system terrified about how they are possibly going to succeed (and out-compete their friends). "That's life," you may say, but that again is exactly the point: we choose a stressful world, and impose it upon ourselves and our children.

I firmly believe that too much work gets done in the world (that's a post for another time), I think it is even more troubling that so much time is spent worried about getting work done. There is something backwards about a culture that is more concerned with what it does and how it is to do those things than why. Choosing stress is about forgetting why, if not personally, then societally. Of course, the widespread epidemic of stress in the world - especially in Western countries - is probably a symptom of an unexamined why. If purposelessness breeds stress and frustration, it is no wonder a culture built upon profit is rife with them.

That's probably also a post for another time. Meanwhile, I don't think there's a need to delve too deeply into the cosmic - or at least cultural - sources of stress. More important is the personal decision, which is tied so closely to personal habits and expectations. I have seen people who respond to mountains of work as a fun challenge to be overcome - even when that work is not ostensibly engaging - which seems to me a better choice.

Call that attitude "life as a game," where there is always fun to be had in almost any effort, if you make that choice. Sometimes that might involve a good deal of fantasy; sometimes, perhaps, too much. But we already know what too much stress looks like.