Diana Senechal demonstrates how the Common Core standards may be misinterpreted. She gives the example of a video lesson purporting to teach students how to interpret a poem, in this instance William Wordworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” familiarly known as “The Daffodils.”
Students are supposed to summarize each stanza in their own words and write it on a sticky note, according to the instructor on the video. This almost makes Diana scream, “No!”
She writes:
“I question the premise that this is a helpful activity. The reason poetry is worth reading in the first place is that it makes singular use of language; it cannot be translated into prose. Restating a stanza in your own words takes you away from the language of the poem itself. Yes, some poems have complex constructions that need to be teased apart, but that does not have to involve restatement; or when it does, one can restate the specific construction, not an entire stanza. To restate a stanza is to stop it at the border and say, “You may not cross over into my mind with your own goods; you must exchange them for mine.”
And she explains that there are far better ways to teach poetry.
Is this a problem inherent in the Common Core standards or the implementation or something else? All three, she argues.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
SEE? NUTS are telling us what to do and destroying learning.
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Before I comment, so others can access the full posting:
Link: http://dianasenechal.wordpress.com/2014/01/03/a-common-core-lesson-gone-wrong/
So let me get this right.
Lazy LIFO over-paid under-worked Diana Senechal engages students in an intellectually and emotively challenging fashion that could lead to original thoughts and feelings and perhaps, even, the intense desire to create one’s own poems. Same old same old. I feel ennui setting in…
On the other hand—I feel tingly all over with excitement—Common Core will develop critical thinking skills and out-of-the-box thinking via the equivalent of dumbed down post-it notes under the frightened gaze of a minimum-wage education delivery specialist who is anxiously awaiting a job doing, well, anything else.
Ok. I think I’ve got it!
When it comes to the Cagebusting Achievement Gap Crushing Leaders of the New Civil Rights Movement of Our Time: the leading charterites/ privatizers and their most valued underlings send THEIR OWN CHILDREN to schools that are stuffed to the gills with the likes of Diana Senechal.
When it comes to the vast majority of young people, i.e., OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN: a Post-It Education courtesy of the likes of TeachForAwhiles.
And best of all: my entire analysis will fit on a post-it note!
I passed!
Even Bill Gates would have to admit that there is a better than 98% “satisfactory” [thanks, Bill!] chance of certainty that I am correct. And I didn’t even have to wait ten years [thanks again, Bill!] to find out.
😎
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HA, one of your Krazier posts. Love it!
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Specific standards cannot encompass all the teaching strategies necessary to help students interpret the complexities of poetry. Trying to develop an understanding of poetry via a formula will not work. Every poem is unique. The CCSS do not address all aspects of critical learning. When you think of all the required elements necessary to a great education, the CCSS are really very near narrow.
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“…very narrow.”
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Yes. Thank you. There’s nothing inherent wrong with this method. Sometimes it’s helpful–but it’s the teacher, in the classroom, with that class, with that poem, at that time who should be deciding what’s going to work. Period.
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Review and rework the goals, keep them general and let the implementation belong to the professionals in the trenches. Assessment drives learning. seperate the test from the standards and develop an assessment that is real. Come up with a viable alternative now. For the zillionth time, unless we come up with a viable alternative, public schools will, and should fail. http://www.wholechildreform.com
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I respectfully disagree that teaching students poetry should not include restating stanzas. For my students, the language of poetry is a foreign language that must be interpreted before being understood. Once understood, they can begin to deconstruct the nuances woven into the language of the poem.
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There are several related problems here.
First, the lesson in question is almost completely detached from Wordsworth’s poem. You could take the same words and slap them on any poem. That’s the primary problem: the lesson is not about the poem at all.
That leads to the second point. Although a stanza-by-stanza summary might help clarify the progression of certain poems (such as “The Rape of the Lock” or “The Lotos-Eaters,” it’s superfluous and distracting here. A summary would divert from what’s actually in the poem–and could create misconceptions.
Third, to summarize something well, you have to know what’s in it. Except in the case of long narrative poems with tricky plots, it is not a route to greater comprehension; it assumes comprehension. In the case of “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” you have to be especially careful not to let your literal summary override, distort, or diminish what’s in the poem.
Fourth, there are different ways of teaching this and other poems–but if one plans to bring students into the subtleties gradually, one must enter the poem (without hemming and hawing about how hard it is). This lesson doesn’t do that. Moreover, it is one of a series of six–yes, six–lessons on this same poem. The lessons get worse and worse. The last lesson delivers the crowning insult by stating the poem’s supposed theme: “Enjoy the beautiful, joyous moments in your life because if you feel lonely in the future, you can look back on those memories and be happy.” Aieee!
Six lessons to arrive at that maudlin statement that has nothing to do with the poem? So many opportunities wasted–in the name of the Common Core.
