When I began teaching 44 years ago, curriculum guides were about 50 pages long. In fact, some subject areas had no guide. Today's curriculum guides run four times longer, and we have to teach antidrug, antialcohol, and antismoking education, as well as deal with the social problems that students increasingly bring to school.
In Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (1999), James Gleick analyzes another concern—the exponential growth of every facet of life in the United States. Gleick notes that if Americans have a choice between faster or slower, they choose faster. The rapid growth of computers feeds our hunger for speed and allows us almost unlimited access to infinite amounts of information. We compartmentalize our time into smaller and smaller units and cram more activities into each day.
The high speed of our culture has entered our schools and left our profession panting. We find our energy drained and ourselves dulled, not so much from hard work as from the emotional strain of near impossible instructional expectations. Given these demands, how can teachers keep their teaching voices sharp and energize students?
Help Students Focus on People
The answer may lie in focusing on students over circumstances, on character over plot. We sit in our living rooms, clicking the television remote control as we search for an engaging story. Inside the classroom, reading discussions center on recounting events. In history or social studies, we focus on the chronology of the causes of the Civil War. We're missing the focus on people and their wants—the desires and conflicts that create the plots and cause the wars. Bypass the scientists and their decision-making processes and we don't learn how scientists think. Worse, we bypass students when we fail to focus on the people who can teach them.
About 15 years ago, I took an interest in children's written fiction. Teachers complained that students wrote about nothing but high-speed car chases, murders, kidnappings, visits from outer space, violence, weapons, and bombs. Because I said that students should choose their topics, teachers looked to me for solutions. As I began to study the problem, I examined what professional fiction writers said about their craft (Graves, 1989). Forty-five of 46 writers believed that character was primary and plot, secondary. John Irving (1985) writes: The voice I love best is the narrative voice, the storyteller's voice. I believe that narrative momentum must override description, must restrain all our pretty abilities with the language. . . . The only thing (in my opinion) that narrative momentum must not override is character—for the building and development of characters, even narrative must pause and wait its turn. In contrast, I discovered that children believed, as do many adults, that plot is primary and that characters are secondary. My data showed that when teachers focused on developing characters in students' reading and writing, the quality of the writing and their reading ability increased markedly.
Teachers know that helping students discuss characters' motives will consume large amounts of time. Further, the outcomes of those discussions are often ambiguous because well-drawn characters are in conflict as they weigh their choices. Students can't offer easy answers in a workbook exercise or blacken bubbles with a No. 2 pencil to explain why people do what they do. But when we bypass the people, we lose the very life and the full drama of history that can engage students; we cannot understand the Declaration of Independence without understanding the tough choices Thomas Jefferson faced.
To infuse life into the curriculum, we must provide students with the skills to learn how to understand people and, consequently, to begin to understand themselves. Professional writers who work daily to create conflicted, yet believable, characters can offer sound advice to teachers.
Neil Simon writes, "In every comedy, even drama, somebody has to want something and want it bad. When somebody tries to stop him—that's conflict" (1992). When I interview students about their writing or reading, I ask a simple but very effective question: What does your main character want and want badly? The next question unearths still more understanding: Why does the character want it so badly? I can ask those two questions in almost any curriculum area and arrive at very different understandings of plot or the unfolding events of history. It isn't long before students are asking those fundamental questions for themselves.
Another writer, James Carroll (1996), speaks of three laws for writing and reading about characters. The law of particularity addresses the details, the particulars, that describe the characters and reveal what the characters want. In the law of polarity, the minute that main characters want something badly, they face choices. For example, when drafting the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wanted to abolish slavery. The fact that he owned many slaves created polarity within Jefferson (Graves, 1999). Conflict also arose among the members of Congress who refused to include language abolishing slavery because they wanted to ensure that the southern states would sign the document.
The law of paradox comes into play when conflicted characters find it difficult to achieve resolution and the story ends with unresolved issues. These three laws can apply to all aspects of curriculum and help students understand people and the plots that surround them.
Learn from the Inside Out
In an interview with Roger Mudd, historian David McCullough said that he wanted his students to fall in love with history. "And how do you do that?" queried Mudd. "I think it is important for them to discover history for themselves. If they discover it, they'll learn to love it," replied McCullough.
If McCullough's students were beginning to study the early 20th century, he might distribute artifacts from the period: an architectural drawing, a doll left at Ellis Island, a musical score, or a letter. Of course, the artifacts lead straight to people who lived during that time, allowing the students to see that particular period through contemporary eyes. I suspect that McCullough's students would pick up many of the tools that historians use to acquire their information. Indeed, the students would be learning to think like historians.
