This article by Emma Sokoloff-Rubin, posted at NY’s Chalkbeat, describes a course where students debate a proposition.
They are asked to argue about ideas and explain their views.
The course has been taught for nearly two decades at Urban Academy, one of the two dozen or so New York City Performance Assessment Consortium high schools that are exempt from most state tests.
The argument of the day: Should people be allowed to sell their body organs for money? The argument: They are paid to do other kinds of dirty or dangerous work for money.
So maybe the course fits the Common Core.
On the other hand, students are asked to give their opinions, which contradicts the strongly stated views of David Coleman, architect of the Common Core, that no one gives a “s##t” about what you think or feel.
In this course, students are encouraged to believe that what they think or feel matters.
What do you think?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
As long as the organs aren’t going to David Coleman. . . .
LOL, Michael.
I guess one of the reasons for the CCSS is not only GREED, but also to CONFUSE. Say one thing and do another. It’s called propaganda. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQT_eNip1AY
Proud debate coach here! While the National Forensic League has (sort of) sold out to Common Core by publishing on their website how debate fulfills the CC (yuck!), I STILL feel that debate is one of the BEST things kids can do in school. I teach debate to 8th and 9th graders, and my 9th graders compete for their local high schools. The enormous growth in their writing, speaking, and confidence is invaluable. Frankly, I wish debate or public speaking was a graduation requirement, or at least a Fine Arts credit.
PLUS, as an added bonus, my kids do VERY well, and it brings a lot of pride to our school. I’m in a lower-income area, and so we struggle in sports, because kids in wealthier areas are playing on competition teams from birth. BUT, at least for now, there’s no such thing as early debate programs around here, so my kids get to be on an even playing field with everyone, and they do quite well.
As a former speech coach myself, I heartily concur.
Oh, there is so much that we could be doing of such great value instead of spending our time teaching InstaWriting for the Test!!!!
Amen, Bob!
Several of my debaters have really struggled with these stupid CC essays, because the essays are “supposed” to be done very quickly (and, by extension, badly). My debaters want to take time to really understand the material and write drafts and things. Also, my debaters are very upset that there are not enough points of view represented in the articles that they are supposed to use to back up their arguments. They want to see well-rounded information, as I have taught them.
And, before I get in more trouble for stating stuff about the tests, I want you all to know that the kids brought it up, NOT me. And I have NOT even seen the tests.
Wonderful. Yes, the difference between Argument, which you are teaching, and InstaArgument for the Test, is ALL THE DIFFERENCE, isn’t it?
We teach, via these tests, precisely what we teach people NOT TO DO when we teach them to do real research to frame real arguments for real tests. Ironic, isn’t it?
Again, if we really wanted to prepare our students for college and careers – debating and other public speaking venues (we have the Richmond Speaking Contest for 7th and 8th graders in Buffalo) should be a requirement. Mock court is another great learning experience (and the kids find it a lot of fun).
I would donate my heart to David Coleman,but I still need it in my classroom.
awesome
yes, you do
The first people who ever got paid to teach — the Sophists — got paid to teach stuff like this. Debate’s the longest-running show on Broadway, so to speak.
So I’m guessing ‘no’. Besides it’s not STEM-y enough.
🙂
David Coleman’s infamous quote revealed what is WRONG with our country right now and he seems perfectly fine with accepting the status quo of wrong and working to promote and enshrine it, oblivious to the implications.
We have a government that doesn’t give a s__t about what the constituents think or want, as evidenced in the recent Princeton study suggesting we live in an oligarchy.
We have a media that doesn’t give a s__t about journalism but instead sells its soul to the highest bidder and then presents propaganda and PR as “news”.
We have a Supreme Court that doesn’t give a s__t about precedence and common sense and therefore negates a presidential election and seats an unelected candidate in the White House, declares that money is political speech, and corporations are people.
We have pundits and commentators who don’t give a s__t about tradition, law, the commonweal, and the future of our country who regularly vilify their opponents with the most coarse and vulgar characterizations, leading to a culture of separation, fear, and anger.
We have a gun lobby that doesn’t give a s__t about safety and commonsense regulation passing legislation that guarantees that anyone, no matter how mentally ill or unstable, can carry automatic weapons all the time and in all places, gunning down anyone they dislike and defending themselves by claiming they are “standing their ground”.
We have billionaires and corporate boards that don’t give a s__t what impact their business practices have on people’s lives or the very Earth herself but rather care only about accruing ever more power and wealth to the detriment of 99% of their fellow human beings.
Not giving a s__t is not a truism that must be accepted, a la David Coleman, but a pernicious evil that must be fought and destroyed at every opportunity.
Coleman is aligned with all that is bad and wrong with our world and his CCSS do nothing to help change or fix the worst of the worst in our society. That alone should make any sane, caring citizen totally suspicious of the CCSS, Coleman, and his supporters.
Well stated… to me, this suggests that our society has become sociopathic…individuals may care, but the society as a whole behaves in an amoral and immoral fashion. When the mantra becomes, “No one gives a s***,” what it really means is that they only give a s*** about what they want, everyone else be d***ed.