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That’s the primary problem: the lesson is not about the poem at all.
precisely
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At the risk of being obvious, the message of Wordsworth’s poem is not about how to counteract “loneliness”, but that solitude and the reflection it affords are among the deepest joys of life and constitute the essence of the poetic spirit. Something very lacking in modern mass education (not to mention modern life).
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Ah…. yes.
There’s loneliness in there too–but it is part of the larger solitude; it leads to the encounter with the daffodils.
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A lot of really terrible teaching of poetry of the kind encouraged by the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] in English language arts has made kids so afraid of poetry that they freeze up whenever any pit of language arranged into lines of verse is put before them. You know the sort of teaching that I mean–the sort that treats a poem as a bizarre kind of language in which people try to hide what they mean and one has to apply mystical interpretive tools to it.
Look: Poetry is the oldest literary form. Go back into the oratures of any people, worldwide, and in the beginning you find poetry, song.
The teaching of poetry has been made so awful by lists like those given in the Common Core State Standards that kids, presented with a poem, are often terrified. I used to retype poems as prose to give to my students for this very reason. Without the fear instilled in them by teachers with their lists of literary techniques, they could read poems just fine–as long as they didn’t think they were poems–as long as they didn’t think that they were this weird kind of special language.
Listen: Every bit of writing and speech is absolutely shot through with metaphor and symbolism (e.g., “shot through” in this sentence).
Teachers would do well to throw the Common Core in the trash and to place a moratorium on using literary terminology and to talk about, instead, what is being said in the poem.
Two road diverged in a yellow wood.
Instead of, “What does the road symbolize? What does a wood symbolize?” this:
What’s happening here? When? Where? A road has split off. It’s in a yellow wood. Since it’s yellow, it’s probably autumn.
Poetry is a means by which we speak to one another. It’s not definable (define poetry for me) as a separate type of language because it is seamless with other language.
Treat it that way.
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How horrible to “restate” this poem to kids or to have them restate it!!!
I am reminded of the story that Stephen Spender told of T.S. Eliot. At a meeting of the Oxford poetry club, an undergraduate asked, “Mr. Eliot, what did you mean by the line ‘Lady, three leopards sat under a juniper-tree,'” and Eliot answered, “I meant ‘Lady, three leopards sat under a juniper-tree.'”
“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is not written in Klingon, and we need to stop–TO STOP–teaching poetry as if it were all written in Klingon and needed translating. What are we teaching kids about poetry when we approach it in that way?
I think that because of such terrible teaching, a lot of kids leave school thinking that poets are perverse folk who dress up mundane truisms (e.g., the GAWDAWFUL reading of Wordsworth’s poem done in this model lesson–“Enjoy the beautiful, joyous moments in your life because if you feel lonely in the future, you can look back on those memories and be happy.”) in abstruse rococo for the purpose of torturing students.
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“. . . abstruse rococo. . . “?
Is that one of those pots calling the kettle black, a redundancy or an oxymoran (purposely misspelled)?
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Duane, it’s an illustration of the idea being presented–form following function.
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What grade is this lesson intended for, I wonder?
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I remember having this poem read to us in second grade. Our teacher was British. She read us the poem in her beautiful speaking voice, and then she had us draw a picture of what it meant to us in our “best notebooks”. She may have said something about the “inward eye”, but she didn’t dwell on it. Then, she gave each of us a real daffodil bulb to plant in a pot, we forced them in a dark closet in the classroom. It was an unforgettable experience and I often used to seek out that poem in anthologies as I grew older and finally memorized it.
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Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
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And how we are hastening that process now!
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I think the critique of the Wordsworth lesson is right on target. More evidence that the Common Core Standards were shoddily conceived. To see how poorly written some of them are, it’s worth re-reading one of the quoted standards.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.8.4 “Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone, including analogies or allusions to other texts.”
Just take a look at one clause: “analyze the impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone, including analogies or allusions to other texts.”
Forget the fact that the phrase “Including analogies or allusions to other texts” dangles there without an obvious referent (but if the referent is “word choices,” it might be noted that it’s hard to make an analogy using a specific word), and forget that the word “or” doesn’t jibe with the word “including.” That’s bad editing, but it’s worse than that.
The big problem is that the “standard” makes a distinction between “meaning” and “tone” and places them on the same level of abstraction. “Meaning” is a vague (and not always useful) term, while “tone” is a technical literary term that covers a lot of territory but is to a great extent subsumed within the idea of “meaning.”
It’s my understanding that tone is part and parcel of meaning. Although the importance of the tone of a work isn’t restricted to the particular meanings within the work, or a reader’s overall understanding of the work, it’s clear that meaning and tone are not separable in the way the “standard” implies. Just talk with any English literature professor who has students whose first language isn’t English. Quite often, tone is hard for these students to pick up. And if a student doesn’t get the tone of a work, he’s going to miss a lot of the meaning.
If that sounds picky, I’ll just say that a number of the assumptions the “standard” is based on are highly suspect as well. Moreover, the quoted “standard,” like many of the ELA standards, is a catchall item that covers several distinct concepts but lacks internal logic and coherence.
