There have been many debates since the promulgation of the Common Core standards about the appropriate balance between literature and “informational text.”
The writers of the Common Core think that American children spend too much time reading fiction, not enough time reading “informational text.”
But the New York Times reports a new study, published in the journal Science:
“It found that after reading literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction, people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence — skills that come in especially handy when you are trying to read someone’s body language or gauge what they might be thinking.
The researchers say the reason is that literary fiction often leaves more to the imagination, encouraging readers to make inferences about characters and be sensitive to emotional nuance and complexity.”
Outside experts concurred with the study’s importance.
The article says, “The study’s authors and other academic psychologists said such findings should be considered by educators designing curriculums, particularly the Common Core standards adopted by most states, which assign students more nonfiction.”
David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core, once famously said, that “[A]s you grow up in this world you realize people really don’t give a s–t about what you feel or what you think.”
The latest research says he is wrong. Reading literary fiction teaches you how to interact with people in the world, how to understand how they are reacting to you, a skill that is highly valued and necessary if you want to advance or be hired. People do care how you feel and what you think.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Let’s be careful about demanding that everything we read (or teach) in classrooms have an effect on some practical or test driven outcome. Much of what we teach is and should be justified on the simple grounds that our children have a right to be exposed to beauty. Period. Much of literature, art, music, even math and science – the key issue is that it is a beautiful and profound idea that affects people’s emotions, sense of wonder, and the humanity of their living experience. This is like justifying music because it improves math scores (which is not supported by the evidence!). So what. Our children deserve beauty – and literary fiction is an important part of that. Period.
yes. And wonder.
AMEN!!! It has been said that Shakespeare, I am paraphrasing, was one of our greatest psychologists – not what was meant by Dr. Maldonado but pertinent nonetheless AND many believe that listening attentively to the greats: Mozart, Bach et al, that one’s abilities in many areas are enhanced. Certainly it has been used effectively in many areas of human growth.
I used to tell my students, I hope with reason, that when one becomes totally involved is something greater than themselves that at least for that time they have become in a real sense have become a part of that greater good.
Yes, and is not education about searching for ultimate good, BEAUTY, and truth.
In his wonderful book on Shakespeare, Harold Bloom points out that most writers, even great writers, produce at most two or three fully realized characters and a whole bunch of stereotypical ones but that Shakespeare created 20 or so. And, BTW, it is NOT the case that these plays were written by various authors. All one has to do is to turn from one of these plays to another Elizabethan playwright –Dekker or Kyd or Jonson or Marlowe, for example–to see how distinctive Shakespeare’s style was and how the language elsewhere goes dead. And one can easily spot a passage in Shakespeare inserted by another author. And one can do scientific studies of stylistic features of his texts that prove to an enormous degree of certainty that they were created by him. He was an astonishing psychologist, no doubt about it.
absolutely
Glad to see this!
If the CCSS lovers realized the long list of literary characters they remind many of us who do read literature of, they would be able to get a better sense of why there is resistance to this sweeping nationalized cookie cutter approach to schooling. Literary characters help us keep ourselves in perspective; and that seems to be seriously lacking among leadership lately.
That’s hilarious, Joanna. Exactly.
“Literary characters help us keep ourselves in perspective; and that seems to be seriously lacking among leadership lately.”
Reading about others’ idiosyncrasies and their impact on the characters and those around them does help to prevent some measure of idiocy on my part. 🙂
YES!
Empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence are potentially subversive traits, and a clear threat to TINA (There Is No Alternative). Small wonder that David “Nobody gives a s&p! what you think” Coleman and his backers would seek to remove them from the classroom.
Exactly…which is why fiction is not a friend of those who insist on re-forming education. Re-form empathy, social perception, and emotional intelligence out. This is why re-formers have worked so hard to eliminate all arts–literature, poetry, music, theater, visual arts, dance (which is part of music, P.E., theater, drama curricula). I spent part of yesterday looking at the art of The Mexican Revolution and wondered, where is the comparable art of the U.S.? It has been legislated out of existence, out of schools, out of sight.
I was talking to an elementary teacher, yesterday, who does a lot of reading aloud of substantive narratives with her kids. This approach has, for years, been riveting to her students and has been the springboard for an enormous amount of highly creative, substantive teaching. But now she is having to shelve all of that to do canned, skill-based Literacy Design Collaborative lessons from the Gates-funded LDC on random topics and skills. And so her superb teaching, about which she told me many stories, has been rendered incoherent by these insane “reforms.”
Googled “what businesses want from college grads” and this is the title of the article I got…..Employers More Interested in Critical Thinking and Problem Solving Than College Major National Survey Shows Need to Increase Focus on Applied Learning, Intercultural Skills, Ethical Judgment, and Evidence-Based Reasoning as Outcomes for All College Students….and then read a quote from Common Core architect, David Coleman, that said, paraphrasing slightly, “when you get out of school no one cares what you think or how you feel”….pretty scary
Great teachers have always known about the power of using fiction.
On testing… a friend of a friend posted this letter on Facebook that was sent out to parents from the school principal. (the mom now has a blog as well). Diane I thought you’d enjoy it – the grass roots movement is springing up everywhere.
