Bleah. Curriculum mapping ... again.

Curriculum mapping today. I'm so enthusiastic I could just spit.

Years ago, it began as a piece of paper that briefly said what material and concepts were happening when. This basically worked well. It was called a syllabus and it was "The Course." You used it to guide your teaching. Teachers talked to one another and compared notes. Life was good.

Then the State Frameworks arrived and all was "Wrong, wrong, wrong."

So a few brave souls from each department earned much summer stipend money and aligned everything with the State Frameworks. Each course had it's section in the Big Folder and things were good. Every chapter had it's place and every teacher could look up what happened when and why. (Few did -- the syllabus was still pretty useful -- but the point was that we could.) Life was good and students were taught.

Then the State decided they wanted to update things. "Frameworks BAD. New Standards GOOD." Yep, you got it. Time to change the Book.

So after many hours of work over another summer, the Book was aligned to State Standards and all was good. (We didn't actually change very much, just re-referenced the new sections to the appropriate spot in the Standards, but hey!) Every chapter had it's place and every teacher could look up what happened when and why. (Few did -- the syllabus was still pretty useful -- but the point was that we could.) Life was good and students were taught. The Book ruled.

Then, out of the darkest night, came the GLE's, the Grade Level Expectations. "The Standards are wrong, wrong, wrong. We must align to the GLE's. " Not even the dreaded teacher whine "We won't do it unless we get stipends" was enough to derail this latest round of editing super-goodness. Money was found because NCLB was threatening on the horizon.

But this time there was a new wrinkle. The Secretary had been ordered to make up a "Template" - in Excel because the Principal had no idea that you could make a table in Word. So the Book was transcribed into Excel. Anyone who knows Excel knows how badly this went.

Then the superintendent's office purchased licenses for an on-line system, $5 per student per year. Why did they charge for an online curriculum mapping system by the student? No one knows. It was so slow and cumbersome, no one ever used it. It could insert the particular GLE for you, if you were patient enough to click through all the tiny little plus-boxes and expand every branch of the tree each time you inserted a standard. After the inservice training, though, no one did.

So that initiative failed.

So we now have a new system, CLI. That's where we are today, transcribing our courses into a new on-line system. We have to write "essential questions" and indicate the content, skills, assessment, activities and resources. (You know, make something up.) "Can the students manipulate binomial and trinomial expressions and use algebraic representations for real-world situations?" As a bribe to get us to do it, we're paid an hourly stipend AND we get 3 graduate credits toward recertification.

Who says there's no waste in education?