Oct 11 - Eisner's Three Curricula

There were a few things that made me stop in this article. I was very curious about Jackson's perspective that children must "learn to delay their gratification" and even if a child has the right answer they must learn to share gratification with other members of the class. This whole idea got under my skin a little. I don't like that students are taught to accept suppression. I also felt like it sent a bad message that students shouldn't expect to have their voices heard all the time. I do agree that students should give others the chance to speak and answer, but I don't agree that students should accept deprivation of gratification. I think as teachers it is our job to help students gain gratification in their own ways. Even if I had a class of 30 students and it was impossible to give each student public gratification every class, I would find some way to help each student gain individual gratification in different ways. There are other ways to allow students to express their ideas and get confirmation on them. For example, you could use the think-pair-share method so that every student would get the chance to share their ideas with at least one other person. The opportunities are infinite and so I don't accept what Jackson says. Every student deserves to feel heard and gratified. Another point that made me stop was the discussion about how if initiative was important then schools would make it part of their culture and encourage its development in many ways. This reminded me that schools have the ability to instil many things in their students. School is the best avenue for nurturing an ideal, yet schools often don't utilize this power in the right way. It also reminded of me how governments often used schools to promote their own ideals to younger generations. I just felt frustrated thinking about this. Schools have so much power to do good in the world, to inspire students to create change in the world revolving around a million issues: racism, gender identity sexual orientation discrimination, sexism, poverty, bullying, the list goes on. Unfortunately schools often fail at making changes in society, and I wondered why. The last point that made me stop was the discussion about how competition is bread in schools by the existence of grades and their importance for university entrance. I had never heard of the extent of competitiveness that students would resort to, I couldn't believe students would deface books just so other students couldn't access them and hence get ahead academically. It boggled my mind that this even happens. I do think competition is good for human progress and development though. Specifically if I think about science, many discoveries came from scientists competing to be the first to discover "X". It became this huge race against one another, which lead to more scientific discovery and accomplishment as a planet. An example of this was the development of space exploration, USA wanted to beat the Russians and that is how we landed the first man on the moon. But some of this makes me wonder what the human race could accomplish if they worked together, putting great minds in one room for the same purpose and the same goal or would the lack of competition reduce the urgency and acceleration of development? I don't really know.
I never really explicitly thought about the null curriculum as being part of curriculum, but I guess not teaching students about, for example, domestic violence and how to seek help would be like condoning it and teaching students that it doesn't matter. This really changed my views on how I plan to move forward in teaching. I hope that I never neglect an important theme in my teachings. I felt that the explicit curriculum related to the content curriculum in BC Provincial Curriculum, while the implicit related to the core competencies, however I wasn't sure what the null curriculum related to.