My daughter’s new elementary school principle sent this to all the students as they received their state standardized testing scores this week:
“We are concerned that these tests do not always assess all of what it is that make each of you special and unique. The people who create these tests and score them do not know each of you– the way your teachers do, the way I hope to, and certainly not the way your families do. They do not know that many of you speak two languages. They do not know that you can play a musical instrument or that you can dance or paint a picture. They do not know that your friends count on you to be there for them or that your laughter can brighten the dreariest day. They do not know that you write poetry or songs, play or participate in sports, wonder about the future, or that sometimes you take care of your little brother or sister after school. They do not know that you have traveled to a really neat place or that you know how to tell a great story or that you really love spending time with special family members and friends. They do not know that you can be trustworthy, kind or thoughtful, and that you try, every day, to be your very best… the scores you get will tell you something, but they will not tell you everything. There are many ways of being smart.”
My friend reported her daughter who did well on the test shrugged about her scores, but read the letter over and over and held it close to her heart announcing, “I really love this.”
Mary – this sentiment is lovely. Do you know who the principal was who composed this wonderful letter?
Mary – the sentiment for this letter is so lovely. Do you know who the principal was who composed this?
Wow!!! What a GREAT letter!!!! This principal is a hero.
Only if the principal refuses to give said tests and refuses to have all the accompanying time wasted on special tests and prep. If his or her school continues such educational malpractices then he/she is certainly not a “hero”. (I despise that term, the usage of which diminishes it’s true meaning).
This kind of thing–reporting to parents–is important. And it’s courageous.
Super star Principal!
The obvious question here is to what if any extent this has any causal component or whether it’s strictly a matter of correlation ie people who like fiction tending to be more people oriented as opposed to people who prefer “informational content” tending to be more object oriented.
David Coleman gets one thing right: I don’t give a shit what he feels or thinks.
Clearly, that sentiment should be more widely shared. I have a litmus test for whether someone understands the first thing about teaching English: Does he or she support the breathtakingly amateurish CCSS in ELA?
Funny, but true!
I second that.
LOL!
Reading must be encouraged, not discouraged. Since when does he know what will inspire a student?
Well, if we are being honest it is true that “nobody gives a sh*& what you think”. Except there are those rare times when you are the first to think of something, or you are in the right place at the right time to articulate something many people have thought about. Then, it really matters that you think and that you know how to express your thoughts well.
This, I would say, is the point of education. Good habits of the mind can be affirming to the individual on a daily basis and are a public good on an occasional basis. If you fail to develop the former, you’ll never get the latter.
People give a $@^$@^& about what others thing ALL THE TIME. That’s what we do. As Heidegger put it, we humans care characterized by care, by concern, by our investment in our projects, which includes how others related to these.
cx: People give a $@^$@^& about what others thing ALL THE TIME. That’s what we do. As Heidegger put it, we humans are characterized by care, by concern, by our investment in our projects, which includes how others relate to these and to us.
David Coleman couldn’t be any more wrong. Nearly all of human evolution and current behavior is geared exactly toward understanding what people think and how they feel. Humans, like every other mammal, are social creatures. Our very survival depends on learning to understand what people think and how they feel.
If this is in reference to what David Coleman said at a conference in Albany NY, it is probably fair to look at what he actually said and its context. He was talking about the design parameters behind the common core and had arrived at issues around writing:
“Do people know the two most popular forms of writing in the American high school today? Texting someone said; I don’t think that’s for credit though yet. But I would say that as someone said it is personal writing. It is either the exposition of a personal opinion or it is the presentation of a personal matter. The only problem, forgive me for saying this so bluntly, the only problem with those two forms of writing is as you grow up in this world you realize people really don’t give a sheet about what you feel or what you think. What they instead care about is can you make an argument with evidence, is there something verifiable behind what you’re saying or what you think or feel that you can demonstrate to me.”
Click to access fulltranscript.pdf
For me, it is an empirical question of whether Coleman’s assertion is accurate.
The “accuracy” of Coleman’s (stupendously arrogant and wrong-headed assertion) is a red herring.
Anyone who has taught children, which Coleman has not spent a single day of his life doing, knows that learning must be approached via the child’s identity, experience and sense of self. This is as true of adolescents as it is of small children.
What Coleman revealed with that comment, aside from his arrogant ignorance about how children learn, was his and his Masters’ harsh, intolerant worldview. Children must constantly have their experiences and insights validated, lest they be prematurely crushed by an indifferent world.
That indifferent, crushing world is just what Coleman and his backers seek to impose on teachers and kids, a world where profit and the will to power rule.
Michael:
If when you say, “Children must constantly have their experiences and insights validated, lest they be prematurely crushed by an indifferent world.” Children thrive best with positive feedback, I agree. But then I suspect Coleman agrees as well. If you mean that children literally need to be allowed to make statements that are not accurate because they think they are, then I disagree.
Inaccurate statements by students should of course be corrected, and I did not mean to suggest otherwise. Their experiences should be acknowledged and their identities validated unconditionally, in all the various ways that a compassionate, experienced teacher can do so.
If David Coleman believes that – which his words and output both suggest he does not – he has a perverse way of showing it.