Could the Common Core Standards spark a revolution in learning? Sur-r-r-r-e they could. Except that they’re riddled with imprecision, illogic, and some basic misunderstandings of the subject matter. Who believes that the Common Core tests will be any better?
One statement from the post I would disagree with: “There should be faculty meetings about works of literature, mathematical proofs, historical eras—the subject matter itself, not instructional strategies.” I’m not against teachers meeting to appreciate the liberal arts, but when instructional strategies are as weak as the one cited, some nuts-and-bolts professional development is in order. And I’m not talking about methods of implementing the Common Core Standards. I’m talking about how to teach well in spite of them.
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THIS says it all—from one of the greatest films ever made about education, or life, or anything else. So appropriate here. Enjoy:
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I think a lot about that movie these days and how it’s practically anti-Common Core 20 years before its time. I wonder if that movie could be made today…
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Thank you for that stroll down memory lane. Quite possibly my favorite movie ever.
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I agree with Diane Senechal. I have observed my sons, one a senior, the other a freshman both in high school have any love of literature killed by “summarize in your own words”. Sometimes it’s on a post-it note; other times it’s on index cards or written/typed on paper. Their high school teachers present in-class “lectures” on the author’s intent, with a bit of social/cultural/political background tossed in and then they are sent home with the text, and a list of questions which must be answered, including a quote to back up your answer. Their teachers are NOT looking for what the students think, they are looking for a regurgitation of what they have taught. The message over and over again is that they (the students) have no thoughts that are valuable. The author’s message is carved in stone, and the student is not capable of uncovering it for her/himself.
What I find so ironic about the approach taken on the Common Core video toward this poem, is that the poem is all about the discovery of the sublime in the everyday. The tone of this poem is filled with joy and optimism. I love the way Harold’s teacher introduced it to his second grade class. The “proof” of his teacher’s success is that Harold never forgot the poem and furthermore how he discovered deeper meaning with the passage of time and life experience. That is what real teaching is all about.
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“The message over and over again is that they (the students) have no thoughts that are valuable. The author’s message is carved in stone, and the student is not capable of uncovering it for her/himself.”
Thanks for the input. As a high school student I objected to the idea that the teacher had the “right” interpretation of a work, and I tried to keep that in mind when I taught high school English. I learned over the years that there’s always a lot more in a great literary work than the author intended.
Unfortunately, the primacy of the “author’s message” is deeply embedded in the ELA Common Core Standards, even though the concept isn’t endorsed by most literary theorists today. I believe this emphasis stems from the work of E. D. Hirsch, whose misunderstanding of how students acquire and employ “background knowledge” is also at the heart of the CCS. (David Coleman’s misapplication of Hirsch’s work on cultural literacy, cited in at least one of Coleman’s speeches, is one the weaknesses of the standards.)
Here are two excerpts from the Wikipedia entry on Hirsch:
“The next phase of Hirsch’s career centered on questions of literary interpretation and hermeneutics. His books Validity in Interpretation (1967) and The Aims of Interpretation (1976) argue that the author’s intention must be the ultimate determiner of meaning. At Yale, Hirsch had studied with and taught alongside eminent Yale-based exponents of the “New Criticism,” including Cleanth Brooks and W. K. Wimsatt. His hermeneutic works represent a reaction against New Critical concepts that were omnipresent at the time, especially the idea that texts should be viewed as autonomous objects, without reference to authorial intent.”
“Hirsch’s hermeneutic books are controversial, and his defense of authorial intention remains a minority position in Academia, though a widely cited one.”
Again unfortunately, it almost seems like Coleman and his fellow authors took the central idea of Hirsch’s literary theory and combined it with the biggest weakness of the New Critics (refusal to consider the historical and cultural context of a work, or the reader’s own contribution to the meaning of a text, etc.) in order to come up with his misguided prescriptions for how literature should be taught.
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Of course, there is such a thing as an incorrect interpretation (for instance, one that disregards large portions of the text or that hinges on a misunderstanding).
That said, I am often inspired by my students’ interpretations of literary and philosophical texts. There is room in a literature course for a teacher’s knowledge and perspective and a student’s fresh insight. The two complement each other.
Beneath this question of interpretation, there’s a nagging problem (that some of the commenters here have brought up). What ever happened to the idea of letting students take something in, without requiring them to produce an analysis right away?
I see that as one of the great strengths of the original Core Knowledge Sequence: the practice of exposing chidren to literature without demanding a superficial “outcome.” Yes, there are certain expected outcomes in CK, but they aren’t (in my view) excessive or heavy-handed.
Unfortunately there’s great nervousness today about teaching anything whatsoever without packaging up a result. The twist here is that this insistence on results is constricting the results themselves.
In childhood and adolescence, I encountered many poems that intrigued me but that I didn’t understand. I carried them around for many years; eventually I understood them better but remembered the initial awe. I am glad no one made me summarize them stanza by stanza, or tally up the “harsh” and “soft” sounds, or identify a “theme.”
