The voice of a new blogger! At least, new to me. Glad to make his/her acquaintance.
This post was written by a veteran teacher who knows how to get students to love literature.
But it is a brave new world, and now the teacher must be trained to say the right words and terms by a “perky” Pearson trainer.
She tried! She really, really tried.
She traded jargon with the trainer, blow for blow.
But in the end, she couldn’t do it.
She knew the verbiage was empty nonsense, even if the trainer didn’t know it.
And she concluded:
Fifth graders fall in love with great books when teachers read them out loud with passion, and then talk about them with interest and knowledge. They learn to write when they are inspired to say something. Truth? They don’t need to be told what their reading level is: they need to be surrounded by books and they need to play around with them. Truth? They don’t need a rubric to learn how to craft a story where “the dialogue moves the story forward on the story arc” (Seriously? Whoever wrote this crap never read Vonnegut). They know that a story is good when their friends tell them, “This was great!”
Imagine that! No rubric! No text-to-text comparisons! Just reading for meaning and the joy of language and story. That will never do!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In 35 years with fourth, fifth, and sixth graders, that was exactly my experience. The “right” books are also portals to humor and fun……thank you Roald Dahl and Barbara Robinson.
It seems that students are talked “at” in the Common Core Era. We had so many wonderful class discussions and dialogue in pre-testing times.
I am relieved I am not in the classroom anymore. If it weren’t for tenure, I ‘d be fired.
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I want to issue a correction…..”If it weren’t for tenure, I’d have been fired.”
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I am an avid BookTV watcher on the weekends where authors discuss their books, the writing and research that went into them. Often, these programs are filmed in wonderful independent bookstores and university locations. It occurred to me that the current ‘forced upon and choking’ trend by our EdReformers could soon make this an experience from the past. EBooks, empty libraries, removal of literature from the curriculum, regurgitated rubrics and force fed interpretations….ala Common Core, Gates/Duncan/Obama & Co. Biggest crime ever against public education and our children, EVER!
Listeners in the audience on BookTV, in these wonderful bookstores, are mostly blue hairs who are hanging onto every word, ask great questions and have tremendous knowledge, and were formally educated years ago.
Gee, I wonder where they learned all this prior to RTTT?
Just food for thought! BTW, not to offend blue hairs….I am of that generation, too.
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I agree EdReformers ultimately will have every child hate going to school, my kids like so many others are anxious about being in school. Bringing a test result home is a bitter experience. They used to love all those educable moments at home not anymore they think my husband and I are going to drill them at bedtime. We are in a mess
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Awesome post by this teacher.
The proper response to education deform is derision.
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Bob Shepherd: exactly.
And 99% of the derision is self-generated. Speaking generally—there are always exceptions—it is difficult to make fun of people and ideas that are truly sincere and consistent and selfless.
For example, I have serious disagreements with Mother Teresa. But so what? Krazy props to someone who said what she meant and meant what she said and put herself on the line, every day until she died.
“We cannot all do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”
I, at least, won’t argue with that, and IMHO it applies to the majority of public school teachers and staff.
But take Michelle Rhee—Please! [yeah, the Rodney Dangerfield line]
Someone who gleefully asks John Merrow to film her ambush firing a principal, wanting to make his humiliation nationwide. Says her daughters [much better athletes than she ever was] “suck” at soccer. Claims to have taken her students [during her brief stint as a teacher] from the 13th to the 90th percentile. Has masking tape put on the mouths of dozens of her small students; lips bleed, but never any regrets.
And who can forget her flinty “cooperation, collaboration and consensus-building are way overrated” remark at the Aspen Institute in 2008?
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/31/AR2009103102357.html
Yet she generated the term “Rhee Flee” when after months of petty dickering over trivial details she abandoned even the pretense of dignity and honor by fleeing post haste from the Feb. 6 public discussion with Diane Ravitch at Lehigh University.
She is like a great many of the leading charterites/privatizers—they do a better job of caricaturing themselves than we could ever do.
“Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.” [John Steinbeck]
But for all the laughs that they provide us—unfortunately, too often the joke is on us.
Yet I must conclude with a nod to the recent NPE conference. The tide is turning. A better education for all is gaining momentum. And we will win.
😎
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KrazyTA,
I think that Rodney Dangerfield remark came first from Henny Youngman. It’s an age thing and unfortunately, I’ve got the age!
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Maybe this teacher could appear on the morning edition of Charlie Rose and Gayle King where NYC charter schools (and Ms. Eva M.) were just lauded to the skies. No one mentioned helping children fall in love and stay in love with great literature. Instead, today the talking heads read from a corporate script which pronounced unions and tenure as evil, public schools as inept and charters as the future. Such a cold-blooded future they promote for all of us. Hide the books, my friends and schedule clandestine book circles for the neighborhood little ones. Otherwise, the book burnings aren’t far off and the stories of Roald Dahl and Barbara Robinson will be first on the pile.
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So true! Reading this made my heart long for the days I could simply read aloud to my students for a few minutes daily.
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I subbed in a classroom recently where so much of the day was bound up in reading activities that when I asked them if they wanted me to read or if we should follow the teacher’s instructions to have them read aloud, they resoundingly asked me to read to them while they followed along. They had spent so much time reading silently, to partners, in reading groups,… that they were exhausted and I could see it. Not a child’s eyes wandered from the book as I read. It was a good story and they were eager to listen and enjoy. Must reading always be a task? I don’t fault the teacher for following the system dictates, but so much is lost when we don’t see the children.
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All I can say is, I want my kids taught by this teacher, and not by one who has the time of day for David Coleman and the streams of nonsense he and his buddies have rained down on the American education system!