So true Michael. Can you just imagine the way Coleman would react if he were to teach a lesson to a group of very young children?-the wide eyed little ones who in their excitement constantly want to interrupt and tell you how what you are talking about relates to something that happened to them’ “One time…..” I suppose he would just tell them he doesn’t give a s%#t what happened to them “one time…” and tell them to get back to filling in the bubble on the test. Sheesh. I apologize in advance for taking liberties with proper punctuation and sentence stucture-it is just my passion leaking out.
Elevating argument in this way is indefensible. It’s one human modality of many. Coleman knows NOTHING about the teaching of English.
All matters are personal matters, Bernie, even if the matter at hand is the writing of a scientific or mathematical treatise. Look around you in the world. Easily, 80% or more of all writing produced is fictional or nonfictional NARRATIVE. Coleman sets up a false dichotomy here. And, it is NOT the case that most writing done in our schools is of personal opinion pieces. Clearly, as a matter of empirical observation, that is false. I’ve been working with schools around this country for 30 years now, and I absolutely know that that is a false claim. What is true is that kids do a lot of narrative writing. That they do so reflects a fact about writing in general. Almost all writing that people produce is narrative or partly narrative. And the rest is informed by people’s narratives.
Even the methodology section of a scientific paper is typically at least in part narrative.
There is some NCLB-inspired insipid personal opinion writing assignments in current textbooks. These mostly take the form of short, so-called “extended response” assignments modeled on the NCLB-inspired tests. One finds these execrable writing prompts on most of the state exams. The writing of person opinion pieces can be very valuable, but they have to be properly framed for kids to get anything out of producing them. For example, a lot can be learned from having kids instantiate a rhetorical technique for persuasion–such as, for example, the use for persuasive purposes of the objective correlative to create an emotional response or of storytelling to take advantage of the availability heuristic whereby people form opinions based upon their most recent “experiences,” even if those are vicarious ones.
Fascinating insight from the man who ignored all the available evidence and instead designed the ELA content on what he thought and felt would “work”. A man who continues to ignore the evidence based arguments regarding brain development, cognitive learning theory, and social, emotional development of children.
Mr. Coleman makes several false and misleading assertions in this and other speeches he’s given. Here he implies that students are rarely asked to do argumentative or analytical writing. My thirty-three year career teaching English tells me that’s false. This coincides with his misrepresentation of how literature is commonly taught. He claims that students aren’t asked to actually understand what they read, or back up what they say about a work with evidence from the text. False again.
Adding the context to his infamous soundbite doesn’t redeem it at all. He isn’t just denigrating personal forms of writing (among the most potentially authentic and powerful forms of writing we have), he’s attacking the basic foundations of democracy (what “the people” think and feel). What’s embedded in the context is the belief that people who are able to “make an argument with evidence” get to make and enforce the rules. It doesn’t matter that the argument is faulty and the evidence suspect, as Coleman’s arguments and evidence most certainly are. Precious little of what he says about teaching and learning is “verifiable.”
Smart people can justify anything. Mr. Coleman has used his verbal skills and ambition to build a lucrative fiefdom and land a high-profile job. That doesn’t mean his pronouncements are right or just. If more people spread the truth about how unsound the “Common Core Standards” and accompanying testing schemes really are, the pedestal he’s on will be undermined.
All you have to do, though, is listen to the soundbite. Does that kind of world view really belong in a discussion about educating children? To my mind, he’s disqualified himself from any role in education at all. And he keeps doing it over and over.
URGENT:
PLEASE send this to every public school parent you know.
The way FERPA was amended by Arne, without congressional approval, parent permission is NOT required.
Excerpt:
InBloom seems designed to nudge schools toward maximal data collection. School administrators can choose to fill in more than 400 data fields. Many are facts that schools already collect and share with various software or service companies: grades, attendance records, academic subjects, course levels, disabilities. Administrators can also upload certain details that students or parents may be comfortable sharing with teachers, but not with unknown technology vendors. InBloom’s data elements, for instance, include family relationships (“foster parent” or “father’s significant other”) and reasons for enrollment changes (“withdrawn due to illness” or “leaving school as a victim of a serious violent incident”).
Ms. Barnes, the privacy lawyer, said she was particularly troubled by the disciplinary details that could be uploaded to inBloom because its system included subjective designations like “perpetrator,” “victim” and “principal watch list.” Students, she said, may grow out of some behaviors or not want them shared with third parties. She also warned educators to be wary of using subjective data points to stratify or channel children.
One scene in the inBloom video, for instance, shows a geometry teacher virtually reassigning students’ seating assignments based on their “character strengths” — helpfully coded as green, yellow and red. On his tablet, the teacher moves a green-coded female student (“actively participates: 98 percent”) next to a red-and-yellow coded boy (“shows enthusiasm: 67 percent”).
Executives at inBloom say their service has been unfairly maligned. It is entirely up to school districts or states to decide which details about students to store in the system and with whom to share them, Sharren Bates, inBloom’s chief product officer, said. She said the company does not look at, use, analyze, mine or sell the student data it stores.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/business/deciding-who-sees-students-data.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0
Let me be as clear about this as I can:
We humans are storytelling creatures. The stories that we tell ourselves are our PRIMARY means of making sense of the world. There is a great deal of cognitive science on this topic. Memory is largely reconstructed narrative. And, there is a large and very successful current approach to clinical psychology called cognitive narrative therapy that is all about teaching people to tell more life-enhancing versions of their personal narratives to themselves.