On the other hand, in high school I had teachers who could take us through a poem slowly and carefully, with attention to similes, alliteration, and all, and leave us enlightened. It isn’t analysis or a teacher’s authority that kills poetry for a student; it’s bad analysis and false authority.
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The wikipedia article is a bastardization of Hirsch’s position, which is much more subtle, I believe. I think that he would say something like this: “People write because they have something to communicate–not any damned thing that someone might want to take from a text but something in particular. Emerson had ideas or perhaps even confusions and problematics concerning divinity that he wanted to communicate when he wrote “Brahma,” and if we entirely give over the idea of intention, we undermine the whole notion of cultural transmission–of literature, of texts, being a means for bridging the ontological gap between persons. We undermine the idea that we can read “Brahma” and know something of what this great man, Emerson, thought.”
Of course, this, too, is a controversial position, but it isn’t the cartoon hermeneutics version often placed in Hirsch’s mouth, just as Derrida’s doesn’t boil down to “Any reading is possible” or “All reading is politics and violence.”
I don’t completely agree with Hirsch’s position, but certainly it has merits when one considers it from the point of view of the writer. But even the writer does not, cannot, fully articulate his or her intention. Kublai Khan appeared to Coleridge in a dream. It’s commonplace for writers, when working at the height of their powers, to describe this not as calculated composition but as transcription. The stories of the Muse who speaks THROUGH the writer are reports of this psychological reality.
All this is complicated by the whole business of the marshalling of resources by a skilled writer to create an experience, for literary texts do not mean in the same ways that other texts do. The New Critics were fond of saying that the text creates a world. In my view, the reader enters imaginatively into this world and has an experience and it is that experience that has significance, that has meaning. As a writer, I craft to create a particular experience because I want my reader to understand something at a visceral level, at the level that the Vietnam Vets who used to say, “You wouldn’t know because you weren’t there, man!” would approve of. So, even if we accept the notion of the author’s intention, it’s a complex one–for the intention is not simple if it involves creating an experience, for different people will have that experience, and though you and I look at the same sunset, it will not be exactly the same sunset. Still, there will, we hope, be something shared there.
All this is further complicated by historical distance. Words have resonances that differ over time. When Plato wrote of virtue, he used a word that could refer, equally, to a virtuous man, a virtuous state, or a virtuous shoe. The word he used implied being efficacious–working properly. A virtuous shoe was one that was comfortable, didn’t wear out easily, etc. So his word implies predetermined criteria for virtue, and his whole notion of an abstract world of forms, of the Good, accepts those criteria for virtuousness as givens. All this is extremely foreign to us today. This is not how we typically think of things. But we can learn about Plato and his times and puzzle out what things MIGHT HAVE MEANT to people writing then, with different assumptions, though doing THAT, across the years, and in defiance of our own presuppositions, is no simple task.
These different ways into texts all seem, to me, valuable. And it also seems to be quite valuable to deconstruct the text, to go after the assumptions in common readings of it, for doing so is often extraordinarily revealing.
So, to me, it’s all good–all these ways in and out of texts. But what isn’t good is having some one bullet list of what’s important and what’s not when reading texts–Lord Coleman’s list–foisted on everyone. No one died and appointed David Coleman monarch of the English language arts in the United States. This was done by a small group of presumptuous, self-important arbiters for everyone else. Screw that.
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Diana Senechal:
You make a great point about the reluctance to teach “anything whatsoever without packaging up a result.” I don’t know about the original Core Knowledge materials, but what do you think about making first graders responsible for these items from the EngageNY website, “Grade 1 ELA Domain 4: Early World Civilizations” module?
http://www.engageny.org/resource/grade-1-ela-domain-4-early-world-civilizations
5. Explain why a written language is important to the development of a civilization;
12. Describe how a civilization evolves and changes over time;
51. Use narrative language to describe (orally or in writing) characters, setting, things, events, actions, a scene, or facts from a fiction read-aloud;
54. Answer questions that require making interpretations, judgments, or giving opinions about what is heard in a nonfiction/informational read-aloud, including answering why questions that require recognizing cause/effect relationships;
79. Demonstrate understanding of literary language such as setting;
To me, items 51 and 79 don’t even make sense. And some of the items have had many learned treatises written about them. Yet people like E. D. Hirsch and Michael Petrilli heartily endorse these sorts of bastardized academic tasks for six-year-olds. (The fallacy of “backmapping” that you articulated some time ago is at play here, and so is a certain amount of outright ignorance.) And because such tasks might show up on a test some day, David Coleman wants teachers to make their students practice them “a hundred times.”
So much for “the idea of letting students take something in, without requiring them to produce an analysis right away.”
Your suggestion that students appreciate a variety of approaches is well taken. The dreary sameness of the tasks being inspired by the Common Core Standards is one of their worst features.