I totally agree, Chris. The not caring about others is the worse thing to happen to our world.
In Louisiana Dept. Of Ed the not caring manifests itself in firing many dedicated, experienced educators in favor of Broad and TFA elites who have not a clue what they are doing.
Ironically, most individuals go into teaching because they do care.
Things may have been very different if Coleman had approached the Common Core from the perspective of someone with formal training and experience as an educator, instead of as a former student at elite schools. He might have come to realize that people will form opinions regardless of how much they know or what others think of them, so effective teachers capitalize on the human propensity to become rooted in a point of view by helping students to learn how to identify, locate and analyze credible resources, weigh evidence and craft informed, educated opinions. Many of us were taught this at neighborhood public schools and state colleges.
Clearly, all of Coleman’s years as a student at the best schools –Stuyvesant, Yale, Oxford and Cambridge– did not prepare him to decide what our nations children should be learning, if he never figured out that this is what was occurring in his own schooling and that formed the basis of his personal opinions of education.
cx: Sorry, omitted what is in bold: that lack of insight formed the basis of his personal opinions of education.
If only we had a full quote from Coleman that might clarify his views on the topic. Oh wait, here it is:
“… as you grow up in this world you realize people don’t really give a **** about what you feel or 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.”
This seems like a sentiment debate coaches could get behind. It also answers your question, Diane. Yes, the course “meets” the CCSS. It is specifically relevant to one of the CCSS-M practice standards. Glad I could help answer this question with a fairly straightforward reading of the quote in context.
And all the evidence points to dumbing down of the masses while filling the overfilled pockets of the few. Oh, but we ignore evidence there, I forget.
Coleman was specifically speaking about the “most common forms of writing” when he made his grossly offensive statement. You can spin it however you like but it was still offensive, arrogant, and insulting.
We are allowed to choose to not live the world Coleman’s rarified education provided for him and his cronies and that he advocated supporting, a world of textual complexity and proofs high above poetry and human feeling.
The fact that you are oblivious to Diane’s humor, sarcasm, and use of other clever rhetorical moves in this posting suggests that, like Coleman, you too would benefit from learning to give a s__t about what you and other people think and feel.
Spin on, though, spin on. The more arrogant and smarmy comments made in defense of the CCSS the quicker it dies a well-deserved death.
Sorry, Brett, but there’s quite a bit of room for personal opinion in debate. I don’t know a single debate coach that “doesn’t give a s*** about what (kids) think and feel.” Yes, backing up arguments with facts is important in debate, but so are thinks like “application to life,” “societal needs,” ethics and morals. These terms all come right off debate ballots. And the CC and its writers do NOT care one whit about ethics, morals, varied opinions, or the democratic process, which are the antithesis of good debates.
Coleman studied philosophy, so he should know that verification often fails as a criterion for truth. Almost no professional philosophers these days consider themselves verificationists like the A. J. Ayer of Language, Truth, and Logic. At its most extreme, verificationism treats all statements are not either well-formed formulas in a purely formal system (e.g., arithmetic or logic) or declarative descriptions of that which is immediately present, including the statements that matter in aesthetics, ethics, politics, and metaphysics, into nonsense. For example, a verificationist would be forced to say that a statement like “We should not commit genocide” are neither true nor false but meaningless. Debate has always dealt with appeals based on logic (formal reasoning), empirical evidence (facts), and rhetorical appeal (what matters). Coleman puts forward a discredited, narrow, simple-to-the-point-of-simple-minded view. One expects more of someone who was a Rhodes Scholar and studied philosophy.
Yikes. Typos in that. Here’s a corrected version:
Coleman studied philosophy, so he should know that verification often fails as a criterion for truth. Almost no professional philosophers these days consider themselves verificationists like the A. J. Ayer of Language, Truth, and Logic. At its most extreme, verificationism treats all statements are neither well-formed formulas in a purely formal system (e.g., arithmetic or logic) nor declarative descriptions of that which is immediately present, including the statements that matter in aesthetics, ethics, politics, and metaphysics, into nonsense. For example, a verificationist would be forced to say that a statement like “We should not commit genocide” is neither true nor false but meaningless. Debate has always dealt with appeals based on logic (formal reasoning), empirical evidence (reasoning from facts), and rhetorical appeal (reasoning from what matters). Removing the last of these removes from debate WHAT MATTERS!!!
Coleman puts forward a discredited, narrow, simple-to-the-point-of-simple-minded view. One expects more of someone who was a Rhodes Scholar and studied philosophy.
So, no, Brett, that is not a statement that as a debate coach, a philosopher, and a teacher I can “get behind.”
While I LOATHE this statement, here is the statement from the National Forensic League about how debate “supports the Common Core.” Diane, I know that you meant your OP in a satiric way, but I just thought you’d all like to know:
http://www.speechanddebate.org/aspx/nav.aspx?navid=207&pnavid=206
And the list of activities supports the need of Full Time Library Media Specialists at every school. And they are the first ones cut at the elementary level.
Exactly. A lot of research is required, and the Library Media Specialist is extremely important. Also, a knowledge of social science is needed, and social studies is being cut to ribbons.
