COME ONE, COME ALL! Share your “you can’t teach that” story. Share what caused a curriculum complaint. Perhaps it was a book, a unit, a topic, or a method of teaching. 
As teachers, we often have to be diplomats, thoughtfully moving among various circles. At some point in your career, what you are teaching will be questioned. If it has not happened yet, it will. Trust me.
Share that experience with us. Rambling is allowed.
Please adhere to the three simple norms so that the tone is purposeful and informative, rather than harmful and vindictive:
• Share your frustrations and be honest. Your experiences are important.
• Leave names of people, districts, and schools out.
• Share what we can learn from your experience. Is there a policy change that can be made?
My goal with this post is to get as many teachers (others, of course, are more than welcome) to have a common place to share. From this open discussion (one-way), we can create a dialogue (two-way) from some important thread that is seen throughout the posts
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2 thoughts on “You Can’t Teach THAT!”
At the risk of drifting things off of Travis’s point, great example, Tom, of an important step in risk estimation and calculation, and building a rough prototype of an actuarial table, an everyday task for addressing social events, even for 3rd graders. Let us know how you adjust it next time around.
OK, Travis; I’ll bite:
A few years ago, teaching third graders, we came to our unit on division right around the same time as the baseball playoffs. So I gave each of my 24 students a candy bar. Then I took all the candy back and told them if they picked the World Series winner correctly, they could have all the candy for themselves. Except they would have to split it with everyone else who picked that team. I let them spend some time online researching which of the eight teams had the strongest season. They made their picks and we kept track of the playoffs on a large chart. As the teams were eliminated one-by-one, a student came to me and asked, “Aren’t you just teaching us how to gamble?” I had to admit that I was, although I clung to the fact that since the candy was mine, they weren’t really gambling; just trying to win my candy.
Fortunately, none of the parents complained, at least not to me, and we did have some pretty meaningful discussions about division. (The Yankees won that year, and the winners had 24 divided by six pieces of candy.) I’ve since rethought the experience and decided to used different methods to teach division.