Friday, October 15, 2010

Introducing The Love-it-or-leav-itt Correspondence School of Life Skillz

In my teaching job, we often talk about curriculum development, teaching objectives, benchmarks, etc. which are all just ways of saying, "What do we think it is important for students to learn?" But the answer to this question is always fairly nebulous and usually nothing the students end up internalizing longer than 5 minutes after the final is over. I wonder if we might ask instead, what do these students need to know? Like, for life?

Talking to my nephew this summer who is about to enter middle school, I had a flash of inspiration: let's only teach him things he absolutely needs to know! (You can think things like this when you are an aunt rather than a parent, because you have no overall responsibility for the development of the child other than periodically spoiling him or her and teaching swearwords when appropriate. It is for this reason I think it is a WAY better deal to be an aunt.) Anyhow, I mentioned to my sister and brother-in-law that I'd be happy to admit my nephew into the "Love-it-or-leav-itt" Correspondence School of Life Skillz. Though they politely declined, I kept thinking about it and came up with some of the required courses in said school:
Math for Restaurant Tipping
Slang 1: Building Social Capital
Humor 1: Jokes and Timing
Slang 2: Expletives (Pre-requisite: Slang 1)
Humor 2: Storytelling and Exaggeration
Chemistry 1: Cooking for Life: Pizza, Pasta, Tacos
Chemistry 2: Mixology (Students 21 and Over Only), BYOB
Etiquette
Physical Education: Swimming, Jogging, Biking and NOT Square Dancing
Driver's Education 1: Not Killing Others
Driver's Ed Accelerated: DE1: Not Killing Others Taught Concurrantly With: DE2: Not Being an Ass
Automechanics
Social Studies 1: How to Access Wikipedia
Constitutional Law & Good Citizenship: Why to Vote and How Not to Get Screwed by the Government
Bible 1: The Old Testament: Myth, Incest, Conquest, & Politics in Ancient Canaan
Bible 2: The New Testament: Greek Worldview, Blood Atonement Theology, Mysogony and Apocalypse

Anyway, I think I've got something here. Don't you? Who's in? Anyone have a neice or nephew we could use for a trial run?

No comments:

Post a Comment