Common sense, not Common Core — and power to teachers and parents!
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amen
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I read like this with my high school students and they love it.Very effective… Motivation is the key … We have to get them in the reading game, then they will be successful.
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Young children-(0-4) are so excited when you they sit beside you while you read them book after book after book…
When you allow the to turn the page, they are delighted , they point to the pictures, they laugh, their eyes light up, they oooh, they ahhh,,, they ask questions.
When you finish, they ask you to read it again and again or they run to the bookcase-bookshelf-book box etc ad grab another one for you to read.
They enter Pubic School at 5.
The excitement turns into confusion and stress.
They no longer have the glow in their eyes.
They are told they are there to pass a test.
They cry, they get ill. they want to go home
They hate school.
This is what CC$$ is doing to our children..
These little children’s self esteem has been tarnished
They feel as an adult feels when you know someone is trying to demean you.
Our educational system is in a bad state and it saddens me each and everyday as I hear more stories of the Kids of the Core.
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I have a photo on my computer that serves as my wallpaper. Every morning I am greeted by a picture of my granddaughter gazing at a book her father is holding as he reads to her. She was about eighteen months old in the picture. Every muscle in her body was engaged in listening and looking as her daddy read about cows and pigs…
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When I was student teaching in the district I attended as a student, I was at an in-service and saw my 11th grade American Literature teacher. I told her how much I loved hearing her read us The Crucible. I still remember her voice and the way she annunciated the words. She told me that she was so glad to hear that because, even then (1994), she was criticized for reading aloud to juniors.
I am so glad you are reading to your high school students! Teachers need to open minds and help kids develop a love of learning. Self-selected books, reading aloud, and passionate teachers who love learning, reading, writing, math, science, etc. create students who feel the same way. Pearson can’t bottle that.
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It’s so refreshing to hear criticism of the almighty “rubric”. Thank you.
I know they have value. But I think their primary educational value is training our kids to get high marks in a future bureaucratic job – not to learn.
Why have they become written into the assignments? Shouldn’t they just live within the teachers guide to the curriculum and not on the student handouts? And shouldn’t we care far more about learning than success on the rubric?
But perhaps most importantly – they are entirely meaningless to my boys. They get the handouts and the rubric is like a special assignment in Greek. So I advise them to ignore what the teacher hands out and just do the assignment. (A pretty dysfunctional choice – but it’s their only way to educational success.)
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“I know they [rubrics] have value.”
For the devil they do for they are the devil’s tool.
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Not going to disagree with the sentiment… Maybe I should just say that some people love them. And some people will tell you “that way the kids know exactly what they’re being judged on”.
But in the periodic college courses I teach, I don’t offer anything similar because the point is for my students to be prepared to go into the business world – where there aren’t rubrics to make your job easy.
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Rubrics = white noise
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This all speaks to why a well staffed school library with an attractive collection of books is essential to every K-12 school. Anything less is inexcusable.
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Well, I must admit that I am having a minor heart attack right now, as the author of the “Rigorous” post. I never expected my words of frustration to reach so many, but its clear that it has struck a nerve and that there are so many of us who understand just how outrageous this is.
I’m a huge fan and long time follower of yours, Diane. Thank you, thank you for all of your good work on behalf of teachers and kids.
And thanks for my mini-brush with fame!
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Shame on the technocratic Philistines who would reduce our noble profession–the teaching of language and literature–to preparing students to take standardized tests on the amateurish bullet list that is the CC$$ in ELA.
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It’s a wonderful post, momshieb, and you speak for many!
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Amen! The way to get students interested in reading is to read good stories. Don’t crush the experience by adding meaningless written work or tests. Get the students talking. Once they are used to the process, add some writing assignments. I’ll confess to using textbook multiple-choice tests, but it is only to get students used to the standardized-test-taking process. I hate that I have to this.
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Librarians- the library at my large (2,300 students) high school is used for online testing now. Access to the library is limited. Can’t interrupt the continual testing! The library is becoming a place to test, instead of a place to conduct research and check out books for pleasure and information.
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I understand. Mine is used for testing as well and I am regularly scheduled to test students with testing modifications in other areas of the building leaving my scheduled classes un taught. I don’t mind doing my part but my part and everyone else’s parts are growing by leaps and bounds every year.
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I just loved this post. We had a visit from a Pearson rep last fall after our district spent an arm and a leg to buy a shiny new 2-volume Pearson textbook for each and every middle schooler in town. Teachers got an 8 1/2 pound teacher’s edition and a box of CDs and reproducible worksheets. (Last year they couldn’t afford to keep our libraries open every day.) My favorite moment was when the computer components were rolled out. The rep told us that we could use a computer system to grade our students’ papers. Her tone suggested we were being told that Santa Claus was real. I sat there wondering how she thought this should be presented to students. “Hey guys, write with passion and guts and creativity and daring. Share your dreams and fears. Use words that challenge and thrill and make your readers roll on the floor laughing or bring tears to their eyes. And by the way, I’m not going to read a word of it. A Pearson program will assess your work.”
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Beautifully said, Middle school teacher!
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Might as well buy the Pearson program that writes the paper too.
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Amen to common sense.
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So, did Perky bring you all to the carpet for the minilessons? That’s what the readers workshop Perky did repeatedly throughout the 4 days. The first couple of times I was a good sport and fitted my long boney middle-aged self into the crowd at the carpet. After, I stood against the wall, as did an increasing number of others. Perky probably figured it was fine to treat us like kindergarteners, because we were all primary teachers.
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