Chaotic Curriculum Search

For years, I heard teachers complaining about the common core standards and their frustration with textbook companies, but I never quite understood where all of this frustration came from until last week. Professor Mace, Candace, Jen, and I did some standards research to see how they corresponded to mathematics textbooks, and let me tell you, it was not the best experience I have ever had. I left feeling a bit discouraged to say the least in regards to creating a curriculum and applying standards-based grading in my classroom.

The textbook companies are simply interpreting the standards and providing lessons for teachers to work with, but the standards are so unbelievably vague that you are never guaranteed to find the same lesson if you jump from one textbook to the next. We attempted to compare different textbook brands that were supposed to fulfill the same standards, but it was nearly impossible to match up the lessons even when the corresponding standard was provided. The vagueness of the standards is both a good thing and a bad thing. It gives you some creative freedom to create a curriculum that works for you, but the guidelines are so vague that they are barely helpful. For that reason, it makes me wonder how you could possibly create a curriculum that is not entirely based on a textbook but also meets the standards.

At this point, achieving that goal seems a bit far-fetched. Sure, technology allows us to acquire teaching resources in less than a minute, but there are still hours of planning that goes into a single lesson. That may not seem like too much, but imagine doing that for 180 lessons and having to edit them based on what the class needs more or less time working on. In the context of standards-based grading, this seems entirely impossible. There simply not enough hours in the day to accomplish all of these things; teachers are very busy people. I'm sure that there is another way to go about applying standards-based grading in my classroom and creating a curriculum that works well for me and my students, and hopefully, through my research, I will find out how to make that happen.