Heidi Hayes Jacobs' article on "The Need for Calendar Based Curriculum Mapping" was largely uninspiring. The article is hard to disagree with in its main point that schools need calendar based curriculum mapping. However, like most academically written articles about education, Heidi's article seems to offer a lot of common sense ideas without helping out real teachers. As a real teacher myself, I came away from the article thinking, "That makes sense I guess, but I will probably forget what it says in the next ten minutes." Her ideas sound great, but I am not going to go back to North Panola and tackle the task of curriculum mapping. Let some overpaid consultant do that.
As far as horizontal and vertical planning at my present campus, I think I have heard it vaguely mentioned, but it doesn't have any influence on my daily life. I have no clue what my kids did in the ninth grade, much less in elementary school. I think that having a mapped out curriculum for K-12 would be a great idea, but I don't know how realistic it is with our ridiculously high teacher turnover rate. I guess if we were to have a mapped out curriculum I would want it to align with the state frameworks as much as possible, and I would want to know the exact prior knowledge of my current students. As Heidi Jacobs says in her article, we "need to make sense of our students' experiences over time."
My plan for the summer is to map our exact schedule by the state frameworks in an order that makes sense. I also want a map that is logical and easy to follow for our first year teachers. One roadblock I see to successful planning is the fact that I haven't actually taught Mississippi Studies yet, so I will basically be a first year myself.
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