Concluding Post: An Open Letter to My Students

Dear Students,

The idea of curriculum and what it means to me has changed often in the decade it’s been since I was earning my education degree in history. I can remember leaving college with all these ideas about teaching all this different content that I had grown to love, and helping mold young men and women into the history loving nerds that I had become. I can remember all of the theories I talked about with my fellow future educators in our early twenties, all discussing these different theories as if we were experts in the field of education before any of us had stepped foot in front of a classroom for any meaningful period of time and thinking that we were going to enter the workforce ready to solve all the problems that we had been taught about. Not only that, we were probably going to be having our own Ted Talks being watched in college of education classrooms by the time we all turned thirty. This kind of untethered, irrational confidence is both beautiful and funny looking back on what the reality of my journey has looked like.

When you think of curriculum, you may think, like I initially did, that it is a series of things that we need to learn over the course of a year or semester. I can remember looking at the standards for the state or the school, and constructing these lessons that would focus on teaching as much content in a few days as I’d just spent months learning about in college. I found myself looking at what I was told was the most important aspects of what I was supposed to be teaching, and cutting out a number of what I may have found particularly interesting because I simply didn’t have time. “There was too much to cover.” Curriculum was all about the content at the beginning, and it would take me a number of years of trial and error to realize that the content was just the beginning of my journey to create a curriculum that I believed in.

Once I started to work in schools, specifically, once I started to work in a few charter schools serving students with far less resources than any I’ve worked with before, it became clear to me that there was this new aspect of curriculum that my supervisors and principals were focused on: skills. I had all this content to teach, content that was frankly years, potentially decades old, and on top of all this content jammed into a school year, I was given all these skills and benchmarks that my students were expected to reach. Admittedly, this became my focus for several years. I started to realize that a lot of students truly didn’t have the skills that they would need to go off to the colleges that the schools I worked at wanted them to attend, so I found myself no longer really drilling content, so much as I was starting to drill skills that would deem my students “college ready.” Working at a school that had “COLLEGE” written on the wall of the cafeteria and required students to have multiple meetings with college counselors throughout the year, the idea of going anywhere but college wasn’t really accepted. Getting students ready for the world of academia was what curriculum was meant to do, so again, I adapted.

I have been in multiple places where I found myself teaching ideas and focusing on things that I did not personally value, that I did not believe to be my purpose as an educator, and because of that I think I have been pushed to analyze what curriculum means to me in ways I could not have expected. By working in schools that have a dearth of extra curricular activities, I have found myself wondering why this aspect of school is considered to be beyond curriculum? I’ve thought about the way things like clubs and sports impacting my social emotional development and helped me form bonds that have lasted nearly 20 years, and I began to wonder how I can include that more in my classroom’s curriculum? By working in schools where people who looked like me were the minority, I began to start thinking about how teaching a curriculum that focused primarily on people who looked like me wasn’t tapping into the interests of my students probably because they didn’t see themselves reflected in it. So I began to think about who my students were and how I could show them that they have just as important a place in history as anyone.

In my classroom, I want you to have the opportunity to express your strengths, to embrace your passions, and to challenge things that you believe are wrong. I want you to be able to learn how sometimes we will fail at something, but as long as we’re passionate about what that thing is and we care about it, we can find ways to grow and adapt to be successful in the future. In my classroom, if you feel like you are not being represented, I want you to know that I will do whatever it takes to make sure that you can see yourself reflect in the social studies, because I should be studying what you share with me just as much as you study what I share with you.

One of the main definitions/translations of curriculum from Latin is that it is a “course of study,” and I think too often teachers and educators in general take that and apply it too literally to the content/class they teach. To be frank, I don’t expect my students to go through life remembering that Ancient Mesopotamia was between the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers, and unless they become archaeologists, they most likely won’t need to remember for anything but going out for trivia night when they’re older. What I want my students to have the chance to leave my classroom with, is the ability to look at any group of people from any place in any period of time, and understand that they are capable of incredible things and are worthy of respect. The “course of study” to me is the studying of life through the course of history, to understand that we are learning about time because time is constantly changing, so it’s important for us to change and adapt with those times.

I believe in building a community based on the concept of a social contract, something that I believe is one of the most important aspects of our civic society, but an idea that is far too often looked over. The basic definition of a social contract is that it is an agreement between people in a society that they will collaborate and work together for the benefit of society as a whole. This is an important concept that appears to be further and further from the minds of the average American, especially as we go through some of the most tumultuous, tribalistic, and divided political times in memory. Those issues will undoubtedly continue in the world, but even if it’s for an hour or so a day, I would love for us to focus on what we can learn from each other in the classroom, because to me, that’s what curriculum really is.

I look forward to growing and learning with you,

Mr. Thom