Trego's Mountain Ear

There’s a balance to be struck between the hard facts of a textbook and the beguiling prose of historical fiction. That said, modern textbooks are increasingly less “dry”, and more conversational.

Some of that may be an acknowledgement to the attention span of modern readers (Not, actually, shorter than the average goldfish, as it happens. But research does suggest a possible decrease, beyond the anecdotal commentary of previous generations), but another aspect is the human fascination with stories.

We are better at learning stories than lists of facts- so much so, that “create a story out of it” is a memorization tool taught to teachers and students alike. It makes sense that we would be; stories have been with us a long time, much longer than the written word, and there’s an argument to be made that modern humans evolved with them.

Regardless, general observation would tend to indicate that children, and people in general, are more interested in stories than they are in dry lists of facts and summaries of theory.

Thus, literature-based curriculum. Once, the guidance would have been to supplement the dry textbook with related reading. Take Radium Girls as an example: include it as a suggested addition to a lesson on radioactive decay. Or perhaps tell the story of Thomas Midgley, an engineer with a greater inadvertent negative environmental impact than most could aspire to accomplish deliberately, as part of a lesson on toxins.

Literature-based curriculum takes this a step further. Start with the story. Then, teach the concepts, the facts, the details as part of that story. Because the parts of a story matter; the names for the various layers of the atmosphere…mostly don’t, unless you have a good reason to think they should.

This has the additional advantage of encouraging literacy, especially important when it’s an area that students struggle in.

Trego School has recently shifted to literacy-based curriculum, especially for the younger students, and benefited from a grant from the Montana Masonic Foundation to help support this. This March, the school received $1,500 towards expanding the literature available to support their literacy-based program. The additional books will allow for more customization to student interests and reading levels.