The Curriculum

Growing up, I always listened to what the teachers asked me to do in regards to assignments and projects. I always thought that what the teachers taught us the teachers came up with the criteria and content that was taught. But now that I am in my second year of education I have now learnt that the curriculum is not created by teachers, but rather by people that you'd never think would create the curriculum, one being textbook companies. I thought that textbook companies would be the LAST people to ever have any input in what goes into the textbooks that gets taught to students. For one, I can't help my brother with his math homework anymore because the way they teach math is not how I was taught, same for my parents. They have a new textbook now for math called Math Makes Sense, and almost every student, and even teacher, that I talk to says that it is not a great method of teaching math and it confuses the children with the examples they use to explain a math question.

I feel that as teachers we should have the most authority over what goes into the curriculum as we are the ones teaching it to our students. Even students should have a say so we know what is effective or not effective in what we teach to the students so that we can make necessary changes to what we teach based on what works and what doesn't work as well. Aside from these negatives and the fact that teachers don't have much of a say in what gets placed in the curriculum, the curriculum is great in the sense that some of the content is very informative and goes in depth in some subjects. It also gives structure to teachers and can provide several ideas to teachers.