It is amazing how a hidden curriculum, however unintended, can completely trump the explicit curriculum. Growing up my father's explicit curriculum was get good grades, pad your college application with extracurricular activities, and make lots of money when you graduate. He was trying to teach me to become the traditional American, class-conscious, money-driven picture of success. This was not because my dad was callous and cold, but because he knew how society was, and he wanted to prepare his children for it. I will always appreciate that he tried, but he did not succeed. The implicit lessons he taught in trying for me to reach his goal were the experiences that guided me in my current direction.
"You should be studying mathematics instead of watching TV." That is what I would hear every time after I would get a B in math on a test or report card. Sometimes it would be history, or English, or science, but until the next report card or test all I would hear is how I needed to improve my grades in a particular subject area. It worked; all the way through high school I only received one B for a final grade, and that was in senior physics. My father seemed to be relentless about my grades, but in actuality he was relentless about my education.
My father never missed a back-to-school night or parent-teacher conference in thirteen years of my education. He toured every college campus I considered with me and even attended my college freshman orientation. I remember in sixth grade a teacher told me that he was so impressed by how concerned my parents were about my education. Even if I got straight A's my father would ask the teachers where I could improve. He hounded school administrators and even the school board to make sure I was in the best teachers' classes and taking the most challenging courses available. It was the education that was important to my father, not just the grades. My father taught me to get good grades, but more importantly he taught me how critical education was in life.
With good grades in tow, I was now urged to prepare for a well-rounded college application. My dad didn't just encourage me to get involved with school teams and clubs. He signed me up to take training for a teen help line and made me wake up early on Saturday mornings to help with various service projects he was involved with. For me the community service was supposed to help with college admissions. But my dad had already gone to college, and here he was volunteering as much as I was. Living, working, and volunteering in the town where he was raised, my dad modeled the importance of community. While the personal benefits of community service were stressed to me as a high school student, my father taught me the greater societal benefits of community involvement.
Finally, I was ready to go to college. What was I to major in? I considered journalism, but it was my father that recognized my strength in math and suggested engineering. He even talked with me about being a woman in a male dominated field, and how I shouldn’t be afraid to seek out support. In preparing me to be a woman in engineering, my father was telling me that I could anything. I should not accept society's standards for women and minorities, but forge my own standard for myself.
"Whatever you’re going to do, I am not going to be happy with it." That was what my dad told me during spring break of my senior year when he found out I was joining Teach For America. My father had planned on his daughter forging new frontiers in the world of engineering, demonstrating to the business world the smart and capable woman that I was raised to be. Implicitly though, he taught me that I could choose any path for myself. As he stressed good grades and volunteer work, I learned to value education and improving society. Now I teach in an under-resourced urban area. It is funny that my father’s directions towards a completely different world quietly led me back to the values that were supposed to get me there: education and community. What is even funnier to me is how a doctor, who has been volunteering for five years, once a week in a poor, minority school helping kids learn to read, wonders how his daughter ever decided to become a teacher.
-- Chrissy Hart, American University