You Can't Get There from Here!

Abstract

Have you ever tried to describe a particularly impressive episode of NOVA, National Geographic, or Jacques Cousteau to a friend and found yourself unable to recall many details beyond it was really fascinating the way those dolphins live. While those award winning shows may demonstrate excel lence in video production, their inability to produce meaningful recall of facts or substantive learning in even the most motivated of viewers may provide us cause to rethink some of our assumptions about middle school curriculum, organization, and instruction. The segmenting of curriculum into required, elective, and selective offerings did not disappear with the junior high schools of the past. In fact, the belief that the exploratory mission of middle level education can best be achieved by traveling through a customized menu of classes is almost universally accepted by middle level teachers, administrators, and parents. Putting aside for a moment the logistical (scheduling) and resource problems which this philosophy creates, we should still raise some serious questions about its appropriateness for the teenage learner. Every experienced couch potato has spent an evening, remote control in hand, sampling the myriad of opportunities made available by a 102 channel random access cable T.V. After spending several hours vicariously enjoying exiciting snippits of adventure, love-making, athletic highs and lows, and religious inspiration, the viewer leaves his couch unsatisfied, having failed to follow any of these experiences far enough to convey true meaning. That would be precisely how a teenager might well remember her action-packed trip through the modern smorgasbord middle school. Of course, there are some compelling reasons to segment the curriculum into these little boxes that we call courses. These are born out of a sincere desire to meet and satisfy individual differences. Parents, students, and teachers are all acutely aware of the disparity in learning rates found in the typical middle school student body and the pacing problems that heterogeneity produces in a fact/memo rization-oriented curriculum. We can all