Tony Allman- How long does this book stay in the school system?
Melasawn Knight- Six years, we are on year two. Four more years.
Sharon Brown- Ok, we have a motion, do we have a second? Do we have discussion?
Rob Shamblin- Chairman Brown, we have somebody back here I think wants to speak. I don’t know if
you want to recognize.
Teacher from McMinn High School- Hi, I am one of the freshman teachers, I am not trying to contradict
Melasawn, but I teach the ninth grade curriculum at McMinn and that book is not part of our
curriculum. We have others, we have the Pearson version, not that I am a fan of it but..
Rob Shamblin- Is that the older version?
Teacher from McMinn High School- No, we adopted a newer version when they adopted the older one.
Rob Shamblin- I spoke to another system that was familiar with that book, but they are using the older
version that doesn’t have the same verbiage and graphics. I don’t know what changed.
Melasawn Knight- It was taught at the other high school last year, Central and it’s the same curriculum.
Teacher from McMinn High School- Ok, yeah we didn’t do it at McMinn. The books are meant to teach
to the standards, which is what this curriculum is going to do. Develop the student’s knowledge with
the standards in an in depth way, and I completely support that. Common core for ELA makes complete
and total sense. I can’t speak for math, but I can for ELA. We are able to dig deep and we’re able to
look at things that we weren’t able to look at before. When we taught the old standards, I’ve been in
the classroom almost ten years, when I taught eighth grade at Sweetwater for five years and I taught the
older standards it was, ok what’s the main idea and then we moved on and ok what does this word
mean, it was very disconnected like Mr. Brady said. Now our standards pull everything together, so you
look at it in layered ways. I love the Holocaust I have taught the Holocaust almost every year in the
classroom, but this is not a book I would teach my students.
Tony Allman- We aren’t against teaching the Holocaust.