T out W – another subject which should be at the forefront and not put on the back burner.
I don’t think our students could pass the Citizenship Exam. Refugees and Immigrants know more about our country then they do.
Submitted without further comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNy3ld_1OXo
TAGO!
Wouldn’t want to get into an argument with you crunchydeb.
There is a difference between opinion that expresses only personal preference, and interpretation or point of view based on reasoning or evidence. E.g. I prefer chocolate cupcakes with vanilla icing, vs. I prefer homemade cupcakes over store bought, because when I make them at home I can control the ingredients and I that’s how I can be sure that my cupcakes don’t have a lot of additives like food coloring or preservatives. Someone else may argue that they don’t care about preservatives, but value the convenience of buying their desserts at the store, and so on. Then we can have a rich discussion.
I too took offense at David Coleman’s crude, insulting and flippant remark. I can’t help but wonder when/how he so clearly internalized the message that no one gives a s*** what or how he feels, because that’s what he seems to be saying.
However, as a former high school social studies teacher I know it is a struggle to get students to write reasoned opinions (“the neolithic revolution had both positive and negative effects for humanity) as opposed to empty drivel (the neolithic revolution was cool, or boring, or interesting, or irrelevant, or whatever “opinion” the student may decide to voice).
It’s hermeneutics/ epistemology. I’m grateful that I studied philosophy as an undergraduate, because this has helped me see where Coleman is coming from, intellectually. However, when the CCLS were first published and he also articulated the imperative that we teach primary sources, historical documents and other important texts entirely devoid of context, I dug into the 30 or 40 pages of appendices at the back of the CCLS and examined the “research” on which the CCLS were allegedly founded in order to find the rationale for this approach. I found nothing.
I can only assume his stance reflects a hyper-postmodernism, or a caricature of the view that meaning does not inhere in literature (or art, or history, or media, etc.) but emerges out of our engagement with the work in question. Perhaps Coleman should have read a bit further–he might have discovered lively debates that challenge this position and strongly suggest that the interpretive methodology he would force feed America’s children is both antiquated and shallow.
It is a great struggle to get even good students to write well reasoned papers. One of my colleagues decided to stop teaching honors classes at my institution because of the pushback from students used to getting an A on their writing when they received a C or worse because there was no argument presented.
Sounds like your colleague needs to examine his/her teaching then. If an assignment is resisted by a majority of students then those students don’t see any value in the assignment and/or don’t understand what the teacher actually wants.
It’s always easy to blame the students but very difficult to sublimate the ego and question why an assignment/lesson/project falls flat and fails to reach the students. It took me years to learn that lesson.
Changing the way you teach to meet the needs of the students is one of those simple fixes to the problem you present. And outside of academia that kind of writing is non-existent and I’m sure seems pretty much useless to the students.
Why not try something that is meaningful, has a real-world use, and offers real time benefits to the students? More thinking and work for the teacher, who can’t just assign a meaningless paper because that’s what we’ve always done, but the end result is well worth it.
When I was first teaching freshman English in college over 20 years ago we were doing this with I-Search papers, using exemplary narrative expository writing from great writers like Aldo Leopold, and advocating for an end to dry, boring, endlessly repetitive academic writing that is filled with jargon and overly self-referential.
Things change. People often resist that.
You are really clueless about the abilities and nature of students who enter the classroom today. All my friends who teach in the colleges say the same thing… the students cannot write on levels once expected by middle school. Language usage has diminished to th point, that their working vocabulary is less than 500 words. College professors (now forced to be adjuncts or not work at all) must teach high school English before they can approach college level course work.
20 years ago, huh? Boy, would you be in for the shook of your life.
You should read the satirical novel written by college professor Joel Shatzky, “Option Three,” That is the world you would be working in if you were still teaching in college.
The class in question was a political philosophy class and the students were dismayed that their papers had to present arguments in favor of a position rather than simply making claims about things.
I am not sure about the topic list, but it is likely to have included standard readings from the literature and always some contemporary philosophers. No doubt the paper topics included standard ones for a course in political philosophy, which I would have thought the students would have expected when they decided to take the course.
TE, Chris in Florida makes a point that bears repeating:
It’s always easy to blame the students but very difficult to repress the ego and question why an assignment/lesson/project falls flat and fails to reach the students.
If these students were reading nothing but selections from the chestnuts in intro political philosophy, that could be the problem. Locke, Hobbes, Kant, Rousseau, Mill, Marx, Nozick, Rawls–these folks are not easy reading for most adults. I ran a philosophy group for adults here in the Tampa area for a time, and I can attest to this. Few got the arguments because the language was difficult and the concepts unfamiliar. But beyond that issue, which is a significant one–these people require a lot of translating for most contemporar readers–I wonder how well the professor modeled for his or her students what the paper was supposed to look like–what form an argument acceptable to him or her would take. I daresay that many pieces by folks on that list would not get a passing grade in a course these days because almost none of those guys typically presented anything like solid empirical evidence. Look, for example, at Mill’s Chapters on Socialism. There’s little there in the way of evidence there that rises above the level of hearsay and armchair generalization. He tells his comfortable readers to watch out because the poor are desperate but, increasingly, educated enough to want and expect more of their lives, but one doesn’t get from Mill, in that book, anything like empirical evidence supporting either claim. Instead, he offers up anecdotes and unsubstantiated generalizations. If those sorts of models were all the kids saw–selections from those chestnuts of political philosphy–it’s little wonder that they didn’t present arguments supported by evidence that would meet a minimal modern standard for a scholarly paper, for the sources they had ready to hand don’t do that either, typically.
