I began my career as a member of a very large English department at a large suburban high school. Our curriculum at that time was a series of quarter-long electives.
Because we had eight to ten full and part-time teachers in the department, it was possible for a student to journey from grade 10–12 without ever having had an English teacher for more than a nine-week period. This is an extreme case that probably no longer exists in schools today. But it is useful to refer to it, because it brings the issue of continuity and consistency into heightened focus.
Though my departmental colleagues were all expert practitioners, we had few (if any) conversations about expectations, or about the ways that electives might be arranged in a sequence that developed skills and knowledge in a systematic way. We did have an agreement on which texts could be taught at which level, but the most important question — “What skills are we developing as we teach a text?” — had not been formally agreed to.
As a result, students did not have the benefit of reading, writing and thinking activities that were consistently taught and reinforced from teacher to teacher and from year to year. Just as problematic, the literary works they did read at each level were there because of teacher preference, not because they were logical extensions of essential questions that had been covered in preceding classes.
As a way of dealing with this discontinuity, I developed a two-year Humanities course (not “courses”) wherein successful completion of the first year was a prerequisite for enrolling in the second.
Immediately after launching this two-year program, I discovered how varsity football coaches felt when their first-string juniors returned to the squad for another year.
For my second-year students, the rules and procedures were understood at the outset; the expectations for practice, participation and performance were givens; and previously learned bread-and-butter plays (writing skills, essential questions, themes) presented themselves anew for more mature analysis and for ever more perfect execution.
They had returned to the same class in order to experience the second half of a continuous curriculum.
This two-year relationship was powerful — not only for students who relished taking essential ideas to depth, but also for the student who was 256th in a class of 300, but who nevertheless could find his footing on the scaffold that an intentional curriculum can provide.
I carried this idea of continuity to Bellevue International, but was able to extend it much further. We had designed a 6–12 school, and opened in 1991 with 150 sixth and seventh graders.
At Bellevue International School, I accepted the self-imposed challenge of creating a continuous seven-year-long course (again, not “courses”) where every activity was essential, and where new learning was based upon what had been learned before.
Quarterly grading periods, winter breaks and summer recesses were merely interruptions in a continuous learning journey.
By the time my 6th-grade students were seniors, we had built — and then climbed — a ladder of skills and knowledge that stretched back to the ground floor of our earliest years. Works and ideas that had been introduced in sixth, seventh and eighth grade were essential to the high-flying class discussions we enjoyed at the senior honors level — and my students and I relied upon and invoked this previous learning often.
Just as a high school senior needs to remember essential mathematical principles learned in the earliest years of his or her schooling, so a student in Bellevue International School’s Humanities class came to acquire new knowledge by connecting with, and building upon, previous learning. Seventh graders were engaged in activities that were important not only for seventh grade, but which would also become the foundation for success in each succeeding year.
In other words, 12th graders in Advanced Placement courses were expected to refer back to, and meaningfully incorporate, works, ideas and skills that they were first exposed to as early as the seventh grade. If this had not been the case, then the curricular experience would not have been essential or meaningful.
This is what was so powerful about combining long-term relationships (grades 6–12) with a curriculum that was designed to focus on essential questions, and upon the extension, application, elaboration and refinement of these up through all the grades. During the seven-year period that my students were with me, I could coach them, charge them up with fundamental skills and basic conceptua knowledge, teach them the intricacies of sentence structure and paragraph formation (so that their writing was not only correct, but also so that it could carry the weight of their increasingly complex and sophisticated thoughts), introduce them to the Socratic method, and give them a powerful jump start on their abstract and analytical thinking.
And most important: I could begin to imbue them with a belief in the validity of their own critical powers, and instill in them the conviction that the world they encountered was amenable to reasonable explanation — not mysterious — and that the history of human civilization and cultural experimentation was theirs to understand and to explore.
The goal of the Humanities Strand at Bellevue International School was to produce students who were realistic, analytical, and sensitive to the artistic and cultural products that have been created by their fellow human beings, both ancient and modern.
In addition to a substantial encounter with literature in all its forms, my Humanities students also studied the fine and architectural arts, the histories and distinguishing characteristics of political systems, and the history and characteristics of thought — both philosophical and religious.
The Humanities curriculum’s fundamental organizing principle was a belief that all areas of study in its domain can be referenced to one another — either as a derivative, a departure, a contradiction, a by-product, a corollary, or a transformation and extension of basic, initial premises.
When a high school Humanities student read “Death of a Salesman”, he or she was also expected to reference passages in Miller’s play to Ovid’s “Four Ages” (introduced in seventh grade), to mythological themes (introduced in seventh grade), to religious sacrifice, to the origins of tragedy (both introduced in ninth grade), to Platonic idealism (introduced in tenth grade), to Pyrrhonic skepticism (introduced in tenth grade), and to a neo-Romantic celebration of the attractiveness of nature, as opposed to the impress of civilization.
This unification of works that are separated in space and time — by both thousands of years and thousands of miles — helps us to understand the ways in which they participate in the ongoing artistic and reflective narrative of human culture — a system of artifacts, representations and pronouncements that springs not only from our nature, but also from a fundamental set of concerns that we all share.
These essential experiences and themes were applied and extended year after year, with the result that they became the tools and instruments of analysis — the knowledge of the history of a practice or idea; the knowledge of its make-up and origins; the knowledge of its various manifestations through time.
We call this knowledge the ability to view culture sub specie aeternitatis — under the aspect of eternity, and under the aspect of its participation in pan-cultural, thoroughly human contexts and forms.
Imagine a Bellevue International School class wherein students and teacher might be engaged for two days in an animated discussion of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” linking it back to the legend of Canute, to the plenum of Parmenides, to the wisdom of Aeschylus.
Or where the study of “Oedipus Rex” interfaces with the “Book of Job”, as well as with the theory of tragedy and its Dionysian origins.
Or where a study of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” ranges back to the “Epic of Gilgamesh”; forward to Osirian resurrection mythology; forward again to Beowulf, and forward again to Rousseau, Thoreau and Ray Bradbury’s “Sound of Thunder.”
Or where students can produce a graph that maps the inductive/deductive spiral of an essay by Mo-Tzu.
Or where students animatedly discuss the naturalism of Crane’s “Red Badge of Courage”; trace Heracleitan influences in Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 60”; or make connections between the “Bhagavad Gita”, the neo-Platonism of Plotinus and the “Immortality Ode” of William Wordsworth.
Or where students select, edit and perform their own ensemble Reader’s Theater performances, fusing selections from the work of Jack London, Publius Ovidius Naso, the Old Testament, Tennessee Williams, Kurt Vonnegut and Shirley Jackson.
Or where students, on demand and as early as seventh grade, can write effective appositives, introductory adverb clauses, non-essential participial phrases in several formulations, and a variety of sentence patterns — and know full well what these and other grammatical and structural terms mean.
The achievement reflected in my students’ test scores at Bellevue International School was not an accident of demographics — which is why I have arrayed these scores against those earned by students within the same district.
Instead, their achievements reflected what articulated learning experiences can produce: a familiar neighborhood of practices, skill development and concepts that are carried forward, and that build trust in the learning environment.
I share this story because it is a microcosm of what schools can become.
Though few teachers will ever have the luxury (and the burden) of being solely responsible for a student’s secondary preparation grades 6–12, they can create the same continuity and consistency within their departments and schools.