In addition, as historiographer Hayden White pointed out years ago in his seminal work “The Literary Text as Historical Artifact,” when we say we “understand” a piece of history, what we are really saying, whether we are aware of it or not, is that we have imposed a narrative frame on historical events so that they cohere and make sense.
Given the CENTRAL role of storytelling to human “meaning making,” it’s clear that the arts and sciences of storytelling should also be CENTRAL to our teaching. There’s a lot to learn there that is really, deep, really key to what it is to be human.
We are storytellers. There are other human faculties that are important, too–the ability to reason, the ability to love. But storytelling is central to those, too.
Our ideas of who we are and who others are depend upon the stories we tell ourselves. Storytelling is the central means of human meaning making.
Amen!!!
Thank you for clarifying. On occasion , lately, you have begun to delve into a more vernacular way of expressing yourself, and I find myself missing the scholar.
Then you write a passage like this one: “a lot can be learned from having kids instantiate a rhetorical technique for persuasion–such as, for example, the use for persuasive purposes of the objective correlative to create an emotional response or of storytelling to take advantage of the availability heuristic whereby people form opinions based upon their most recent “experiences,” even if those are vicarious ones.”
I love the way you play with words to convey your thoughts, but you play with more words than I can easily get my head around on occasion. You illustrate, for me, the reason for teaching deep reading. I have to pull out the dictionary to check for meanings in context and reread, leaving out phrases to find the meat before I add the sauce.
In case I am not being clear…I enjoy reading your comments. 🙂
Great point. This is one of the many reasons why Coleman and the “Common Core Standards” are wrongheaded. They’re not forward thinking at all. They represent a giant step backward.
Narrative is actually more important than argumentation. Interesting, though, that Coleman isn’t even very good at building an argument. If he were, his speeches wouldn’t degenerate into misplaced derision and profanity.
Randal:
I do not know the details of the ELA common core. That said, I do not read Coleman’s statement as an either or proposition. In my quasi technical world, argumentation was significantly more important than pure narrative. But I am pretty certain Coleman is emphasizing critical thinking rather than decrying writing style.
He might want to engage in some of that thinking real soon since his takeover of public Ed isn’t going too well and he won’t be able to blame extreme groups much longer. Possibly he can do it without profanity or insults.
bernie1815:
It’s not the writing style, Coleman is talking about. It’s the writing mode. But he’s barking up the wrong tree. For one thing, as Robert Shepherd pointed out, narrative is part and parcel of cognition. Coleman’s superficial attack on narrative is an attack on thinkers like Mark Johnson and George Lakoff–see The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language and Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors we Live By–and on a host of recent authors who’ve pointed out the practical importance of narrative in the workplace and in professional discourse. See Stephen Denning, Annette Simmons, even the movie producer Peter Guber, and many others. One technical application of narrative is in software development, where “user stories” are seen as a key to improving both the code and the user experience.
Authentic stories trump specious argument questionable data and every time. But so far education policy makers haven’t gotten the news.
Randal:
I am not a Lakoff fan, though I grant the importance of both metaphor and narrative in verbal communication.
I still see Coleman as arguing for a balance among the modes – but I have not read the details of CC ELA.
That is… Authentic stories trump specious argument and questionable data every time. But so far education policy makers haven’t gotten the news.
My read of the Common Core is that it asks for more reading in addition to fiction–not as a replacement to fiction. The argument is to do more informational text reading overall, not less fiction in English classes. This is certainly something many teachers of science, math, history, etc. will confirm as a weakness in student ability. Many science/math teachers require minimal reading in their courses. Those teachers that do–are not worried about the new standards… Why is this controversial?
Mark, the authors of Common Core made a fundamental error by stating what percentage of reading should be literature and what percentage should be information text. There was no reason to do that. These are judgments that should be left to teachers. One could teach both or either and do a good job.
If we had good standards, as opposed to the amateurish CCSS in ELA, then these would take a systematic approach to narrative. They would deal with archetypal narratives and their variants and develop understanding of those over multiple years. They would measure outcomes of systematic, coherent learning progressions that familiarize students, again over multiple grade levels, to the astonishing variety of narrative forms and techniques. They measure outcomes of systematic, coherent learning progressions that familiarize student with the major cognitive metaphorical and symbolic networks via which people make meaning and that are KEY to understanding how language works. For example, “understanding” is a metaphor. It means, literally, to stand under something. It’s connected to a whole network of metaphor that relates thought to spatial orientation–good is up, bad is down, etc. No one who does not understand the ancient symbolic network that connects the life cycle to the cycle of the year can REALLY have a decent grasp of what’s going on in an enormous amount of human literary and spoken communication. I good go on and on.
But the amateurs who put together the CCSS in ELA weren’t aware of any of the deeper studies of literature, language, and meaning making, clearly. Otherwise, they would not have produced the drivel that they produced. An amazing, unprecedented opportunity was lost when these new standards [sic] were produced was squandered. And we now have a document so retrograde, so uninformed, that it will set back innovation in ELA pedagogy and curricula a half century or more.