Under the new regime, students will be getting relentless doses of mal-defined “close reading” week after week, year after year, starting in the early grades. Less variety and less novelty in the classroom will lead to less engagement and less learning for students. Even when a new and exciting work gets assigned, it’s liable to have the life sucked out of it by the same old reductive approaches.
As you and several commenters have suggested, it isn’t just the implementation that is a problem. The impulse toward bad practice is built right into the standards.
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Robert D. Shepherd:
I just wrote a comment that disappeared into the ether. I won’t try to reconstruct it. But as I was looking for some clarification of Hirsch’s “intentionalism,” I found this from Denis Dutton:
“For Hirsch, unless we have a standard of interpretive correctness, criticism loses its status as a cognitive discipline. Without a notion of the author’s meaning as a guide — almost a regulative ideal, it would seem — criticism would be unable to decide between competing interpretations of works of literature (or art). The result, for Hirsch, would be chaos: anybody’s interpretation as good as anybody else’s. Hirsch does not deny, of course, that works of art may mean different things to critics or to audiences in different historical epochs. This is in fact how it is that works of art can have different significances to people. But the meaning of a text is always one and the same thing: it is a meaning that the work had for its maker, the artist or writer.”
http://denisdutton.com/intentionalism.htm
To me, this chimes with Coleman and Pimental. They basically see reading (including the reading of imaginative literature) as a transfer of knowledge from writer to reader:
“The standards and these [Revised Publishers’ Criteria] sharpen the focus on the close connection between comprehension of text and acquisition of knowledge. While the link between comprehension and knowledge in reading science and history texts is clear, the same principle applies to all reading. The criteria make plain that developing students’ prowess at drawing knowledge from the text itself is the point of reading; reading well means gaining the maximum insight or knowledge possible from each source.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/11/19/common-cores-odd-approach-to-teaching-gettysburg-address/
It’s implied that the writer’s message is what ends up on the page, and the reader’s job is to decipher that message. If we take this idea to its logical extreme, the best reading would be akin to downloading information directly from the writer’s brain. Here again, the idea of author intention is melded with Hirsch’s beliefs (faulty, in my view) about how knowledge can best be built, and put to use by learners. This is an example of why I say Hirsch’s fingerprints are all over the Common Core Standards. And in my view, that’s not an especially good thing.
As for helping kids experience literature instead of turning it into a chore, I’m with you 100%!
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Robert D. Shepherd,
Thank you for your eloquent description of the merits of various approaches to literature. I agree with you fully that each one you describe has merits (when not treated as the answer) and exists in complex relation to the others. In addition, I agree that all of these contrast with the bullet-list approach.
In addition, I wish more people read Wikipedia with your skepticism. It seems to have become a Grand Authority. This problem is actually related to the one above. A dreary kind of committee thinking is replacing keen individual thought.
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Randal Hendee,
You characterize Hirsch’s work unfairly (citing an unreliable source, as Robert D. Shepherd has pointed out), but you make some good points elsewhere, especially when you comment on the wording of one of the standards.
As for the list of items on the EngageNY website, I agree with you somewht (but not entirely). I see no problem with expecting six-year-olds to be able to do some of the things on the list, if they can do this informally, through discussions and so forth. I do see a problem with excessive emphasis on “outputs” of this kind. Let kids learn about interesting topics and works, let them absorb and think about these topics and works, and assess the right things, judiciously.
Many Core Knowledge schools are vibrant places where students paint murals, sing songs, act in plays, and demonstrate their knowledge in numerous other interesting ways. I taught at a Core Knowledge elemenatry school (a high-poverty school in East New York) where I directed second-, fourth-, and fifth-graders in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It turned out splendidly, and the kids learned a lot while doing it. I did not give them tests in which they had to analyze “Call you me fair? that fair again unsay.” They showed through their acting that they understood these words and many more. (I did make sure they knew the meaning of “fair” here.)
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Diana Senechal:
Actually, Wikipedia can be a great source of highly accurate information, especially in the sciences. Controversial topics, such as the so-called Shakespeare authorship question, can and do get hijacked by partisans.
While trying to clarity my understanding of Hirsch’s “intentionalism,” I ran across an essay by Denis Dutton that substantially supports and illuminates the Wikipedia entry I cited. The essay seems even handed and doesn’t actually condemn Hirsch’s views. I tried to post a quotation from it last night, but it hasn’t shown up yet…
“For Hirsch, unless we have a standard of interpretive correctness, criticism loses its status as a cognitive discipline. Without a notion of the author’s meaning as a guide — almost a regulative ideal, it would seem — criticism would be unable to decide between competing interpretations of works of literature (or art). The result, for Hirsch, would be chaos: anybody’s interpretation as good as anybody else’s. Hirsch does not deny, of course, that works of art may mean different things to critics or to audiences in different historical epochs. This is in fact how it is that works of art can have different significances to people. But the meaning of a text is always one and the same thing: it is a meaning that the work had for its maker, the artist or writer.”
