I know there will be trouble as soon as they begin handing out three-ring binders. I was a public school teacher for twenty-five years and as every new wave of pedagogy sweeps down from above, there is always a white three-ring binder. If I had not released them back into the wild, I would have a wide shelf of them by now. The binders always include text, dividers, colorful charts, and worksheets and handouts; they are never organized in the order they are used; and every single time, they announce new vocabulary. Not new ideas, just new words for old ideas.

When I attended high school, going on fifty years ago, we called them position papers. Today, The New York Times calls them Op-Eds or Opinion. In college they were analysis or persuasive essays. Recently, papers concerning a controversial issue with a thesis and supporting evidence are no longer called persuasive but argumentative papers. That term feels unnecessarily . . . argumentative. Monday, I learn that I am supposed to label such writing as “proposal and support texts”. Not essays at all. “Tasks” rather than text.  The presenters admit they still sometimes get the meaning of these terms confused.

I merely want my students in Writing 121 to construct logical and compelling essays that respectfully and effectively review a range of credible viewpoints, and convince readers of their own. It is more easily said than done, my educational task, and I still do it imperfectly. I keep trying things to improve. On Monday, I was accidentally reminded about parallelism.

Aristotle’s appeals? Evaluating information? Outlining as an organizational process? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Pish-posh! The very teacher who said to me twenty years ago that I was “ridiculous” to insist on personally writing each assignment I give my students, was part of the team on Monday insisting I should personally write each assignment I give my students.

Presumedly, this person has learned something about teaching, something beyond trusting a strategy merely because it arrives in a large binder with dividers and new vocabulary. Doing the work is essential to teaching others how to do it.

Another teacher, binder open, asked about making bullet points of key features desirable in the assigned writing sample. Would this be a way of clarifying what they wanted from students? They were promptly told, No-no! 

I have always done both. I write the assignment and then identify what students must, should, or might include in their writing. I am always particularly pleased when students include some perspective or connection I had not discovered in advance myself. Bonus for that in student writing. Needless to say, this possibility of students out-thinking their teachers’ giant white binders did not come up. Despite a program that ostensibly insists on a “gradual release” of agency to students, we are already shutting it down.

In the mean time, we are asked to learn a new vocabulary that is not what is used in popular media or academia. This program asserts itself by renaming existing pedagogy.

This new system or approach is not worse than others I have seen in the past. But it is not any better. It is relabeling and renaming what has been known for decades. I figured it out years ago and I am not a genius. The program is packaged and involves training “leaders” and selling products. Despite having a nonprofit website, this is about sales. People are being paid and boxes are being checked off. There is money changing hands, public funds.

I do not say there is no need for teachers to better understand how to design curriculum and teach analysis and writing. Certainly, teacher training does not cover everything a teacher needs to be effective in the classroom. I am also not so foolish as to think I have nothing to learn. I am merely weary of being offered the same old meat in a new wrapper.

I am not sold.

Unlike some systems, this one is careful to cite research supporting their claims about how we learn and develop as communicators. What is missing? Respect for people as more than employees, genuinely innovative working structures, and the newest research on how we think and learn and develop as people.

Just one example: Human beings learn through stories. The presenters of this “new” system know this. Or they should. They used personal stories themselves in making their points about the need for this program. It is odd, then, that the words “story” and “narrative” were not listed in that binder. They seem not to exist as terms. Recent research makes clear how the human mind gravitates to story. It is as old as speech, this desire to convey ideas and values through narrative. Yet all the recent “innovations” from Common Core to this misguided program I attended, deliberately ignore how narrative informs our lives.

As bees dance to share the pathway to nectar, human beings share stories to explain their pathway through existence.

And some sweet.

The eagle pair have been here for years. Three flew yesterday—the pair and last year’s youngster all grown now and white-headed. This photo is from another year.