One of the problems I’ve had with packaged curriculum materials since I started teaching is that they present as many problems as they solve. Math books are my biggest gripe. When I taught the lower primary grades (I taught first and second graders for 14 years.) the kids had consumable math books, which means that they could write in the book. Most of the time we would do some kind of activity and then go to the book to “apply” it. The real difficulty was, though, that the format of the book page was so confusing to the kids that they couldn’t think about the math. I’d end up frustrated because they got hung up on some graphic feature of the book that confused them, and they’d be frustrated because they thought they were bad at math, since they didn’t know how to get the answer the book seemed to want. I learned after a while, too long a while, to stay away from the math book if I wanted the kids to do math.

I don’t know where we’d be without the copy machine. There’s a lot of talk these days about computer technology, but I believe that the photocopier has done more to affect teaching than any other single piece of equipment. That may change soon, now that we can write to the web. But for now, we’re still cranking out the paper. Why? I know why I do it. I have lots of reasons. I use the copier mainly because it’s easier than having the kids write everything down. I tried that one year. I lasted about 6 months. Not bad, I think. They wrote their own notes home, their own homework assignments, their own whatever. I broke down finally when I realized that I was bucking a cultural norm. It was almost like telling people that you don’t let your kids watch television. They look at you funny. Try it; you’ll see. They’ll know you’re some kind of radical. When I tried going cold-turkey on copying I did it because I wondered if kids were getting lazy having everything handed to them pre-formatted. I think they might be, but I don’t care about it as much now as I did then. I ran into problems with absent kids. They didn’t have copies of the assignments. Parents wanted spelling lists. They wanted tests. They wanted to see worksheets because worksheets are self-contextualized. They have titles. They have directions. So they make life a little bit easier for all of us. Is that so bad?

From a literacy instruction perspective, worksheets offer some challenges and opportunities to teach about text genres. A whole language teacher believes that kids should receive instruction at the point of need, using authentic texts. I think so, too. But I also think that kids should get comfortable reading and responding to things that they may not have a lot of experience with. My job as the teacher is to figure out exactly how much support to give them when we are doing stuff that has been handed to us. I work real hard to get them to read their writing critically, to revise and proofread it. We have writing conferences, and they pair up and review each others’ work. But I still give them more formal instruction on the fine points of grammar, spelling and punctuation. I have a book full of bungled up essays that are written in a type face that looks like handwriting, presumably so the kids will believe that a kid wrote the piece. But the content and writing style are most definitely not juvenile. I look at these things and think, what kid could realistically do this without help? None that I work with.

Today I handed out one of these things. It was about Gregor Mendel’s research on heredity. The very first two lines in the paragraph had the words ‘traits’ and ‘heredity.’ These are not words that my fourth-grade students have likely ever heard. I decided to go ahead with the lesson because I wanted to do a presentation about schema with them. Before I gave them the paper I said something like, “Today we are going to have a science and a psychology lesson. I’m going to talk to you about how your brain works so that you can become better operators. Probably no other teachers are going to tell you about this, so listen and think about what we are going to talk about. You need to build schema before you can work on this assignment.”

We’ve talked about schema before. They know that it is something like a mental filing system. I put a new piece in there for them today, though. I told them that in order to add on to your schema you have to find something to hook the new knowledge to. As an illustration I took my coat to the front of the room and stuck it to the board. There was no hook, so of course it fell to the floor. Everyone laughed. Then I said, “That’s what happens when you try to learn something without activating your schema. There’s no hook for it.”

I went on, “Before you read you have to do what all good readers do. You have to activate your schema for what you’re about to read. Think about what you already know about the subject. Look for some hooks.” I believe that kids should be explicitly taught to do this at every age, in every subject. They will get to know their own minds. They will become aware of their own thinking process (metacognition is the buzzword, isn’t it?). I had their attention. We went on to talk about traits. What are traits? What traits do you have? Where do they come from? I mentioned heredity. All this to learn about a few commas and capital letters in a canned paragraph out of a workbook.

What did the kids learn? Maybe they learned something about punctuation. My real mission, though, was to teach them something about themselves. And to give them some ideas for ways to approach the world when I’m not there to answer their questions. When we finished I told them that they should learn to have fun in their own heads. “Know your brain, it’s all yours.” They went down the hall to their music class with big smiles. We had fun.