Necessary knowledge, skills, and attitudes...

What knowledge, skills, and attitudes do you think your students will need to be successful? Are you teaching to their needs? If not, what do you need to change?

Successful financially? As citizens of the world? Those are two very different questions. To be successful financially, our students need financial literacy. They need to know about savings, credit ratings and FICO scores, interest rates, how to properly use a credit card, mortgages, financial aid, mutual funds, paying bills, the stock market, life insurance, how not to open up those "10% off" store credit accounts, etc. No matter how intellectual a person is, everyone can learn and use the above knowledge and build security for themselves. To me, this is what successful is. Are we teaching this? At my school, it is only a select few who choose to take Life Math, and these are the kids who just want an "easy" math credit. The "smartest" of the kids are too busy with their AP and Honors classes to be bothered with information like this. They go to college and are at a loss. They get that first credit card and use it for everything, without having full understanding of the repercussions. This information should be mandatory for all graduating seniors. I know, at my school, a number of teachers have been trying to get this into the curriculum, but it always falls on deaf ears. I do what I can to talk about a number of these things when I teach my Social Class unit in Sociology, but I don't have complete knowledge of all of these topics to do it justice.

As far as being a successful citizen of the world, students need critical thinking skills, evaluative skills, and the ability to make decisions and choices. Horace Mann was correct that the purpose of education should be to create an informed citizenry capable of making the difficult decisions all members of a society encounter, such as in voting. This is exactly what I strive for. When presenting students with two different scenarios, can they intelligently evaluate the options and make a decision? If we focus on the higher level thinking skills, they should be able to do this. Can they make a reasonable argument for this choice? I do not know if other teachers do this, but, to answer the question, I do believe I am teaching to their needs in this regard.

Our own question and answer

Q: In what ways do you use your department's curriculum? Line for line? As a basic guideline? Don't use it at all? How helpful is it to you? Did you receive it before you started teaching, or did you have to seek it out?

A: In regard to the history section of my curriculum, I use it as a basic guideline for my lessons. I was given the curriculum a couple of months into my first year, which isn't exactly the way it's supposed to be, is it? To be honest, I haven't looked at in in about two years, but I did have a hand in writing the most recent version, so it is actually modeled after my own lessons already in place. As for my Contemporary Social Issues course, I do not use it at all. Half of the writtten curriculum is for psychology and the other half for sociology. About 2 years ago, my administration told me I could not teach the psychology component because I do not have a degree in psych. (But, I don't have a degree in sociology, either?!?) So, then I needed to "stretch out" the sociology component to fill up the rest of the semester. Instead, I have added more units of study and expanded on what was already in place. I have added a significant writing aspect to the course, as well. It is a completely different class than what is in our curriculum. I expect I will be re-writing the curriculum for this course when the time comes, and I will model it off of what I already teach.

NCLB and "Teaching to the Test"

No Child Left Behind has not had an effect on my classroom. I do not teach Math or English, and there has been no demands on me to prepare my students for standardized tests, except for writing my "essay" questions in HSPA-style. Therefore, I do not spend any time "teaching to the test," as it applies to standardized testing. In my own way, I do teach to the test, as I write all of my tests myself, and make sure I teach my students everything on them. When reviewing for tests, we play games that include questions directly (and indirectly) from the tests.
No Child Left Behind includes high stakes testing; if the students do not pass these tests they will not graduate high school. If I did have to prepare my students for such tests, I would undoubtedly join the masses and "teach to the test," but I hope I would not do so to such an extent as to only teach test subject matter. Is there a way to do both? Or do these lessons ultimately consume all of a teacher's time?