Some corrections to that post:
If we had good standards, as opposed to the amateurish CCSS in ELA, then these would take a systematic approach to narrative. They would list measurable outcomes, for example, related to learning progressions that systematically, and over years, develop understanding of archetypal narratives and their variants. They would list measure outcomes of systematic, coherent learning progressions that familiarize students, again over multiple years, with the astonishing variety of narrative forms and techniques. They list measurable outcomes of systematic, coherent learning progressions that familiarize student with the major cognitive metaphorical and symbolic networks via which people make meaning and that are KEY to understanding how language works (e.g., “Understanding” is a metaphor. It means, literally, to stand under something. This so-called dead metaphor, which is actually very much alive in that it conditions how we think, is connected to a whole network of metaphor that relates thought to spatial orientation–good is up, bad is down, etc. Another example: No one who does not understand the ancient symbolic network that connects the life cycle to the cycle of the year can REALLY have a decent grasp of what’s going on in an enormous amount of human literary and spoken communication. I could go on and on, multiplying examples here).
But the amateurs who put together the CCSS in ELA weren’t aware of any of the deeper studies of literature, language, and meaning making, clearly. Otherwise, they would not have produced the worse-than-useless drivel that they produced. An amazing, unprecedented opportunity was lost when these new standards [sic] were produced. And we now have a document so retrograde, so uninformed, that it will set back innovation in ELA pedagogy and curricula a half century or more.
Dienne – Every mammal is social? That’s certainly not true. Humans indeed are social and all primates except for lemurs and tarsiers and their allies all social but lots of mammals are not social. Among the cat family for example only domestic cats and lions are social.
Jim, it is a myth that other cats are not “social.” Social interaction is very important in domestic cats and central to their lives:
Some people regard cats as sneaky, shy, or aloof animals. Cats have an inherent distrust for predator species such as humans, and often seek to minimize any contact with people they do not perceive as trustworthy. Feline shyness and aggression around people is often a result of lack of socialization, abuse or neglect. Cats relate to humans differently than more social animals, enjoying some time on their own each day as well as time with humans.
Cats have a strong “escape” instinct. Attempts to corner, capture or herd a cat can thus provoke powerful fear-based escape behavior. Socialization is a process of learning that many humans can be trusted. When a human extends a hand slowly towards the cat, to enable the cat to sniff the hand, this seems to start the process, and can also remind a cat of a human they knew long ago.
There is a widespread belief that relationships between dogs and cats are problematic. However, both species can develop amicable relationships by reading each other’s body language correctly. The animals can better read each other’s language when they first encounter each other at a young age, due to the fact that they are learning to communicate simultaneously.
And see this:
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/wild/unlikely-animal-friends/videos/the-cat-and-the-crow/
It’s difficult to escape pictures on the Internet of cats of all ages cuddling with one another and with a wide range of other creatures.
So, while domestic cats are less social than are lions, it is false to say that they are “not social.” Hierarchical relationships–which are social relationships, surely–are very important to domestic cats, for example, and so are bondings with other cats, as any cognitive ethologist who has studied the matter can tell you. The death of a companion cat TYPICALLY sends the other cat into a terrible depression and sometimes even results in death.
See also Darwin’s The Expression of Emotion in Humans and Animals, a delightful early study of emotion in nonhuman animals, mostly mammals, as a means, primarily, of social signalling. An enormous evolutionary continuity there, which is why Darwin devoted so much of his life to studying the subject.
Due respect, Robert, but you are wasting your erudition on a man who thinks blacks are inferior. Pretty useless to argue.
BA in English. Second grade teacher. Life-long devotee of good fiction. Yes! Yes! Yes! Aren’t students reading enough non fiction in science/history/etc? Why not get those teachers to teach nonfiction reading skills?
And, Coleman’s “three modes” approach in the CCSS encourages the writing of formulaic five-paragraph themes on idiotic topics. I am seeing a DELUGE of new CCSS-inspired curricula of that kind right now. The CCSS in ELA are disastrous for education in the language arts, for many, many reasons. It would take me a couple months to list them all.
Robert – If you read what I wrote note that I said that domestic cats and lions are social. However all other felines (of which I think there are about 30 species) are non-social.
My apologies, Jim. You are absolutely right about what you said. I doubt, however, that if one actually delved into the field literature on, say, civets or lynxes, that one would find that social behavior plays no role in their lives–in their development, for example. All cats nurture their young.
There’s been some interesting speculation that feral domestic cats are genetically diverging from present domestic cats and gradually evolving into a non-social and untamable species. The North African wildcat which is believed to be the wild species from which domestic cats were developed is solitary. North African wildcats look very much like domestic cats except that they average about twice the size.
That is fascinating, Jim. Really, really interesting. Thanks. These changes can happen very quickly in response to new environmental conditions. There were great experiments done in Russia with foxes. By simply breeding them based on how closely they would approach humans, the researcher was able to produce a creature that barked, had droopy ears, was very tame, and had doglike coloring in only three generations!