I’ve seen a lot of college professors do this–give vague assignments and then get PO’d when their students don’t rise to some standard that was neither explained to them nor modeled for them.
I suppose anything is possible, but the class was small, run as a seminar, with multiple papers and multiple rewrites with extensive comments on the drafts.
You are right Bob. The teachers should check with the school librarian to see if the resources are available to complete the assignment as written (or rewritten, as necessary). College Professors should also check with the University Librarians to see if their projects are doable. The best projects are done in collaboration between the teacher and librarian (the expert on research).
When will they ever learn.
Ellen,
The resources of a library at a library at a major research university are basically limitless these days.
TE – yes, there are numerous resources available (technically almost limitless) but the students lack the skills to access this information. Even the professors go to the
Librarians, tell them what they want, and then wait (not very patiently) for the result. These librarians move heaven and earth to locate the requested articles, books, or research – often borrowing from other University Libraries across the country.
The background of acquisitions and inter library loan in institutions of higher learning (and the stories told by librarians about their working relationships with the faculty) is fascinating. The issues of storage and retrieval of print materials is another saga which some of you might be interested in learning.
My point was that at least for students at major research institutions like mine (the collection includes a little under 4.5 million printed volumes and over10,000 journals with instant access to articles) is not the binding constraint on the student. In the case under discussion, the important constraint was that students thought that making a claim and expressing an opinion was an argument.
And TE, in order to make a persuasive argument, based on fact, not opinions, they need to know how to navigate the system and find scholarly print or online resources to back up their claims.
“If an assignment is resisted by a majority of students then those students don’t see any value in the assignment and/or don’t understand what the teacher actually wants.”
Or you may just have a class of academic shitheads (oops, we’re not supposed to voice those “truths”) due to bad luck of the computer draw.
I teach three classes of Spanish 1, in one hour every time I check there will be more missing and/or incomplete assignments than the other two combined, sometimes twice as many as the other two combined (partially meaning that in the other two there might be 3 or so each out of 30 who haven’t completed the work while in the one there is at least 15-20 who haven’t). I guess I must just be Dr. Jekyll for the one class and Mr. Hyde for the other two, eh!!
TE,
You have “honors” classes at the university level? How does that work? Who qualifies, etc. . . ?
Thanks,
Duane
Most state universities have an honors program. Typically students apply to ours as incoming freshman and our admitted based on high school record, standardized test scores, and application essay. In the program they take a number of honors courses which are typically small and at the introductory level. The other aspects of the program depend on more on the school. Some have honors dorms, some have a separate advising system, etc.
SUNY at Albany has an honors dorm for incoming Freshmen in the honors program.
Well, I guess in the lofty heights of high school and college engaging students is considered to be passé and uninteresting (although I don’t remember that being the case when I taught college English at 2 different universities 20 years ago).
In my first grade classes if a student isn’t engaging in the lesson or can’t/won’t do the work then I try to figure out why and then change my approach. I’ve never been much for the laminated lesson plans/assignments approach where the students must conform to me.
Having said that, I do agree that some classes are more challenging than others but then all I have to do is teach every single subject and in addition how to read, write, think, and talk on the side. I don’t have the luxury of teaching the same class 3 different times using the same lesson plans and same assignments for differing groups of students.
By law and by district and principal mandate I must differentiate every lesson to the needs of individual students and keep records proving that I have done so. Every single lesson I teach and every assignment I give has to have written out and extensively explained modifications for ESOL, ESE, ADHD, and Gifted students outside the “regular” lesson plan and assignments.
I have to provide Response to Intervention small group or individual lessons to every single child who does not succeed on the district assessments and keep copious records of my interventions, which can be in reading, math, behavior, language, and/or writing. This is all in addition to the mandated core curriculum lessons delivered “whole class”.
Maybe I should just move up to high school or college so I can blame those lazy, good for nothing students for not “getting” my stellar teaching and not completing my fabulous assignments? Eh? Sounds much easier than what I do with 6-year olds!
And where did anyone blame students?
We are having a discussion about being able write arguments, do I thought I would bring up an example where some very good students not only had difficulty writing arguments, but understanding that making a claim or expressing an opinion is not an argument.
Chris – each grade level has their foibles.
But listening to your list of required paperwork (some of it redundant and unnecessary), makes me glad I’m retired.
I miss teaching the kids and individualizing instruction as well as using various learning styles, I don’t miss the constant documentation.
TE, see my longer note, below.
Oh TE, you and your colleague will be very happy when you get the first crop of CCSS-trained students in your classes. We now teach expository writing with textual evidence starting in 1st grade (introductory in Kindergarten). By the time they get to you they will have had 13 years of supporting their arguments in writing. The world will be changed, all will be well, eh?