The final sentence in this excerpt is the kind of thing that makes me queasy. There doesn’t seem to be much room in Hirsch’s theory for the wonderful multiplicity of approaches that Robert and others are recommending. (You can find the essay on the Denis Dutton website. It contains additional learned commentary on Hirsch, his detractors, and more, including a proposal for a New Intentionalism.)
By the way, I love the idea of kids doing Shakespeare. It sounds like your approach was brilliant. By contrast, I once had the misfortune of sitting in an auditorium full of high school students watching a group of fully costumed fourth graders “perform” a good sized chunk of Measure for Measure. They had their lines down pat, but they stood more or less like statues and recited their lines in a sleep-inducing monotone. They didn’t appear to understand what they were saying, which might have been just as well. It seemed like such a wasted opportunity. (I may be exaggerating a bit, but that’s how I remember it–the high school kids were either amazingly polite, or asleep.)
So it all depends on the approach. That’s one of the many reasons why I believe that teachers are more important than curricula. If you had insisted on a bunch of academicized outcomes for your students, it probably would have diminished their experience.
I still have fond memories of playing the soothsayer in Julius Caesar in sixth grade. Shakespeare had something to do with it, but it was my teacher and classmates that made things memorable. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, that teacher was one of my early inspirations for going into the field. Later on I taught the play for seventeen years running, to multiple sections of tenth graders. I rarely failed to tell them stories about that sixth grade production. This kind of legacy is now under threat, from the Common Core Standards and all related “reforms.”
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Wikipedia can never be considered a credible source. Your college professor will not accept it as a reference. Neither will they accept google searches.
It’s a good starting point, for general information, if taken with a grain of salt.
I won’t go into my college reference lessons.
I will talk a little bit about encyclopedias. One well known encyclopedia, an accepted reference source, has signed articles on various topics by experts in the field. The section on witches was written by the known expert of the time who told the world that a coven was made of thirteen witches. Eventually, it was discovered that she invented that number. A coven could consist of any number of witches. Thus we have perversion in expert knowledge.
Another example, which reflects Robert Shepherd’s comment on how words, in this case viewpoints, change over time. When my mother was growing up, Custer was considered a war hero. At that time the expression “The only good Indian, is a dead Indian” was meant. If a family member “married” an Indian, they were ostracized. Luckily, over time this viewpoint has lessened. (The crimes which we have committed over the years on the Native Americans is a while other issue). Now, Custer is reviled, not revered. I was doing some reading on General Patton recently and I came across this thought (I’m pretty sure it was in Wikipedia), where a top government official, after World War II, compared Patton to Custer. The modern writer assumed that Patton was being criticized and debased, instead of being glorified as a great leader. All because of a change in viewpoint.
And that’s what we are experiencing today. A change in viewpoint on the role of public education in society. And we don’t like the new interpretation.
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Ellen T Klock:
“Wikipedia can never be considered a credible source.”
I’m not so sure. I think Wikipedia can be a very credible source (at least according to one scientist I’ve spoken with).
Here’s more evidence: http://www.livescience.com/32950-how-accurate-is-wikipedia.html
Here’s some more: http://library.blogs.delaware.gov/2013/05/05/is-wikipedia-a-reliable-source/
I think Wikipedia is a very valuable resource for students and other web surfers. Everything depends on the nature and quality of the article and the way the article is going to be used.
If I were still teaching English, I probably wouldn’t accept Wikipedia as a formal citation in a research paper. Even so, it has a lot to recommended it. Flexibility, instant updating, the capacity to evolve as knowledge evolves . . . The list goes on. It’s a huge trove of information, much of which would never make it into a standard encyclopedia.
Of course Wikipedia has some junk in it, too. But students need help evaluating information and information sources anyway. Teachers can use Wikipedia to help them learn how.
By the way, add Eve Merriam to the children’s poetry list. “Cheers” (great for choral reading) and “A Lazy Thought” are two of my favorites. These poems were written for kids, but I’ve used them successfully in high school classes. I think your ideas for collecting all sorts of rhymes and sharing them with kids–and inviting the kids to do the same–could work in high school, too.
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Randal – I didn’t say never to use Wikipedia. It’s a good place to get background information. Then you need to do further research on the topic. Ultimately, all the sources you use should be examined with an eagle eye and a good sense of judgement. You need to wade through all the “fact” and “fiction”, then make your own determination.
After all, one morning you might wake up to discover that “Pluto” is not a planet.
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Wonderful comments, here, by both Randal and Diana. It’s great to see two gifted teachers going head to head on matters like this. That’s what we should be doing ALL THE TIME, with ALL frameworks, standards, curricula, pedagogical approaches, model lesson templates, etc.
Or we could just do whatever Lord Coleman tells us that we have to do.
About Wikipedia: Anyone who has ever done fact checking for a publisher will know that authoritative reference works are anything but. They are produced by people. A friend of mine worked for Encyclopedia Britannica. Some wag sneaked into one edition of the encyclopedia an article on gremlins that treated them as real creatures–described their habitats (the innards of electrical machinery) and so on.
