Baseball & Teaching

"When I was playing baseball, most of the time i wasn't playing full-scale four bases, nine innings.  But I was playing a perfectly suitable junior version of the game...But when I was studying those shards of Math and History, I wasn't playing a junior version of anything.  It was like batting practice without knowing the whole game...In The Right to Learn, Stanford educator Linda Darling Hammond logs how narrow curriculum standards, bloated textbooks, and pressure for coverage have led to a piecemeal curriculum."
-Making Learning Whole: by David Perkins

This quote made me feel both guilty and eerily reflective.  In my first years of teaching, how guilty I was of 'piecemealing' curriculum; teaching comma usage and poetic language in isolation of the 'whole of writing'.  I should have explained what a whole piece of writing looks like, why we write an entire letter, before teaching a specific writing standard.  Damn those NCLB masterminds!  They created a piecemeal monster.