As if I already hadn’t said so, teaching is ridiculously hard work. As I come to the beginning of my third week as a teacher’s aide in a high school English classroom (and first official week in a student-teaching internship), that hard work is ever more apparent. But lately, something else is becoming crystal clear: The U.S. education system needs to revamp its curriculum.

I’m not talking about the Common Core or adding more AP science and math courses, either. You’ll get no argument from me that our schools need more well-trained science and math teachers to better engage the bored and battered coming into our classrooms. And with students spending an average of 53 hours weekly (weekly!!) with TV, video games or online, Lord knows we need a serious emphasis on literary analysis and the critical thinking developed by sustained reading and serious writing in English classes. (Side note, a 2008 study on writing and technology revealed that 73 percent of students surveyed do not consider their online writing, such as Face Book updates, “real” writing - although they enjoy it more than most in-school writing.)

But what I’m talking about are things like logic and personal finance and playing nice with others. Plenty of students can write a basic MLA-cited research paper, but it becomes obvious in class discussions they don’t grasp logic. They can parrot talking heads from “news-talk” shows, but they don’t know how to analyze media and, unless they hail from a foreign country, they know little to nothing about current events and how to read a newspaper. They know how to use an ATM, but not make a budget or reconcile a check book – let alone read the fine print on credit card interest rates.

They don’t know how to cook, grow their own food, sew on a button, and, hard as it is to believe in a supposedly post-racial society, they don’t really know how to get along or disagree with respect. Fewer and fewer have dinner with their parents nightly (or even weekly), so they lack basic manners; more and more come from divorced homes steeped in poor communication skills. In spite of living in a world where extremists have made religion a top-of-the-food-chain issue, all but a handful know anything about the history of religion, especially in the development of this country. Add to all that, only a teeny tiny percentage of our students are anything close to fluent in a second language and many way too many are fat.

Therefore, if I ran the world – or at least the Department of Education – I would change the required-for-graduation high school curriculum to include:

4 years of physical education – the kind with standards to meet, not just “grab a ball and play.”

1 semester of personal finance; final semester before graduation

1 semester of what used to be home economics. Students would learn the basics of nutrition; how to cook at least five balanced meals; how to mend clothing, and read a sewing pattern. This class would be responsible for the semester’s care of the school garden. First semester of senior year.

1 semester of economics and one semester of business math or statistics; senior year in lieu of 4th year of math. If the high end math kids still want Calculus AB and BC, they can have it, as well. But econ and business math are the requirements.

1 year of current events, taken concurrently with U.S. History during junior year. We’ve got a whole generation of kids growing up ignorant of what is happening round them and thus, unable to truly participate in a democracy (or know what we should be watching out for internationally).

1 year of a logic-media analysis class in lieu of the fourth year of English. (Yes, I know this is heresy for an English teacher-in-trainig, but I think that a logic/media analysis course would be heavy on writing/reading/analysis/critical thought, a senior English standard.)

1 year of a life-skills course, which would focus on interpersonal relationships, communication, manners, racial-cultural-religious relations, and communication with young people in other parts of the world.

1 semester of community service: Every student would participate in a semester-long community service project sometime during junior or senior year. The easiest option would be tutoring underclassmen or working with the special education classrooms at their school. But there are other options as well – and the students could come up with ideas. We need to help students become “other focused.”

As for that second language? In a forward-thinking country, a second language – most likely Spanish for the U.S. – would be taught from kindergarten on, just as English is taught as a second language in most developed countries beginning in elementary school. By the time these kids got to middle school, they’d be taking Spanish conversation and able to add a third language and learn it much more quickly, and continue through high school.

What do you think is missing from the high school curriculum?

Image courtesy of scienceblogs.com

Health care reform needs to include food industry reform. The well-off often wonder why the poor are obese. I can tell you simply: fattening “food” is cheap. I call it “food” because anything with more than four ingredients on its label can hardly be called real food – it is little more than processed poison, a poison laden, usually with high fructose corn syrup, the bane of anyone trying to stay healthy. It is put in food for one reason and one reason only- to appeal to our sweet tooth, to get us addicted to junk. I mean, really, does a fast-food burger need sugar? No, but they have them. And, as anyone knows, fast food is cheap – check out the $1 menus sometime.

This has been on my mind ever since the battle over health care reform heated up. We have an epidemic of obesity and we’re going to be paying for it either personally or through our taxes if we get universal health care. Ergo, we should care that people’s waist to hip ratio is right, we should care that the food stamp program in some areas is so backward it forbids the purchase of yogurt but allows people to buy soda, we should care that the food industry is stuffing our cows with corn instead of grass and beefing up our chickens with hormones to the point they can’t stand on their own…. and that all that poison goes into bodies that are biologically designed to eat food in its natural state and revolts (gains weight disproportionately) when we eat what our too busy (or too poor) lifestyles seem to demand: fast, cheap, processed food. (And don’t even get me started on the “leftovers” grocery stores and restaurants send to soup kitchens.)