There have been studies of the veracity of Wikipedia articles. They compare very favorably to the articles in print encyclopedias. Crowd sourcing is an extremely powerful means for fact checking because no one knows everything but we all know a bit. I typically begin almost any research, these days, with a quick glance at a few Wikipedia articles, and who doesn’t? In many ways, the Internet is the realization of the age-old dream of the universal encyclopedia. Now, many educational publishers and their wind-up toys among the educrats want to replace that universal encyclopedia–the pull medium–with narrow online curricula–a push medium. That’s tragic.
And about those Core Knowledge schools. I have been to these as well. They are astonishingly good. It’s amazing how vibrant schools become when kids and teachers concentrate on obtaining knowledge, when kids are not given a steady diet of abstract skills instruction (The deadly “Today, class, we are going to be practicing finding the main idea” crap that took over our schools for a couple decades). One gets the sort of engagement that comes from experience with the actual, the concrete, and the sort of learning that happens when one doesn’t flit from domain to domain, for knowledge builds upon knowledge. Kids want to read about snakes because they want to learn about snakes not because they want to practice their identifying cause and effect skills.
I am, frankly, horrified by the unholy alliance between Core Knowledge and the Common Core. Hirsch spent decades writing books and articles about what a mistake it was to do all skills instruction all the time, but the CC$$ in ELA is nothing but a list of abstract skills.
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There are places in the CC$$ in ELA that seem to assume an “authorial intention” hermeneutics, e.g., this:
RL.11-12.5 Analyze how an author’s choices concerning how to structure specific parts of a text (e.g., the choice of where to begin or end a story, the choice to provide a comedic or tragic resolution) contribute to its overall structure and meaning as well as its aesthetic impact.
Of course, this standard assumes that an author’s choices are a proper object of study, and as Randal points out, that extremely controversial position is simply taken for granted in the standard [sic]. It’s a background ASSUMPTION. E. D. Hirsch stood almost alone, throughout much of the past century, in his heroic defense of recovery of the author’s choices, or intentions, as the goal of interpretation. (See his book Validity in Interpretation.) During that time, many scholars and critics, perhaps most professional literary people, contended that the author’s choices, or intentions, were irrelevant or irrecoverable or both and that we must attend, instead,
• to the text itself (Ransom, Tate, Empson, Brooks, Warren, Wimsatt, Beardsley, and others of the New Critical school; Propp, Jakobson, Stith Thompson, Levi-Strauss, and other Formalists and Structuralists);
• to the reader’s construction of the text (in their various ways, Barthes, Fish, Rosenblatt, Derrida, and other Reader Response, Postmodernist, and Deconstructionist critics); or
• to historically determined responses to the text and differences in these over time (Heidegger, Gademer, Foucault, Greenblatt, and other Historicist and new Historicist critics).
My own view: there are many ways in and out of texts. We approach them from various perspectives and see different things when we do.
In other words, I champion, in literary criticism and in philosophy generally, the Jainist concept of Anekāntavāda. In the U.S. we call that pluralism.
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It’s so wonderful to read these comments by Randal, Diana, and Ellen. Thoughtful teachers, all!
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The Common Core State “Standards” in English language arts are almost exclusively a list of formal skills. The standards call for close attention to texts but, ironically, encourage to sort of superficial teaching that reduces the reading of a literary work to application of some subset of these skills. Every educational publisher in the U.S. is now beginning every project by making a spreadsheet with a list of the CCSS skills in one column and a list of the places where these are “covered” in the next. So, the reading of say, Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” becomes simply an opportunity to apply, say, the CCSS skill of identifying its uses of figurative language or of allusion. This narrowing of curricula to coverage of the list of skills was ENTIRELY PREDICTABLE from Coleman’s bullet list of skills. The same sort of narrowing was already happen because of the state bullet lists.
Look, people don’t read Madame Bovary or Yellow Star to find out what method of character development was used in paragraph 4 of chapter 3. Such formal analysis must not be placed front and center. It must arise naturally out of engagement with the novel–with its characters and situations. The most important thing that we can teach our kids about reading literature is that they have to take the author’s trip. They have to put themselves, imaginatively, there in the world of the work. They have to experience that world. And then, it’s THAT EXPERIENCE that has meaning, that is significant. If we cut to the formal analysis–to the sort of stuff one finds in this bullet list of standards–then we ARE SKIPPING OVER THE LITERARY EXPERIENCE ITSELF. We are doing literature instruction without the literature.
We do not read Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” because we want to find what poetic devices he used. That comes after or in the course of experiencing and grappling with the bizarre, wonderful, challenging things he has to say. What he has to say is what, primarily, we should be attending to.
So, again, the CC$$ in ELA, for literature, are almost exclusively a list of formal skills. And it’s a pretty amateurish list at that. It shouldn’t be driving our curricula and pedagogy.
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Well said. Thank you.
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Thanks, Diana!