I was a college honors student, believe it or not! I took honors English and other such courses as an undergrad. Not new at all since that was in the late 1970’s.
Chris,
Have I advocated for the ELA CCSS anywhere in this blog? I am not sure why you are bringing this up. I also made no claim about honors being new, so I am not sure why you pointed out it was not new.
In any case, my personal frustration revolves more around mathematics preparation.
te, I’m not picking a fight with you (this time, LOL). You’ve grown on me and I’m beginning to enjoy discussing things with you.
My comment about the honors courses in college was for Duane, not you. There’s no way to reply directly to his comment but only to the whole thread — sorry I wasn’t clear.
Also, I didn’t mean to imply that you were “for” CCSS — I was mocking the PR that the supporters use. My 1st graders can find textual support in a most rudimentary manner, yes, but they don’t have a clue why they have to do it nor what purpose it serves, proving to me that the CCSS ELA standards are extremely developmentally inappropriate.
Teachers complaining about those lazy students who lack basic skills and who can’t write is a treasured old trope. When I was writing my first master’s thesis I found evidence going back to ancient Greece and to the turn of the century (19th to 20th, that is) here in the USA of teachers and professors making these exact same laments and complaining about the exact same things. I found that funny and telling.
Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should, to paraphrase Einstein.
I believe that when a human brain is asked to ‘debate’ an idea, to offer evidence for an argument, then the neural pathways that are developed to the areas of the brain where comparison and contrast, hypothesis and prediction and finally synthesis (analysis) are used.
Since there is NO skill that can be acquired but THE BRIAN without practice, classrooms where teachers plan activities that offer PRACTICE in critical thinking, are crucial to later use of the skills.
Frivolous debates aside, thoughtful exercises in thinking where teaches demand research and evidence develop the HABITS OF MIND necessary to do WORK.
As some of you know by reading my resume,or past comments, I was a cohort for the real National Standards (The 8 Principles of LEARNING… yes, LEARNING) and attended 2 years of workshops led by the tools people at the LRDC, staff developers for the nation’s best schools.
I tell you this because the words HABITS OF MIND, joined other words like ACCOUNTABLE TALK, and GENUINE EVALUATION/AUTHENTIC ASSESSMENT. but the word WORK was the core word. For the brain to do work, it needs practice. One does not have to think about how to tie a shoelace, because the neural pathways allow easy access and it become automatic.
SKILLS ARE POWERS, and can only be acquired by PRACTICE!
I must have said this thousands of times, and I wish I could remember the book in which it appeared; I was preparing to teach writing in middle school, and to inform my practice I was reading about critical thinking skills because kids need to access ideas in order to hang words on thoughts… on paper.
Discussions here are so interesting, but sometimes the real focus for the lesson is lost.
It helps to use the old fashioned Lesson Plan, where the OBJECTIVE is at the top.
The OBJECTIVE is not, “Should people be allowed to sell their body organs for money? “It is LWBA (learner will be able) to argue about ideas and explain their views.
The activity: to argue whether or not Should people be allowed to sell their body organs for money?
Next would be MATERIALS ,(research, internet etc) and finally FOLLOW-UP PRACTICE– review of skills/information acquired..
There is merit to this Looking for an Argument class –it lubricates one’s ability to argue and write. However it should not replace learning content. You cannot be a good debater without knowledge; and you cannot acquire the knowledge needed for a debate quickly unless you come to the task with a large body of background knowledge already committed to long-term memory. This is what the fans of Common Core and “21st Century Skills” usually overlook.
You need books, periodicals, DVDs, and databases to research ideas. Oh, a library and the school librarian will be an invaluable tool.
Keep pounding Ponderosa.
yes!
As long as David Coleman gets a lifetime ban from any connection to public education (or shall I say the education of our nation’s children on a national level in case education becomes 100 percent privatized).. I might have enough brain cell activity left to muster the courage to answer that question. Coleman should be effectively banned immediately from anything having to do with education for his creation of public school- destroying, segregationist-instigating, anti civil rights-promoting, untested, big business profit connected garbage of a concept – common core…. repeat life time ban from public education! For now, I am too mired in the need to only concern myself with data and the “factual” so long as it is Coleman-supported “factual”. When expressing opinions is approved by Coleman and Danielson and the likes, then maybe I can answer that question. Back to my “How to be a Teacher in One Trillion Data-Connected Steps” manual published by Pearson.
Opinions are fine when well supported by evidence and good arguments. I expect my students to research and identify the evidence and arguments that will support their views. I also expect them to research and find evidence and arguments to combat the strongest opposing views. Most importantly, I hope to help them to become educated enough to change their opinions when and if the evidence gives them reason to do so. I was teaching this way long before David Coleman reinvented argumentation as the hot new standard.
About twenty-five years ago, I wrote a little book for high-school kids on writing the research paper. It sold a lot of copies and is still in print. Oddly, that book was about doing research, formulating a thesis, and then doing a lot more research to find out whether the thesis could be substantiated.
