It’s about historical accuracy. Imo, this non-religious mythological character from Ancient Greece should really be played by a blonde woman from Algermissen, Germany.
Has anyone else had experience with the Odell Curriculum?
I’m sorry, you’re gonna have to buckle in because this is a long one.
I’m at a new school this year that has just instated it, and it has been so soul-crushingly awful I just want to sob.
I’m in a low-income district, and teaching tenth grade to students who are, on the whole, at about a sixth grade reading and writing level. Honestly, Ive taught 6th grade for the past couple years, and most of my 6th graders were at a higher ability than my kids now.
The school’s abysmal test scores of has of course resulted in the expected outcome - administration has bought a cheap state-sponsored curriculum, foisted it on the school, decided to overhaul the entire grading system, etc etc - every annoying superficial change you can make, short of actually sitting down and carefully analyzing what factors are holding back our students.
ANYWAY, they have insisted Odell be taught to the letter, no modifications or changes. Which is ridiculous because 1, the texts offered by the curriculum are already above a 10th grade reading level. The first damn thing you learn on the education track is Zone of Proximal Development - you cannot drop a college-level scientific article in front of a student at a 6th-grade reading level and expect them to just “rise to the occasion.” The entire point of our job, or at least I thought it was, was to help them bridge those gaps in attainable knowledge increments - apparently I was wrong.
Secondly, the curriculum is THE MOST BORING CURRICULUM I have ever been subjected to in my life. There are only two offered books available to us, and we are only doing one this year - a nonfiction text, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” The other units are a unit on ethics made up of YouTube videos, a unit where they watch the entirety of “Hamilton the Musical, and take notes (without any specific purpose or guidance for said notes), then a giant Research Project that they are expected to repeat every single year.
Not a single novel? Absolutely zero creative writing? And the handful of essay assignments are fucking abysmal - throughout Henrietta Lacks, students are repeatedly asked to write detailed responses explaining “how does the author use syntax and text structure to represent the perspectives of the figures in the book?” Just fucking shoot me now.
And thirdly - ITS NOT EVEN GOOD! Half the directions don’t make sense. Materials are not included and are often genuinely non-existent on the internet. The curriculum requires various “tools” that be downloaded and printed for students, and a lesson might ask students to find evidence to add to their “Evidence-Finding Tool,” and then take the evidence they’ve found to complete an “Analyzing Relationships Tool,” and then take what they’ve done there to fill in their “Forming Evidence-Based Claims Tool.” It is legitimately absurd. And there’s zero actual writing instruction included in the curriculum whatsoever, something our students desperately need if the goal is to actually, idk, help them get better!!!
And on top of all that, the genius creator of this state-approved curriculum, my mortal enemy Judson Odell, has a GLOWING resume: a BA in philosophy, a MA in ~~~DIVINITY~~~~, and spent a total of three years teaching college humanities in a school that appears to be entirely unGoogleable but may or may not have actually existed at some point in Argentina?
The kids hate this curriculum. I hate this curriculum. I got into teaching English because I love writing and I love novels, and I’ve always loved seeing the kids’ creativity and ideas and hearing their opinions and discussions, and this year there is absolutely no space for ANY OF THAT.
I just keep thinking, what am I even doing here?
I legitimately love my students, and after getting laid off from a new school last year, I just don’t have it in me to jump to a new district and do another first year. But at the same time, I don’t know if I can handle another year of this utterly-joyless, dry-ass, badly-organized, inaccessible curriculum.
Has anyone else been saddled with this soul-crippling, useless curriculum? Can anyone send help, or advice, or prayers? I’m just banging my head against the wall here.