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Wordsworth, Byron, and Tennyson were among the best-selling writers of their times. A young woman once wrote Wordsworth asking him why he didn’t try his hand at one of the new romances (novels) coming out of Germany, and he wrote back to say that as a poet he had a far greater readership.
Today, terrible “meaning-hunting” and “formal analysis”-style approaches to the teaching of poetry have just about killed the art for most students. In the United States, major poets are published in editions of a couple thousand copies, most of which are bought by libraries. Once when Randall Jarrell won some poetry award, he went up and collected the check and folded it carefully and put it in his shirt pocket and said, “If I wrote prose, I wouldn’t have to be so careful about this.”
Don’t kill poetry for your students. Don’t turn reading it into dull academic exercises on application of the standards. Read poems with your kids, as you would read anything else, to find out what these poets have to say. Often, it’s astonishing.
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I know Diane posted this poem once before but so appropriate to read again now.
Introduction to Poetry
Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
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great poem by a great poet
love this guy!
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Anyone teaching poetry from the perspective that it’s just another form of prose (and probably non-fiction prose at that) is likely to find little if anything wrong with this lesson. Just cite David Coleman’s timeless idiocy in support of that viewpoint. The irony of the call for “close reading” is that this lesson illustrates just the opposite. It disrespects the artform and everything about it. It essentially ignores the integrity of poetic language and instead encourages the reader to reduce the art to a “message” that is more clearly conveyed in ordinary prose. What could be more idiotic? What could be less appropriate for literary analysis?
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The irony of the call for “close reading” is that this lesson illustrates just the opposite. It disrespects the artform and everything about it.
Very well said, Michael!
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Thanks, Robert. Before going into math education, I nearly finished a doctorate in literature. I have analyzed a poem or two. And I know much better than to mistake the recommendations in the CCSS for “close reading” or anything of the kind.
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It wasn’t written as material for analysis and testing. It’s poetry!
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There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Lord Coleman, than are dreamt of in your bullet list.
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To Diana, Harold, Randal, Michael, and the other great defenders of real reading of literature, thank you for your comments here! More of this! It does my heart good to see people standing up to the philistines and their bullet lists!
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I have been reading Diana Senechal’s superb essays on her blog. I highly recommend these. I bet she is an outstanding teacher!
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Find them here:
http://dianasenechal.wordpress.com/
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Thank you, Robert!
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Funny to come home tonight and find a post from Diana on this topic. Reading some Common Core model lessons at the beach today I wrote this note in the margin: “Poetry ground down into the most prosaic of prose.”
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As a librarian, I did at least one lesson a year on poetry. We would sing simple nursery rhymes or the students would come to the front of the class in small groups to recite old favorites.They would, as a group, repeat poems they had learned in class. I would do word plays, silly poems, poems from the streets – such as for jumping rope or slam poems. One of their favorites was the bumble bee song – “I’m bringing home a baby bumblebee. Won’t me mommy be so proud if me. I’m bringing home a baby bumblebee. Ouch, it stung me.” (Then the bumblebee would be squished, licked, thrown up, and flushed). I would read poems from books – Shel Silverstein, Jack Prelutski. I would read tongue twisters and limericks. I even had a rap poem to share. I would stand up and demonstrate reciting with my favorite poems – such as Stevenson’s My Shadow. I would read other classic poems, depending on the age level of the class.
I never once analyzed the components of the poems. (I did talk a little bit about vocabulary, especially words which had different meanings today as compared to when the poems were written (as per Robert Shepherd’s explanation)).
My only goal was to make poetry come alive for the children (grade school level). My evaluation was their response. If I wanted to quantify the success of the lesson, it was by the number of poetry books the kids checked out at the end of class (and continued to check out over the years). The stack of poetry books I read from was constantly depleted.
And that was a good thing.
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yes. yes. yes.
especially the jump-rope rhymes! 🙂
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Robert, It means a lot to me that you approve.
Strawberry shortcake, cream on top,
Tell me the name of your sweetheart
Capital A, B, C, . . .
Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack
All dressed in black, black, black
With silver buttons, all down her back.
She asked her mother for fifty cents
To see the elephants jump over the fence.
They jumped so high, they reached the sky
And never came back, til the Fourth of July.
(3 Repetitions at the end of each phrase)
Rachel and Larry, sitting in a tree
K-i-s-s-i-n-g
First comes love, then comes marriage,
Then comes a baby in a baby carriage.
My favorite slam poem:
I wish I were a bar if soap,
So clean and white and shiny,
And every time I’d take a bath,
I’d swim around your hiney.
The kids loved the naughtiness, and very few asked for definitions.
They also loved The Alligator Purse and The Old Lady Who Swallowed the Fly. Sometimes I even did Miss Susie Had a Steamboat.
These were from my childhood. And I revered the idea that they were from the childhood of past generations.
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It is precisely this sort of thing, Ellen, that we need to do a lot more of. Wonderful!!! THis is how a love for language is developed.
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Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:–
We murder to dissect.
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