Funny that that book sold so many hundreds of thousands of copies. Maybe people were using it as door stop or to prop up the legs of wobbly desks, for evidently, before Coleman, no one was reading closely or gathering evidence.
Yes, Robert, the good old term paper. I bet I had a copy of your book in my library.
Audrey – that is the ultimate goal.
From the article it seems that this course was developed by a teacher or a group of teachers. They have refined it over time – 20 years – and replicate it by teaching it to other teachers. It’s not a textbook brought out by a committee of consultants with “ideas” about best practices, but no practice in a classroom. This is why it engages the kids and is flexible and can be adapted. Most importantly, it raises kids’ self esteem with the powerful notion that their ideas matter and that they have to power to persuade others of their opinions.
WIN! WIN! WIN!
When people defend the new “standards” in ELA, they always do so by referring to this principle that students are now supposed to support their ideas with evidence. That kills me because that is, of course, what we’ve ALWAYS asked students to do. The defenders of the “standards” NEVER base their defense on the particular items in the 1,600-item bullet list that makes up the standards because a) they typically haven’t read the list, or haven’t done so at all closely; and b) the list itself is indefensible–hackneyed, unimaginative, narrow, distorting, misconceived, amateurish, and full of holes big enough to drive whole curricula through them.
Whenever people start talking this way, I wonder do these people have any clue what we have always done as English teachers? I know that Coleman didn’t, but it’s really shocking when one hears this crap from
a. superintendents and principals
b. high-powered edupundits and consultants
c. leaders of teachers’ unions
I say to myself, when I hear them talk like this, are they really that ignorant of what teachers actually do, have actually been doing all along? And then I feel embarrassed for them.
Or, the other common defense is that now, under the new standards, kids are “reading closely,” as if we never had kids analyze texts before–as if that weren’t ALMOST ALL OF WHAT WE HAD KIDS DO WITH LITERATURE AND NONFICTION.
It’s amusing, for example, to look at something like the new Common Core Regents exam, which is touted for having kids read closely to find evidence to support their arguments, as though kids didn’t have to do that for the English Regents exam in the past.
All this would be funny if it weren’t so damning of the folks who actually take these CCSS claims seriously. One begins to think, OMG, these people–the LEADERS in our profession–really haven’t any clue what people have always done.
The edupundits and consultants are a special case, of course. They are simply doing the Vichy collaboration thing because it pays so well.
Robert, Instead of reading closely (I.e. With a magnifying glass), shouldn’t they be getting the gist of the article with details to back up their point – you know, the main idea.
When doing research, who has time to read all the articles that closely. They just need to find the information relevant to the question asked.
Is the word “skimming” in the CCSS vocabulary?
Of course, Common Core won’t change this, at all. In fact, it will lead to further Walmartizing and Microsofting of U.S. education in the hands of a few big box educational publishers who will basically recycle the same old crap they have always peddled, now correlated to the Common Core. Because of the massive economies of scale created by having a single national bullet list of standards, true innovation in ELA pedagogy and curricula of the kind that WAS OCCURRING pre-NCLB will not occur.
If you want real innovation in curricula and pedagogy, you have to create the conditions under which innovative, smaller publishers will emerge with products that actually address issues like this one–like teaching kids how to construct arguments. YOU ARE NOT GOING TO GET THAT FROM THE BIG BOX PUBLISHERS. Their interest is in pushing product out the door as quickly and cheaply as possible, using a lot of recycled material, not in building products that innovatively address these kinds of issues.
In addition, Robert, the textbooks sometimes gloss over controversial issues, such as Climate Change, the use of fossil fuels, the Trail of Tears, the Japanese Internment, Palestine vs Israel, even the Holocaust.
I always had to skim through nonfiction books to be purchased for the library to make sure they were accurate and not politically correct (I rarely bought a book I had not previewed).
Falsification is commonplace in K-12 textbooks, especially in ones from the larger publishing houses, and particularly in the science and social studies books. The history texts might as well be shelved under Mythology.
I’d laugh at the mythology comment if it weren’t so true.
Vive la revisionist history! (Not!)
Every tribe tells its its myths, and its myths are the true ones. This tribe is no exception to the general rule. Oddly, though, it thinks of itself as an exception.
Robert, they either don’t have a clue or they are lying.
It’s bizarre that anyone would think that suddenly, with the advent of the Common Core, we’ve discovered teaching kids to write arguments. I have been writing textbooks for use by English teachers for some twenty-give years now, and many of those were widely used writing textbooks, and all of those texts treated writing arguments in considerable detail.
If professors are finding a general decline among their students in ability to construct written arguments, here are some possible explanations (and please note that the Common Core does nothing to address any of these issues but actually perpetuates the problems):
1. In the standards and testing era (from NCLB to the present), enormous pressure was put on English teachers to ensure that their students would do well on standardized tests, and so, instead of devoting the time that they used to devote to having kids do reports and research papers, they now devote much of their time to teaching what I call InstaWriting of the Test. Instead of formulating a thesis, doing a lot of research, gathering evidence, sifting through arguments, and preparing a well-substantiated, well-documented paper, kids are now being drilled, a lot, on looking briefly at a selection or two and then answering a question using a formulaic structure (the five-paragraph theme, typically) and some “evidence” from the selection(s). Developing a strong, sustained argument takes time and reflection that simply aren’t available when kids are taking these tests or doing exercises modeled on the tests (on their formats and time constraints). This is one of the dramatic ways in which the standardized testing is distorting and narrowing our curricula and pedagogy.
