Staring Down The Content Monster

My class is heavily weighted towards skills, rather than content. This tends to frustrate students who are:

• good at multiple choice assessments
• good at guessing right
• good at memorizing random facts and vocabulary
• not so good at connecting those random facts in any kind of meaningful order

Admittedly, students in my classes aren't going to get a super-thorough grounding in the tropes of Victorian Literature--they'll probably miss out on the history and context and the dresses that covered ladies three times over from chin to toe. Also the whale-bone corsets. They will miss those as well. To be honest, though, while that stuff's pretty cool to me, it's really just Lit Major Brain Crack, not terribly useful in the context of the modern world outside of academia. You know what skills are universally useful, though? 

• making a good argument
• writing clearly and concisely
• understanding how other people manipulate them with rhetoric
• building a professional web presence
• learning to do good research
• being able to find cross-curricular connections
• learning to work with other, and what ACTUAL collaboration looks like
• building good presentations and beautiful slide decks.

Everyone needs to know this stuff. And a focus on those skills stops me from getting bogged down in the COVERING ALL OF THE THINGS monster that attacks every other day or so. 

Because despite how adamantly I am skills-based in my class, and how proud I generally am of what we do in class, there's always the sense that I'm not covering enough, that kids are going to miss out on something important, and that we should spend a few hours of our lives memorizing the definition of epistrophe and zeugma, just in case it shows up on a test they're going to take in a few months. 

That sense is ever-present for me, and it's only in conversation with my partner and the other people in our close-knit community that I can stare down that Content Monster and tell it to (bleep) off. They remind me that the content isn't nearly as important as the skills. I just have to keep telling myself that. 
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(A caveat: Yes, I know I'm an English teacher, and yes, I know that skills-based curriculum is much easier to accomplish in this class than, say, Biology or US History.)