For years, leading up to our respective retirements, I co-directed several state-wide professional development projects with a math education colleague from University of Central Missouri – Dr. Terry Goodman.  I enjoyed working with Terry for many reasons, among them our similar philosophies (and senses of humor).  But another big reason was his good perspective on (math-) educational issues.
I’ll always remember one comment Terry made in one of the first programs we were leading together.  We were on a mid-day break and visiting informally with several classroom teachers.  They were discussing the yearly problem of feeling the need and/or the pressure to ‘get everything covered’ in their classes.
In a perfectly casual manner, with just the right touch of humor, Terry said, “I quit worrying about what I was covering in my classes and started worrying about what my students were covering.”
I always liked that statement because it was a clever way to frame what seemed like an obvious fact:  ‘Covering material’ doesn’t always equate to ‘student learning’, and it takes a good teacher to know when those two are happening together and when they’re not.
Knowing when classroom material is actually being learned in an authentic fashion is one of the toughest jobs any teacher has, and it can be severely hampered by getting forced into the ‘covering material’ trap.
This trap manifests itself in several ways, one of which we’ve already mentioned – the pressure, usually from some outside source, to ‘get everything covered’ before a certain deadline.
Another way this trap can show up is even more dangerous, because it can seem like a good idea at first.  There are school systems and/or institutions where it is required that all sections of a given class be ‘covering’ exactly the same material at the same time in each class.
On the surface, this seems like it might ensure some consistency of ‘coverage’ across classes.  In reality, there are few things that handicap a teacher’s ability to do his/her job more than an ill-conceived requirement like this.
I experienced this requirement first-hand once, in a community college course I taught for a semester.  It was neither fun nor productive!  Inevitably, there would be an occasional class session where it was clear that the particular material for that class hadn’t quite ‘sunk in’ yet with these students.  Every teaching instinct I had told me to back off a little and revisit the topic a bit more in the next class.  To do otherwise was simply not fair to the students.
And yet, that naturally took time away from what I was supposed to ‘cover’ in the next class!!  Once you’re in such a vicious cycle, it’s very hard to extract yourself.  The dilemma then becomes whether to honor your employer’s wishes and cheat your students, or vice-versa.  Not much saps the joys of teaching (or learning!) more quickly, and everyone suffers.
The irony (or is it the crime?) here, is that in each of these ‘covering the material’ traps, the power is actually taken away from the single most important person in the equation, namely the teacher.  We can’t continue to hamstring teachers trying to do their jobs, and then try to criticize them if things don’t work the way we want.
If there is any good news here it is that there is an escape hatch:  Let’s allow teachers to focus on ‘authentic student learning’ and not confuse that with ‘covering material’.