T oday, I had four students show up to class with neither pencil nor pen. Another nine had no paper.

Yesterday, I took up student journals to grade. This was no surprise, since it had been written on the board. Six students did not even have their journals with them, even though these are daily required materials in my class.

Last week, I handed out a packet on fragments and run-ons, a packet that was their homework to turn in the next day. At the end of class, I found three of them left behind on the floor of my classroom.

So, just for a quick summary: 15 weeks into the school year, I had 13 students who had either nothing with which to write or nothing on which to write it, six who didn’t have a homework assignment that was a graded daily requirement and three who couldn’t possibly complete the graded assignment for the next day. And all of these numbers come from a single class of 25 ninth-graders!

The numbers are remarkably similar in my other classes.

Yet my department head, my principal, my district, my state, my entire society is mandating that I teach all students assigned to me what parallel structure is, what a comma splice is, what the theme is in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” what the difference is between a simile and a metaphor, what a good thesis sentence looks like, what the typical five-paragraph essay should be, what context clues can be used to decipher unfamiliar vocabulary words. And much more of the same.

Don’t get me wrong. As an English major, I fervently relish these concepts; as an English teacher, I fully appreciate the social value of attaining such skills; and as a professional, I am altogether committed to doing my best to impart such knowledge to every child who passes through my door daily.

The state and the district refer to such skills as GLEs, for grade-level expectations, and they are subject-specific to each secondary core curriculum needed for graduation from a Washington public high school; they are non-negotiable.

However, I’m wondering – just wondering, mind you – if I really am, at the heart of it all, teaching these children what I truly should be teaching them.

Curriculum, curriculum, curriculum – it’s on what the GLEs focus; it’s what the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) tests; it’s what the PSAT and SAT test; it’s on what the federal No Child Left Behind Act was built.

Thus, it certainly seems that our entire society values curriculum above all. Yet nowhere built into that mandated curriculum is the purposeful instruction in ethical principles. Nowhere. You can even check the Washington Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction Web site ( www.k12.wa.us) if you’d like to double-check my facts.

A solid work ethic? Timeliness? Preparedness? Organizational skills? Responsibility? Socially acceptable behavior? Integrity? Respect? Honor? Diligence? Nowhere to be found in any official curriculum guide; thus, not to be emphasized in the public school classroom.

But a comma splice must be both taught and tested. The same goes for the ability to comprehend a piece of text written by John Steinbeck or Harper Lee or Frederick Douglass. And the same for the definitions of the words “superfluous” and “pernicious.”

I am by no means suggesting that we begin to ignore the aforementioned curricular abilities; to me, they are still absolutely necessary in order for an individual to become a learned and productive member of the greater society. Rather, I desire that some perennial values be deliberately instilled in our children via an ethically comprehensive curriculum in our public schools.

Some may ask me why I don’t have pens, pencils and paper in my high school classroom for thoroughly unprepared students; or why I don’t allow for several days, or weeks even, for thoroughly neglectful students to turn in late work to me; or why I don’t run out and find thoroughly disorganized students in their next classes to get work to them they have left behind in my classroom.

The answer is pretty simple – I refuse to teach just curriculum. There are far more crucial issues that have been ignored in the education of our children for far too long. I want to remedy that deplorable fact. I want our state, our nation, our society to want the same.