My second week of class

Reading about the historical experiments in integrated curriculum helped me flesh out the concepts of reading the first chapter in my guide to developing ITUs.

While reading the introductory chapter on what are interdisciplinary thematic units, I was a bit overwhelmed with the ideas of blending subjects, learning modalities, multiple intelligences, etc., because I am not use to the idea of being the a teacher in charge of a classroom and implementing a curriculum to a group of students. So it was very helpful to read the historical experiments and in my minds eye see the techniques that I've read about in our other text. Maybe it was the years in Sunday school and hearing so many moral imperatives in the narrative form that reading the stories of how these schools used integrated curriculum when it was not widely used, I could understand these new concepts.

I also found that trying to imagine myself as one of the teachers in the six classrooms that I'm in daily, and implementing these techniques in what the class is studying at the moment. Doing this helped me understand the concepts.

Working in a high school, in a particularly low test scoring school in the district, I see the need for the curriculum taught to the students to be more "child-centered", respectively, as a way for the students to be more motivated to learn. Of the four schools profiled in the Interdisciplinary Inquiry book, three of them focused on the intellectual development of the child. And working along side the young adults in my school, I feel that preparing these students to be individual thinkers is lacking, which is a shame. Especially in today's world, in this country, where our individualism is sacred to us, to we desperately need to teach our youth to think for themselves. In my own educational life, I remember most the teachers that had me question the world around me and got me to think about things in life that I did not have an answer for and wanted to find out.

I also loved the concept of thinking that a school was it's own community, a microcosm of society. I always heard my parents growing that I should work hard in school because it would give me the tools to work hard in life. Oh how I wish I would have listened to them more intently. Nevertheless, we see this today with examples like school government which I can finally understand the value of, empowering future leaders.

Much was learned in this week of reading, about how ITUs can be implemented and the pioneering of interdisciplinary design. I'm starting to see the forest through the trees and I'm gaining a grasp of the subject.