But I suspect, given your knowledge of natural history, that you were already familiar with that classic study.
Without fiction my soul would die.
Tell Coleman to:
LIVE PONO (ethically), not easy.
He also needs a good dose of ha’a ha’a – humility.
CUI bono?
Cui bono indeed. There is a reason why Gates and Pearson put billions into the standards-and-testing “reforms.” Both have business ventures whereby they stand to make a great deal of money from “creating a national market for [educational] products that can be brought to scale,” as Arne Duncan’s office puts it. Think: The Walmartization of U.S. education. Education big-box store style. As if we weren’t already well down that path.
That said, I do believe that Mr. Gates has a genuine philanthropic motive that is more important to him, in this case, than are his financial ones, and I don’t distrust financial motivations per se. Gates is doing astonishing work on vaccines in the “developing” world–he is personally responsible for saving the lives of many millions of kids. I think that he genuinely wants to improve U.S. education. I also think that his chosen policies there are disastrous for reasons that he does not understand because of the group think of those he has surrounded himself with. Few people have ever had the positive effects that he is having via the vaccine work. And for that, I very much honor him. The education work, however, is doing a lot of harm.
Robert, my apologies I responded to an earlier comment before I saw this one.
Robert:
You are probably correct about Pearson’s motivation but then they are publishers. I remain unpersuaded that Gates is pursuing a mercenary objective. He has given huge amounts of money to eliminate polio without any mercenary motives. He may genuinely believe he is doing a good thing around education reform. I would need to see actual evidence that Microsoft is investing in the education market before I would begin to give credence to the charge. Previously somebody pointed at a $15 million investment in some education research project. I can assure you that nobody at Microsoft pays too much attention to that type of investment. It is veritable chickenfeed.
All mammals nurture and raise their young but this is not what constitutes sociality. Tiger cubs will stay with their mother for a year or two but then leave and thereafter they never return. Individual tigers at a watering place may tolerate each other prescence as they drink water from the same source but other than occaisional chance enounters adult tigers interact only for a brief act of copulation. Otherwise they live alone and like it.
Mating is a rather social behavior, don’t you think?
Good points, Jim. Very well argued.
No. Mating is not inherently a social behavior. In species which are social such as most primates mating may have social aspects but sexual reproduction is very common over a huge range of biological organisms and not inherently social. The mating of tigers is completely unsocial. In tigers of course males play no role whatever in raising young but even say in many species of birds where males play a big role in raising the young the formation of a male-female pair is not social behavior. On the other hand ants are highly social but only a tiny number of ant individuals ever mate at all.
Robert – It is interesting that the North African wildcat in becoming domesticated as the domestic cat became a social species while on the other hand domestic dogs which are derived from the Eurasian wolf lost much of their social behavior and are less social than wolves.
This is fascinating. The domestication took place in different ways. Humans and dogs were long commensal, so the domestication took place in a different way than for cats. For dogs, it was a big step to separate from the dog pack and join up with the human pack. This one will be interesting to think about.
The social nature of lions allows them to take out elephants sometimes. One after another the lions jump on the back of an isolated elephant and eventually bring it down. Although individual tigers are generally more powerful than individual lions, tigers never engage in cooperation in hunting so they couldn’t do this. Lions will drive game into ambush by other lions in their pride but tigers always stalk their prey individually.
Diane is on msnbc,Chris Hayes in one minute.
Here’s something else that really astonishes me about the folks who buy into these standards-and-testing “reforms”: they seem actually to believe that these current high-stakes tests are valid measures of general reading and writing ability, as if reading and writing ability were not VAST areas of endeavor, as if there weren’t VASTLY different kinds of each.
It as though they were giving, say, tests of mountain climbing ability that deal only with ability to lace up one’s hiking boots and knowledge of good wicking fabrics.
The lack of understanding on the part of the test makers and the test promoters of the gulf between what they think they are testing and what they are actually testing is breathtaking, and it’s breathtaking that those in the English teaching profession have not risen up in a single chorus to denounce this absurdity.
But here is why that has not happened: those knowledgeable teachers have not been organized, and they have not had organizations–unions–led by people knowledgeable enough about the teaching of English to be their voice in this matter. Instead, their unions have bought into the CCSS as fully as if they were employees of the Gates Foundation or of Achieve.
The supposed tests of reading and writing ability are ridiculous. And we need to start making that clear to the people who take them seriously.
That wonderful principal, today, who wrote to the parents of his students to say, these tests don’t measure the times you help a friend who is feeling sad, how well you can dance, etc., didn’t go nearly far enough. He should also have said, “These tests do not measure how well your children can read and write and think.” Not by a long shot.
Robert:
I agree that these standardized tests have many limitations. However, I believe that these tests do in fact measure “general reading and writing ability” in the sense of a lowest common denominator. If you have a better approach, I would love to hear it. I grew up in the UK with lots of open ended questions on our standardized English Literature exams (“O-levels”) but in essence they graded us on knowing the content not our ability to write.
In classes of 20 to 30 and a student load of 100 plus, how realistic is it to do more? That is a genuine question. I can see pushing for more among a select group of students, but such efforts would have been totally lost on a math nerd like me.
