I have planned an entire school year several times. That doesn't mean I knew every day what I was going to teach, but I knew pretty much by the week. When I was a fresh-out-of-the-box history teacher, I could tell you when my classes would be "doing" the Illinois Constitution (I had seventh-graders; the eighth-grade teacher covered the United States Constitution). I could tell you how long my class spent with Illinois history and at what point, within a week, that that would grind to a halt and American history would begin. It was all timed so that I could "do" a little about the coming Civil War but that was the province of the eighth-grade teacher, so I had to keep my hands off otherwise.
This was before No Child Left Behind. It was, however, during the first stirrings of the Standards movement...
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Things changed when I returned home (California) and no one wanted me to teach history, so I became a Math teacher. Eh, well, not so much. I still planned out whole years, but now I did it under orders from administrators. That sounds bad but it wasn't, at least not in the way "under orders" might seem.
California adopted its Math Standards in 1997 but when I started teaching here, in the fall of 2000, it seems people still didn't have a firm grasp of what they meant and how to implement them over time. I've attended meetings with teachers of my same grade on site, teachers of my same grade throughout the district, my on-site department, my department meeting with the most-local high school's department, so on and so on. I've planned weeks (to show I understood somebody else's presentation), months (again, somebody made a presentation), whole years. I've taken apart the Standards one at a time, in bunches and as a whole. I've compared textbooks. I've written "curriculum maps" that identified what parts of the textbook covered each Standard, when the Standard would be addressed and what the students would be expected to do (and threw in which English Language Development Standard I'd be addressing at the same time as I addressed a Math Standard). So on and so on.
Inevitably, letting the teachers have this much freedom to think and plan would make somebody in the District Office nervous and we would get the adopted plan or interpretations passed on to us. Just as inevitably, this plan was written by someone incredibly anal (day-by-day) or somebody who didn't use the same textbook (um, ok, let's adapt this to what we use) or somebody who didn't teach classes of their own but were "curriculum specialists" (some of these plans and interpretations made me wince because it was obvious the writer had been plucked out of the classroom to stop doing damage but had either tenure, political connections or both).
The cold, hard fact of the matter is that teachers have a gun to their heads because administrators have a gun to their heads (trouble does not roll up hill) because school districts have a gun to their heads because States have guns to their heads. We have to succeed with every student. Success has been determined to be good scores on multiple choice tests. The tests, supposedly, are designed to test the adopted Standards. There are no options to this. This is what the voters want. This must be what the voters want because politicians, starting with school board members, promise to deliver it.
Allow me to post here my list of what students in eighth-grade Algebra are supposed to be able to do with the first five Standards, as adopted by the State of California. There are twenty more Standards for Algebra. All must be addressed and students must be prepared to succeed on a 65-question test at the beginning of May (the fact that the school year goes into June is cause for grim mirth). These all-important scores will not be ready until August (simple question: If these are so important, why does it take so long to get the results?).
Here:
About integers and rational numbers
(CAS 1) Explain what integers, rational numbers, irrational numbers and real numbers are.
(CAS 1) Explain what a number’s absolute value is.
Explain how to add and subtract integers.
Explain how to multiply and divide integers.
Explain the "order of operations."
(CAS 2) Explain what an opposite is (including which operations use opposites), what a reciprocal is (including which operations use reciprocals), what a number "squared" means and what a numbers roots are.
Explain what an exponent does.
(CAS 2) Explain when you are allowed to add exponents, when you are allowed to subtract exponents and when you are allowed to multiply exponents.
Explain why a zero exponent means the number one (include the word "reciprocal").
Explain the function of negative exponents (include the word "reciprocal").
(CAS 2) Explain how fractional exponents work.
Explain how to add and subtract rational numbers.
Explain how to multiply and divide rational numbers.
(CAS 1) Explain "Integers are not closed for division."
(CAS 1) Compare the Commutative Property and the Associative Property.
(CAS 1) Explain the Identity Property and give examples of its use.
(CAS 1) Explain the Inverse Property for addition (use the word "opposite") and multiplication (use the word "reciprocal")
(CAS 1) Explain the Distributive Property and its use when multiplying polynomials.
About Solving Linear Equations and Inequalities
(CAS 5) Explain how to solve one-step equations and inequalities involving addition and subtraction (use the words "opposite" and "Inverse Property").
(CAS 5) Explain how to solve one-step equations and inequalities involving multiplication and division (use the words "reciprocal" and "Inverse Property").
(CAS 4) Explain what like terms are and when you are allowed to combine them.
(CAS 4) Explain how to solve equations and inequalities that involve combining like terms.
(CAS 4) Explain how to solve equations and inequalities that involve expressions with parentheses.
(CAS 4) Explain how to solve equations and inequalities that involve expressions with parentheses and combining like terms.
(CAS 3) Explain how to solve an absolute value equation.
(CAS 3) Explain how to solve an absolute value inequality.
(CAS 3, 4 and 5) Explain what a solution to an equation is. Compare this to the solutions of inequalities.
(CAS 3 and 4) Explain the graphs of the solutions for equations, inequalities, absolute value equations and absolute value inequalities (use the words "or" and "and" correctly for these graphs).
There is no love of mathematics in that list. That's a list designed to divide students into winners and losers. The winners continue in Math through Calculus and beyond. The losers take Algebra again in ninth grade. There is no way I would want to be a ninth-grade Algebra teacher because every student in their classes will have been judged, er, wanting the first time. Imagine trying to motivate those students.
Oh, and regarding how your history sucks. I'm working on a better book about American history leading up to the Revolution. It is my working thesis that the history we have all been taught about "What caused the Revolution?" has reinforced conservative politics, economics and is indirectly responsible for Iraq and Katrina. Heh, what's your hobby?