Phinal Phlogg
Teaching at a new charter high school has been a tremendous blessing! In such a brittle economy I consider myself truly blessed to be employed. Other than having a means to pay the bills, I feel especially fortunate to get paid for doing something noble, influencing and developing the young minds of Albuquerque’s youth.
Curriculum is an important tool that is a vital component of teaching. The curriculum should be established to challenge students and to assist the instructor. Creating a science and engineering curriculum from scratch for The GREAT Academy charter has been a very challenging task. The GREAT Academy is a small charter school with tremendous potential. Students at The GREAT Academy are not placed on different learning tracks. Every student is required to take the same courses as their peers. The students in my classes are of different ages and different abilities but are required to complete the same level of work. This is great for the student because it requires every student to challenge themselves and prevents them from falling behind their peers.
The curriculum that I have created has been fashioned using the New Mexico state science standards and benchmarks. For anyone who has not read these standards and benchmarks should be aware that these standards address grade levels 9-12 simultaneously. I wish there was a separation of content based on each grade level so I could narrow my focus a bit. The challenge I face daily with my curriculum is the unpredictability of the student’s previous content knowledge. Curriculum should be flexible for this reason.
I sometimes wonder how my teaching experience would be different if I worked for a school with a curriculum already in place. This would be easier for me to simply implement the established curriculum rather than having to create, implement and critique my own efforts.
The GREAT Academy could be a wonderful place for learning. It sounds like the school is trying to integrate students of different age levels and abilities, perhaps to counter the negative effects of over-categorization. Yet you also express a desire for a more highly categorized system of standards. It's an interesting paradox. Creating a curriculum for a very specific and limited category of students could be easy and simple. But mixed groups of learners, with diverse abilities, allow for more open-ended educational experiences. In my opinion, the best way to learn something is to teach it. When students teach each other, they simultaneously improve their learning. However, it all depends on the situation. Sometimes the teacher should be the only one doing the teaching. At other times, the teacher should step aside and just allow learning to spontaneously occur.
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