2. In the past, English teachers commonly worked from two basals—a literature basal (basically, an anthology with added study apparatus) and a composition basal (a dedicated writing text that treated writing and GUMS–grammar, usage, mechanics, and spelling). The composition basal has now almost entirely disappeared and has been replaced by the Integrated Language Arts text. In the Integrated Language Arts text, writing is incidental, and the use of such texts has led teachers away from dedicating large blocks of uninterrupted time to writing activities. So, for example, where teachers in the past would commonly have students spend a couple weeks working through the Persuasive Writing chapter of the composition basal and several weeks working through the Research Paper chapter of the same basal, they often now have kids do writing in bits and pieces as they work through the integrated language arts text. Good writing takes a lot of time—doing research to formulate a topic and thesis, gathering information for that, writing a draft, critiquing and then revising the draft, proofreading—all this is time-consuming. But often, these days, the time is simply not available. The three weeks that the kid used to spend doing the major report or research paper is now spent taking invalid standardized tests.
3. In the standards and testing era, extracurricular activities like Speech and Debate Competition that built generations of students’ abilities to formulate and critique arguments have been deemphasized in a lot of schools.
4. The general emphasis on abstractly formulated skills (like those that make up the bullet list of “standards” in the CCSS) now prevalent leads to a concomitant lack of emphasis on knowledge acquisition. To the extent that kids are spending their time doing activities dealing with abstractly formulated skills, they are not spending time acquiring knowledge on which they can base sound arguments. Kids come to think that if they are going to write on, say, the death penalty, they have no duty to go out and learn a lot about the death penalty—to develop a broad knowledge base related to the subject—but they can, instead, take the sorts of short cuts modelled all the time in their test prep exercises (“Use one piece of evidence from selection A and another from selection B to support your inference or conclusion”).
5. There’s a lot of vagueness in contemporary teaching materials about what, exactly, constitutes sound argument. Whole chapters are commonly written, these days, on “inferencing” that never treat, specifically, differing types of propositions and their correspondingly different truth conditions and differing types of reasoning and their correspondingly different types of warrants. It’s astonishing, really, how little substance there is in most lessons promulgated, these days, as lessons in critical thinking. And that results from these materials having been prepared by “education experts” who don’t, themselves, know much, if anything at all, about the relevant sciences and arts—informal and formal logic, probability, statistics, and rhetoric, in particular. And because the Common Core uses such extraordinarily vague language to refer to argument and evidence, it perpetuates the sort of vague, vapid, non-operationalized, almost completely content-free instruction in “critical thinking” that has become so common.
cx: “InstaWriting for the Test,” not “InstaWriting of the Test,” of course
So, people have always taught kids to construct arguments. They’ve done little else. But writing instruction has taken a huge blow under NCLB, and so have acquisition of knowledge as a basis for argument and concrete instruction in types of and techniques for argument (because of the formulation of both the NCLB-era and Common Core-era standards as lists of vaguely formulated, very general, very abstract descriptions of skills).
Robert, your explanation of the demise of our students writing ability coincides with my personal experiences.
Ironically, I can teach even kindergarteners to do research. In small groups – We pick a topic, get several books on that topic (or online sites), look at the pictures and read the captions, come to some conclusions, write a paragraph together based on our observations, read the paragraph together and read it to the class. Of course, I am assisting along the way, answering questions, gleaning their responses, putting their words down on paper in a coherent way – but it starts them on the correct path.
Unfortunately, I was only part time and didn’t have the minutes in the day to do this on a consistent basis. Left to my own devices, all my students would have learned the skills they needed to write credible research papers. Due to time constraints, I did the best I could. Sometimes I was frantic to teach them as much as possible, step by step, especially as I approached retirement.
“My” graduates who are completing their Freshmen and Sophomore years of college are doing well. Hopefully, I played a small part in their successes.
I have only been reading the commentary here for 2 weeks, but I have come to admire your passion for teaching and your grasp of what it takes to enable learning. We all fell that frantic need to do more in the ten months we have them. My ‘graduates’ from second grade and event grade are all in their thirties, and many find me to say that I was the teacher they remember, the one who made the difference.
That is the reward… it certainly ain’t the money, or those 2 month summer ‘vacations.’
Our union says not to call summer a vacation – we have been laid off with no pay.
Oh, and Susan, I enjoy reading your posts as well. We both care, probably more than we should.
Welcome to the blog. Warning: it can become an addiction.
I must say, Ellen, that I concur with Susan on this. I dearly love reading your posts!
Thank you, Robert. I am in awe of your knowledge and usually agree with all your posts. Your kind words mean a lot to me.
One way in which the Common Core differs from previous textbooks and many previously existing state standards is in its promotion of Argument over Persuasion. In the past, most basal composition texts in the United States had separate units on each of three modes: narrative writing, informational or expository writing, and persuasive writing. The authors of the Common Core opted, instead, to label these modes narrative writing, informative writing, and argument because they wanted to de-emphasize appeals to emotion and appeals to authority.
