My wife and I both love doing yard work. Really, we do. Give me a weed whacker and a compost pile and I am in heaven. When we moved to our house over 15 years ago we had a 10 year plan to make our home the most wonderful garden we ever had seen. Well, in our minds it would be wonderful anyway. So you would expect our gardens to be finished, right? Well, no. Because stuff changes.

Last year, for example, we got a new next door neighbor. Steve is a nice guy. He is very friendly and likes to chat. He also has horses. Nine horses, to be exact. In late summer those horses make a lot of dust. That wonderful view we didn’t want to block with trees was now a pathway for dust! We are in the midst now of a new landscaping plan. One that includes a lot of dust trapping trees and shrubs along the eastern edge of our property. The wonderful view of the sun rising over the Sierras will be gone. Its not that our original plan was bad, or wrong. It is just that stuff changed.

Curriculum is like that. There was nothing wrong with how I was teaching five or six years ago. (Well, ok, I had lots of room to improve, work with me here.) But I cannot use those lessons anymore. Those projects kids spent a couple weeks on? There’s an app for that now. You can do those “projects” in about 5 minutes on your cell phone. And the kids know it. I could “make them do it, and most of them would. But that would be kind of pointless. I am supposed to be preparing them for the future, not simply keeping them busy. So this summer, between planting new trees and going to lots of edu-conferences, I will, once again, be revamping my curriculum. Because stuff changes.