I COULD’VE TOLD YOU THAT!! THE IDOL HAS FALLEN, THE TEMPLE ABANDONED, I LUCY CAULKINS IS NOT THE MAGIC BULLET

“Damn, I hate being RIGHT all the time!!”

---Ace Ventura


Though I DO own a crystal ball (it’s blue and it’s around here… somewhere) I am not a scryer As it turns out, I don’t NEED to be—almost everything I predict comes to pass eventually.

Take for instance the edict sent out last school year after a few teachers went to a 2 day seminar hosted by Lucy Caulkins. Whooo BOY were they PUMPED when they got back! Man, they were on FIRE (or is that fie-yaah??) They were thrilled and it was clear that they thought they had found the latest magic bullet to blow the lock off the door blocking students from learing and writing well.

“We’ve ordered her books!” the administration crowed, “everyone gets a set!” and then came the edict that, since the $$$ had ALREADY been spent—and rather a LOT of $$$ had been spent at that—we were to USE these books in our writing program. A gun was not ACTUALLY put to our temples, but it was obvious that we were to use these books right away. In fact, we should read them cover to cover o’er the summer and be ready to teach ‘em in the fall.

Summer came and I finally started reading the Caulkins series. Very lengthy, very detailed, very useful IF all I was teaching all year long was narrative writing (storytelling). What the Big Wigs missed was that Caulkins was pretty good for primary grades—K-3—but almost useless for intermediate of 4-5.

I won’t bore you with details about the 4 genres students are expected to write in, other than to say they’re narrative, expository (how-to), research and response-to-literature (book reports) and that the series of books 5th grade got was only useful for narrative. No where have I or other teachers found lessons on how to teach research writing or expository writing to students.

Of course, if you had GIVEN me the books last spring and ASKED MY OPINION, I would have TOLD you that there was so very little there and that these books should be SUPPLEMENTAL to the so-called curriculum, not a REPLACEMENT.

But no one asked. They merely ordered a few thousand dollars worth of books and told us to go use them.

Now, fast forward some 165+ days to NOW, the end of the school year. It’s been discovered—shockingly—that Lucy is NOT the magic bullet we looked for. Yes, she’s useful, certainly, but she’s far from the 1-stop-shopping we were hoping to get. The god has died, the temple is abandoned. Someone on the administrative staff actually admitted that it WAS probably a mistake to order SO MANY books and instead the writing should’ve been PILOTED in a few classrooms across the grade levels to see if it would REALLY work.

Of course, *I* could’ve TOLD THEM THAT back in april/May of 2006, but no one ASKED me (or anyone else) for my input. It looked good in theory and on paper, so the money was forked over by the shovelful and we were left to make the thing work. At least administration didn’t blame the TEACHERS when it didn’t work, which is the usual way things happen: the District buys a multi-million dollar math curriculum that turns out to be absolutely horrible and even stupid. Teachers complain, parents complain they don’t know what their kid is doing. The District, having spent 9 million, blames the TEACHERS and says that it’s OUR fault and not theirs for making a rash decision and forking over truckloads of money for a program that only looked good on paper.

IMHO this will be one of the causes of the downfall of Western civilization. As long as we allow people who DO NOT teach children each and every day to make decisions about what is right for those kids (that they don’t teach), and we allow THEM to make decisions re: what textbooks to buy, we’ll always have troubles. As long as companies as varied as Microsoft, Ford and McDonalds do NOT ask their employees how THEY can make their OWN jobs better, there will be problems. As long as we allow people who are more-or-less COMPLETELY DISCONNECTED from the actual WORK to make sweeping decisions about how that work shall be done, we shall never truly move forward.

Luv,

10,000 Spoons