Now, the traditional title for the third mode made more sense, of course, because persuasion involves making a case that is BOTH appealing and reasonable, and often reasonable BECAUSE it is appealing. Many matters about which people argue–arguably, all the really important ones–deal with topics for which what matters to people—what they care about/what has emotional meaning to them—is precisely what is at issue, and it is those matters—people’s emotional responses–that are relevant as evidence. The authors of the Common Core make the case that the switch from persuasion to argument is important because “college is an argument culture” (Appendix A). They therefore show themselves entirely ignorant of (or on the troglodyte side of) a debate that has raged in the humanities departments of our universities over the past half century over precisely this issue—whether we can and should treat the curriculum in isolation from its human meaning as mattering and the extent to which those facts that we attend to and how we frame them are power plays with meaning as mattering.
When Coleman stands before a crowd and tells the assembled people that “No one gives a $#&*&*$#*&#$!!! what you feel” and then goes on to explain that people are looking, instead, for evidence, he fails to recognize that how people feel is, quite frequently, THE VERY EVIDENCE THAT IS RELEVANT. It’s peculiar that he doesn’t recognize this, for he studied philosophy, and philosophers have almost all long rejected logical positivism, verificationism, and behaviorism on logical, empirical, and ethical grounds, and as a student of philosophy, he should know this, and he should be familiar with the powerful and compelling objections to those discredited positions. Instead, he spouts antiquated, simple-minded nonsense as current REVELATION. I would even go so far as to say that one can, in fact, derive Ought from Is because what matters to people—people’s “oughts”—are themselves observable, demonstrable facts about the world. In fact, one can apply to those “oughts” the same sort of inductive reasoning that one applies to scientific questions. I find that I don’t like to have sticks poked into my eye and that I feel that people shouldn’t do that to me. I make a generalization: People don’t like to have sticks poked into their eyes, and people shouldn’t do that to one another. And the former part of the generalization proves to be repeatedly verified, and the latter part of it follows logically from the first by a simple consistency criterion. Perhaps David should go back and take an introductory ethics class before he spouts such hoary, discredited nonsense. Of course people give a $@#*$*(*@$!! how you feel and how they feel, and almost no human interaction is free from such concern, including, ironically, his attempt to make his case, which is highly emotion-laden.
And, of course, appeals to authority are not bad in and of themselves. Looking a word up in a dictionary is an appeal to authority. What matters is not that it’s an appeal to authority but whether the authority can be trusted. But, again and again, one finds this sort of simple mindedness in the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic]. Appeals to authority are appeals to emotion and therefore bad. Well, no. Looking up the proper pitch of a ¼-inch bolt in a United Fine standards table is an appeal to authority– not one to which a lot of emotion is attached, certainly, though there is some—people feel good about going to what they know is a trustworthy source, and they feel good about getting the measurement right, and that’s why they seek such a source, and we cannot, as Coleman tries to do, drive a wedge down the middle of ourselves and divorce our rational being from our emotional being, for these are inseparable. Even the conclusion of a deductive proof could be arrived at by a machine comes to us because we have chosen to use the deductive method because it has proven to yield results that satisfy, that matter, that we can depend upon, that we care about.
I suspect that what’s behind that switch from Persuasion to Argument, ultimately, is authoritarian presumptions. These poor fools–these teachers and students–they do not understand, as I do, the difference between reason and emotion. It’s time I gave them some rules to follow there.
Keep your rules, David. They are far too crude and simple minded for my tastes.
cxs: Even the conclusion of a deductive proof that could be arrived at by a machine comes to us because we have chosen to use the deductive method because it has been proven to yield results that satisfy, that matter, that we can depend upon, that we care about.
That’s what it is to be human. That’s what Heidegger said our kind of being, in essence, is. It’s caring. It’s giving a $#&$&*#&*!!!.
David, go read some Heidegger.
I am in awe of your knowledge, too, but the way you use it, and express it really knocks me out.
Please don’t equate college with high school – they are too different beasts with two different motivations.
Some high school students “get it”, but way too many use the path of least work effort, no matter what the assignment or what their ability. They get lazy and difficult to motivate. Some have a heavy workload and don’t have the time to do a thorough job or simply don’t know how to create a “good” product. And I’m not blaming the teachers.
The better students are used to getting high grades for barely adequate work. In the honors or AP courses, they get the grade they earn. Any complaints should fall on deaf ears – this is one way to get college ready.
The trouble is – nobody teaches them how to do a real research project. It’s not in the curriculum. And the experts – the school librarians – are cut out of the loop.
Instead of addressing the writing deficiency of the current generation, the CCSS puts their emphasis on the wrong issues. English teachers in both high school, college, and even grade school, should have been consulted to see what our students need to be successful – not a list pulled out of the air based on personal school experiences as a student.
Remember, just because you were once a student, doesn’t make you an expert on education.
Smart answer.
Thank you Susan.
I’m obviously as passionate about this topic as our friend Robert.