You are making, Bernie, the fallacious assumption that some such test is needed. No valid such test can be constructed, and none is needed. And these tests do enormous damage. They DRAMATICALLY distort curricula and pedagogy, which take as their goal not teaching English but teaching kids whatever it is that is necessary in order for them to pass these tests. I can demonstrate these dramatic distortions in hundreds of individual lessons and exercises in NEW! Common Core Aligned! ELA curricula currently hitting the market and in the formulatic lesson plan designs being foisted on the nation’s teachers.
Here’s the problem with that: opportunity cost. The time spent doing this gawdawful test prep is time taken away from teaching English.
Robert:
I do not think I am arguing for a standardized test per se, but I am arguing that part of the current test measures something and that is the general ability to read a short piece of text and answer questions about it. I have not seen the writing tests so I will withdraw any comment on those.
I am still looking for data on how much time is spent test prepping. The AFT did one covering two school districts. The bottom line was that it was not much different than the time my wife spent on her Archdiocesan tests in the 60s.
Are you saying that there is no room for or need for any form of standard assessment of writing ability? I can tell you that as an employer we had to come up with tests to ensure that our office staff could perform basic business writing tasks. It was not pretty and these were all 4 year college graduates from good schools .
Having your office staff demonstrate basic business writing skills is hardly the same task as having every public school student in the United States demonstrate the ability to follow an approved canned rubric never mind that the people who are speed grading them are not qualified to teach the writing they are grading. I sound a trifle snarky and I don’t intend to be, but I seriously do not see what we hope to gain by it. The tests do not inform instruction since the students have moved on in their schooling, so they are of no value to teachers or students. You have the expert opinion of several people on this blog explaining the shortcomings of this testing mania and yet you still insist on relying on the leadership of a man who has little real experience in education or testing.
2old2tch:
You say that I ” still insist on relying on the leadership of a man who has little real experience in education or testing. I think you mistake me.
My initial comment here was to simply point out that the Coleman quotation was taken out of context. I do not know enough about the CC ELA to assess Coleman’s contribution. I already noted that assessing the writing skills of students or anyone for that matter is not easy, certainly not as easy as assessing somebody’s knowledge of math or grammar or spelling.
The issue of the use of summative testing is dependent upon its purpose. For example, when we hired someone for a job, we need to know whether they were equipped to do some of the basic tasks. College GPAs were not particularly helpful.
I spose I was more miffed that I felt like you were not giving Robert credit for his expertize especially in comparison with a man with nowhere near the same expertize.
As to whether your job applicants can write a business letter, that I would guess depend on whether they went to secretarial school or “business” college in the loosest sense of the word. Writing business letters was not part of my college training forty years ago nor was it part of the training of any of my four children at their colleges. It seems to me that businesses appear to have dropped all training that use to be on the job in favor of demanding that public education meet all their training needs. Now we are in the era of unpaid internships with the chance of future employment. Give me a break. Sorry, but you hit a sore spot. I trained my teaching associates. Why shouldn’t you train your employees?
2old2tch:
The issue is not writing a business letter, it is writing a simple declaratory statement. Of course we trained people on things we had no expectation they would have learned in college.
I have a great deal of respect for Robert’s expertise as I believe is demonstrable in each of my responses to him. I also respect his willingness to acknowledge when he has made a mistake – which is not often. At the same time we have disagreed about things.
I am sorry about the dismissive and flippant tone of my answer, Bernie. It’s late, and I am tired.
Here’s what I mean when I say that such tests are not needed. We have decent diagnostic tests in reading and for some speaking and listening skills. Those are quite valuable, and with some research, we could improve them a lot. What we do not need are these lame summative tests that distort pedagogy and curricula because they have been made high stakes. Diagnostics, yes. Those can tell us a lot about where we stand. These simple-minded summative instruments–no. They do a LOT of damage. In their place, we have LOTS of alternatives that would be more finely tuned, including large, ongoing, multi-year, locally juried portfolios of student work; tests given by classroom teachers with excellent training in their subjects and in assessment. Various grading schemes. And even, as much as I detest them, normative tests like the Stanford, ITBS, and current SAT exams. I can even imagine various kinds of qualifying exams for entry to various programs post-high school. But these current high stakes tests are criterion-referenced, and if you are referencing lousy criteria, and if you then make tests based on those lousy criteria high stakes, you deform the teaching that will be done. What is happening in our classrooms all across this country, right now, as a result of these exams is a disaster.
I can imagine a bright young person, just out of college and full of more self confidence than knowledge, going to work for an educational publishing house, starting work on a new integrated language arts series, and sitting down and writing something very like the Common Core State Standards in ELA–an outline of outcomes to be measured in the various domains in the field of K-12 English studies. I can imagine that editor thinking that he or she had done fine work. And then, without doubt, a few years on, that same person would look at this beginner’s work with embarrassment.
Unfortunately, the entire country has been saddled with the embarrassment that is the Common Core State “Standards” in ELA–amateur work by someone with very, very little understanding either of best practices in the teaching of English or of the sciences of language acquisition.
Measuring reading and writing ability with these current high stakes tests or with the PARCC and Smarter Balanced Tests being developed (if one judges by the sample questions posted on their websites) is like measuring metric screw threads for United Thread Extra Fine standards conformity with an eight-pound sledge hammer.
