Caught in the Middle: Nonstandard Kids and a Killing Curriculum

Once again, Ms. Ohanian reminds us that "it is better to do nothing than to do something bad....First, do no harm." (138) Then she tells us about Lucille who wants to pass the test but doesn't think that she did so well. And then she gets sick. "I try to rush her to the lavatory, but we don't make it, and evidence of Lucille's 'failure' lies visible in the hallway... As I clean up the vomit, I vow never again to drill children on such inappropriate curricula." (172) By telling the stories of real children who need relevant curricula in their lives, she echoes my belief that the most important factors in any lesson are connection, community, competence, and choice. "I only know that if you don't recognize and accommodate and nourish uniqueness, you don't have any chance to educate children in your care--not for writing, not for anything. And to recognize a student's uniqueness you have to offer him choices. Real choices. And to offer students choices, a teacher has to make choices herself. A teacher who makes choices is a teacher who is still alive." (99) It is my hope that educators read this book as well as Ms. Ohanian's previous book, One Size Fits Few: The Folly of Educational Standards, and make note of the many wisdoms found in them. I share Ms. Ohanian's belief that the truth about education is found in our children's stories.

Why should you read Susan Ohanian's latest book? Caught in the Middle: Nonstandard Kids and a Killing Curriculum doesn't offer any lesson plans or multimedia interdisciplinary thematic units. It won't help you align your curriculum with state standards. Ohanian doesn't bolster every claim with research, or bandy about the latest educational jargon. And there's not a single rubric to be found.What Ohanian does is tell the stories of real children, mostly seventh and eighth graders she taught over a ten-year period in New York. The children she focuses on are the most vulnerable, the least likely to succeed in a bureaucratic system: Keith, a fifteen-year-old who reads his first book, Dr. Seuss's Hop on Pop, in eighth grade . . . paranoid Arnold, who recites a catalog of those who are trying to kill him . . . Tiffany, nobody's friend, until she discovers a thesaurus and falls in love with whoop and rhapsodize . . . unforgettable Sylvia, a legend in her own time, who curls up and sucks her thumb while listening to John Ciardi read poems with his son.The children's stories, told in exquisite and sometimes painful detail, bring vivid particularity to themes that Ohanian addressed in more theoretical terms in her 1999 book, One Size Fits Few: The Folly of Educational Standards. The new book is devoted to the children who don't meet the standards, and the harms they suffer from a standardized curriculum. Ohanian writes, "We must get back to the craft of nurturing children, proclaiming loud and clear that no curriculum silver bullet is going to enable every kid to succeed in every subject. Rather than dumping children who don't master algebra and semicolons and the intricacies of the elastic clause in our Constitution onto some refuse heap, we must help these children develop the skills and talents that will guide them in finding useful and satisfying lives in the real world."Ohanian offers no panaceas, no sure-fire solutions for nonstandard children. Instead, she opens her craft for inspection, sharing a decade of teaching -- warts, bodily fluids, and all. One of her caveats for classroom management is "Don't trust anybody who tries to define and organize what you do." On lesson planning she writes, "I may be reluctant to draw a road map for where the class is going tomorrow, but I carry a thick atlas of possibilities." Her message is clear: What we teach and how we teach it must be shaped by who we are and informed by the children we work with, not by standards imposed from the outside by bureaucrats and politicians. Writing with grace, power, conviction, humor, and an incredible literateness, Ohanian earns a place among the ranks of the great classroom chroniclers like James Herndon and Sylvia Ashton Warner. Despite the failure and frustration that mark the lives of children caught in the middle, Ohanian inspires us to an uncompromising advocacy of children as she exhorts us "to keep one's eyes on the needs of children in a system run