I don’t have time to explain all this today, but luckily, the NYTimes is having a discussion about it today here, and there are links to various blogs discussing the politics of food, who gets what in our nation, and why the real health care issue is reform of the food industry here, here, here, here, here, and this video about “portion distortion” with links to more discussions on those blogs. Read them and engage your brain. Then take a walk, make your own lunch and read labels: If it’s got more than four or five ingredients, don’t eat it.

1. The post I did last week on noise in public libraries was a hot discussion topic both on this blog and out in my neighborhood, so I called Nancy Ledeboer, Pima County Library Director, today to get some information about how local libraries are dealing with concerns over noise. As per normal when one speaks with a librarian, I learned something: Libraries are actually serving a broader range of the public than they did in the past, thus being more “public” than ever.

“We say we’re a public library here to serve everyone in the community,” Ledeboer said. “But the truth is what we were servicing in the past were people from middle class backgrounds who grew up in a culture of using the library.”

But now, she explained, libraries are drawing from all strata of the community because libraries offer more than books. The Internet changed the game in the ’90s, and people who could not afford access to a private computer – or lacked Internet access at home – came to the one free place where they knew they could find both computers and Internet access.

“A whole new group of people began coming to the library library looking for information,” Ledeboer said. “That’s a good thing – we’ve got more and more people acquainted with the library and what a library offers. But it did create a clash of sorts because so many people are using it.”

That clash is often about noise. Ledeboer said it has been an issue at many of the 27 branches in the library system, and each of the libraries is dealing with it in different ways.

“We’ve charged each of our libraries to create a quiet zone, and if they don’t have enough space for a quiet zone, then they are working to create a quiet time. “But frankly, some of our libraries are just too small. In that case, people need to approach a librarian if they feel they are being disturbed. Some people are hypersensitive to noise, and some people don’t know they’re being noisy so it is a matter of finding a find balance where people can all coexist in the libraries. We do have a code of conduct policy posted on our Website that says you’re not allowed to create a disruption that interferes with other people’s use of the libraries, but we don’t have specific ‘no cellphone’ policies.”

Ledeboer also said that the belief that fewer people are reading books because they only use the library for the computers or to hang out after school is a fallacy. She said books circulation is actually way up in the past few years when contrasted to before the time when libraries were community centers, and part of that is because when people come into a library branch to do research on a computer or participate in one of the job clubs or book clubs or get tutoring, they often leave with a book as well.

So, yes, libraries may be more noisy than in the past, but that is because libraries are, thanks to computers, Internet access and the myriad programs offers, actually living up to the “public” in their names in a manner that didn’t happen in the past. And that’s a great thing. See how much you can learn if you talk to a librarian?

2. Yet again, there was a study saying we’re killing ourselves with food. Actually, the report was about how more 60-somethings are disabled now than ever before and that disability is directly attributed to obesity. This is something that really gets on my last nerve because – surprise – we all have the ability to control what we eat. (Well, except for those people who have the syndrome where they eat in their sleep and all that.) We have the ability to get off our tail and go for a walk or something more strenuous. We have the ability to say no or go to food-addiction meetings to get help saying no. But we don’t. How many times do we have to hear that we are killing ourselves by eating this and drinking this and then eating this? With talk of health care all the rage, is anyone besides me wondering if we should put a limit on what a government plan would cover in regards to illnesses caused by obesity? Should healthy taxpayers have to pay for people to get insulin when their diabetes could be controlled with diet but those people refuse to control their food intake? Should we fine parents who let their children get obese? If you want help eating right and exercising, here’s an article you could read. And here is a clue: The sooner you start getting in shape, the better it is for you. It is harder to lose weight with every passing year and the damage is cumulative.

3. And speaking of eating …Thanksgiving is just around the corner and fellow religion blogger Karen Edmisten is asking, “Have you started your Thanksgiving tree?” If you don’t know what one is, check out her blog here. We used to make these when my kids were small and I’m thinking the idea needs to be revisited, especially in this year of loss. Too often we focus on what we don’t have … a Thanksgiving Tree is the cure for that.

4.  John Allen, reporter on all things Catholic and Vatican has come out with a new book, The Future Church: How 10 Trends are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church. In this blog post, he says that if he had to pick a motto for his book it would be “Designed to start arguments, not settle them.” Sounds like my kind of read. Anyway, he is inviting people to read the book and then meet in cyberspace for discussions — should be fun. (And maybe interesting to see who actually shows up.

5. And finally, if you want to do good while you’re searching the Web, add GoodSearch to your browser. You can pick any charity you want and they get funds from your searches. Share, and share alike is what I say.