Week One: Curriculum

It feels good to be back in the game, to be back in classes, and to begin my last semester at the College of Wooster. I have a new roommate who came back from abroad, new classes to get excited about, and only one more semester of I.S. (my senior thesis) to complete! It was incredible to walk in on the first day of class and get to see familiar faces and "geek out" about education again. So, talking point number one, I'm happy to be back and I'm SO excited that education is still a part of my life this semester (not that I could ever separate education from life)!

I had a fantastic albeit busy and hectic first week with a lot of loose ends to tie up in the next few days, but I'm already excited about where this semester and this class will be taking us. I'm relatively sure that curriculum is not supposed to be this exciting. Isn't that the part that most teachers hate? For me, it's a puzzle...problem solving...a new perspective on the whole teaching profession that we really haven't been exposed to before. We've spent so much time focusing on how to teach a single, isolated lesson that it's refreshing to finally look at a larger perspective and see where your students have been and where they will be going in terms of the "big picture" rather than "yesterday they did THIS, and tomorrow they will do THIS."

In keeping with this week's theme, how do you personally view lesson/curriculum planning? Do you look at the big picture first, or do you have a tendency to sit down and go "oh, and then I could teach my lesson on _____ and then I could do ______"? Do you let the big picture dictate your lessons, or do you let the lessons dictate the overall curriculum?