In a recent Paris Review (1999), McCullough writes about how he became immersed in a study of the great Johnstown flood: Not only do I want the reader to get inside the experience of the events and feel what it was like—I want to get inside the events and feel what it was like. People often ask me if I'm "working on a book," and I say yes, because that's what they asked, but in fact they've got the wrong preposition. I'm in the book, in the subject, in the time and the place. Whenever I go away for a couple of days, I have to work to put myself back in it, to get back under the spell. If we want to keep the curriculum and learning fresh, we have to make it possible for our students to go from outside the subject to inside.
Make Learning Live
Years before I knew anything about helping students move inside their subjects, I conducted an all-school program in which elementary students became experts on subjects of their choice. Students kept a journal on their independent studies, constructed something to help others understand what they were learning, and interviewed an expert on the subject. For example, one student studied whaling in the 19th century, built a model whale ship, made a papier-mâché sperm whale, and reenacted hunting and harpooning the whale. The student also interviewed an expert from the Old Dartmouth Historical Society in New Bedford, Massachusetts. We taught students to narrow their topics, take notes, make a construction, and conduct an interview.
To start the projects, I arranged a space outside my office in which an expert sat behind a white picket fence, such as garden shows use. Each guest brought a physical object relating to his or her interests: a garage mechanic brought in a clean crankshaft; an artist, her easel with a painting and paints; a lobsterman, a trap with live lobsters; and a dog trainer, her dog. The students arrived in teams of two or three to learn how to acquire information from the visiting expert.
Rather than lecture, the expert responded only to questions. The better interviewers learned to ask penetrating questions: How did you first get interested in trapping lobsters? How did you learn how to do it, and why do you want to do it? How do you set a trap and get the lobsters out without getting bitten? The children worked hard to connect the person with the subject, as well as to learn about the subject itself. They began to understand what it means to know a subject deeply.
Because more children wanted to interview our experts than we had time, teachers brought in their own experts—often parents or people the teacher and children already knew—for the children to interview. In fact, many informed people live within walking distance of most schools.
Before I conducted a workshop on interviewing in one school, I spent an hour lining up experts for teachers to interview. In a Methodist church across from the school, I found an expert on stained glass windows. I asked that person whether others on the block possessed special knowledge. "Yes," she replied. "Down the street, Mrs. Eaton has 2000-year-old Chinese tapestries."
Each person I met recommended other people with special interests and abilities: a jazz saxophonist, a ham radio operator, a woman who had traveled to Italy, and a foreman at a building under construction. Adjacent to the school was an antique dealer who had rooms with furniture from time periods covering 50 years—a veritable museum. The man's only previous contact with the school was complaining about playground balls that had escaped over the school fence and bruised his carefully groomed shrubbery.
I gave the teacher teams 40 minutes to leave the school to interview these local experts before they returned to teach others what they'd learned. They left with Polaroid cameras and tape recorders and returned with a renewed vision for how to expand students' knowledge through interviewing people. In subsequent weeks, the teachers brainstormed how interviewing could deepen the curriculum and create student interest.
Learning how to acquire information from others brings more than life to the curriculum: It is an essential life skill. Hardly a day goes by that I don't call an 800 number for assistance or phone a friend across town to learn more information on a topic. Although I may not always know the exact, technical questions to ask, I have to have a clear enough understanding of how to help the person teach me. I might say, "You are going too fast on that one. Could you give me an example?" Interviewing can help students be assertive in asking questions and consulting with others for help.
Most of us know of experts who can teach us what we need to know to cope with an enormously expanding life curriculum. One of the sad corollaries of our preoccupation with assessment is the notion that everyone has to be an expert, but without knowing how to ask for and offer help. Indeed, one of the common complaints of business leaders about new employees is, "Knows his stuff, yes, but he doesn't know how to work in a team."
Creating Long Thinkers
Teachers face tough choices when they try to keep their teaching fresh and engage their students. Quality classroom time is scarce, and most students face a standardized curriculum followed by standardized tests that allow little deviation in course content. Further, schools expect teachers to follow specific methodologies that will guarantee student success on high-stakes tests. Consequently, teachers feel pressured to dispense with discussions about people, the use of interview, an in-depth study of a topic—processes by which students fall in love with their subjects.
Teachers must give students enough time to learn about a subject. Gleick (1999) observes, "Much of life has become a game show, our fingers perpetually poised above the buzzer." He points out that such famous thinkers as Darwin and Einstein were self-proclaimed slow learners, but adds that they were "long-thinkers." Gleick quotes Yale psychologist Robert J. Sternberg: "The essence of intelligence would seem to be in knowing when to think and act quickly, and knowing when to think and act slowly."
Short-paragraph responses or filled-in bubbles on timed, standardized assessments may identify the quick thinkers—the students who are prepared for the mental equivalent of the 50-yard sprint. But we need to rethink how teachers can use time to bring life into the curriculum, engage their students, and let students move inside their subjects to become the informed learners so necessary in the 21st century.
