After discussing the ins and outs of curriculum and assessment in Education 394 I have started to get a grasp on where these two things come into play while teaching. From my understanding of what we have covered from both topics, the curriculum is the basis for which you should create your teaching on. In other words, it’s the foundation. After looking through some sections of the BC new curriculum I personally really like how everything laid out from core competencies to specific learning expectations. The reason why I enjoy how they have the curriculum set up is that it is framed in a way that suggests that curriculum is just a baseline and you can really make it your own. From what some of the instructors have expressed to us about the old ways that curriculum has been presented it seems that it used to be more like a checklist that you have to complete. Having said that the new curriculum is also a list of goals but it is framed in such a more inclusive way that really aims for more cross-curricular learning and openness to interpretation. Coming to assessment, grading and testing is something I struggle to justify. I totally understand the need for assessment because you need to be able to see where your students are at to plan for their learning based on that and also to see if they had met certain learning expectations. Why I point out grading and testing as something I haven’t fully grasped yet is because as a student I find that assigning a number or a letter to work is kind of arbitrary. That is why I do like the pass/fail structure of this program because it eliminates the need for a scale and to place students in a ranking on it. I did talk a little bit about assessment in my reflexive writing for Education 391 and the example that I used for why I am not fully okay with grading is dance. I was a dancer for over half of my life and have had the opportunity to take part in many competitions over the years. So, in this case, your adjudicator will assess you and give you a mark out of 100 based on your performance. What I argue is the problem with this is that the person judging you has no idea who you are or the progress you have made to get to this point and also you cannot always guarantee your best performance at the moment you are being assessed. Maybe I just have a hard time agreeing with the ranking side of grading and that is what is not quite hitting me right. The discussion we had in class about self-assessment did bring me some enlightenment though because if the student is involved in their own assessment this can provide a whole new perspective and make it more about the individual rather than the curve of the class. Overall, I hope to gain more knowledge on each topic to help me better understand their place in learning.