Good diagnostics, ones that are finely grained, can be useful. But summative tests this crude are not only useless, they are damaging. And they are damaging because people take them seriously, despite how flawed they are.
Robert Frost writes in one of his delightful essays that the beauty of metaphor is that it breaks down. Well, the analogy with which I started this post breaks down here: the United Thread Extra Fine standards are legitimate, scientifically designed, valid, clearly and repeatably measurable standards. The CCSS in ELA aren’t
“Other animate creatures have powers innate to them, like the power of running in horses or flying in birds, but to mankind has been given the desire to know, which is also where the humanities get their name. For what the Greeks call paidea we call learning and instruction in the liberal arts. The ancients also called this humanitas, since devotion to knowledge has been given to the human being alone out of all living creatures. This kind of study is more varied than the other branches of knowledge, but I hope that those who are now [at the stage] of understanding literature on their own will have acquired such pleasure from their studies that they will have little need of my urging.” Battista Guarino, letter to his young pupil on a program of teaching and learning. Verona, 15 February, 1459, in Craig w. Kallendorf, Humanist Educational Treatises (Cambridge, Mass: I Tatti Renaissance Library, 2002), p. 307
My 10 year old son, Alexander loves to read and I asked him his thoughts about what literary fiction teaches him…
“They teach me about things that are happening in the world. For example, the author, Rick Riordon incorporates real facts but through fiction. I can also learn how characters react to things without actually experiencing them…. like if someone lies to someone else you can see how they react and consider whether it would be realistic and wonder whether would someone in real life react this way. I can feel the reactions of the characters and it’s so fun. Fiction gives me a chance to get a break from the real world…it’s an escape and takes me somewhere else…like a time machine!”
“Fiction is entertaining and fun and I learn a lot. Reading gives me a chance to learn new things. If I didn’t read fiction I wouldn’t know as much as do like Greek mythology, Egyptian mythology and other cultures, plus I learned a lot about science through fiction. I like the techniques the author’s use to learn non fiction facts through fiction. I love Rick Riordan books and Eoin Colfur books.”
Coleman and Duncan should talk to Alexander…he got a 4 on the crazy ELA but I’ve refused future testing after I got informed about the effects of testing. I’m sure he would tell them a thing or two. 🙂
Bernie,
I see from going back over your comments that I have been unfair to you. There are times when I should keep my mouth shut especially when I don’t reread a thread often enough to remember its flow. I apologize for my testiness.
The lack of writing skills probably depend a bit on the college majors of your employees and the types of writing tasks that students are now given in this age of power points and tweets. I do not find that technology has improved the ability of people to communicate in writing. I also find that certain majors require less rigorous standards for writing. I went to a small liberal arts college forty years ago where I don’t remember an exam without a blue book. Bubbling was not a skill we were required to master. I imagine that people who have attended schools with massive classes are doing less writing than is optimal. I found, though, that my ability to string words together didn’t really come together until graduate school. Since I was raising a family, I took the entire six years to complete the program, which may have actually worked to my advantage. I really got to think about my courses while taking them one at a time. I did a lot of writing and thinking about how to convey my thoughts effectively. Perhaps I was slow to develop these skills, but I suspect that good writing takes a while to develop and a lot of practice. “Use it or lose it” definitely applies.
When these reformers can understand and appreciate the perspectives and opinions of our students and not be critical that they are not “at their level” of understanding their world and how things are, then maybe real learning will take place in classrooms across our beautiful land. The best classes I have experienced are when the students can connect reading to their level of experiences, and let us not overlook the “storm and stress” years of middle school. Emotions play a huge role in the development of human knowlege and understanding, and YES, validation of these emotions is crucial to understanding how students learn. Stop being so critical about where our students need to be at every developmental age, and start tuning in to their emotional development instead. When a child is hungry or sad, one must attend to these basic needs before any kind of learning can take place, and this is the problem with these reformers: their inability to see the HUMAN side of learning is not in their equation of accountability. So what am I trying to say here? At the classroom level, teachers are tuned in to the basic needs of every student and know that learning takes place when their students are emotionally healthy, when they don’t come to school worrying about their home lives, their environment, etc. The older students want desperately to fit in and make sense of where their place is in the community and beyond. What I see is a ruthless push for our students to think and behave like good, obedient workers, to never question WHY they are required to follow the strict rules and procedures in their schools. Suzie and Johnny must adhere to the rules set by the adults because that is just the way it is? Wow. Thank you, reformers, for your lofty mandates requiring students to “reform.” However, here is one secret that you are clueless to: they are on to you, and sit back patiently for their “reform” k-12 to pass, and then they will unleash their version onto the world, and they will stuff all of you reformers into nursing homes and keep doing what they are already doing: playing with their phones and laptops, communicating with the world through their emotions, and trust me, as they mature, they will form their own opinions and critical conclusions and realize exactly what you tried to force down their throats in school. Give it time. Give it time….
Reblogged this on Transparent Christina and commented:
YOu mean this is better for College and Career ready? Who would have guessed? Certainly not our DOE, State Board and #CCSS loving Gov.