Paul,Thomas writes here about what we learn from fiction–some fiction–about life. Why do we keep reading George Orwell’s “1984” or Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”? They teach us important life lessons, which we value.
In this post, he writes about other books, books that teach us lessons about scarcity and about our willingness to accept harsh conditions as inevitable.
This is the book he explores:
“The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, written by George Saunders and wonderfully illustrated by Lane Smith (whose It’s a Book I cannot recommend highly enough), is a fanciful and satirical tale that proves in the end to be an allegory of scarcity and slack—a perfect companion read to Ursula K. Le Guin’s allegory of privilege, “The One’s Who Walk Away from Omelas.””
It is, Thomas writes, a powerful allegory about scarcity and slack.
And it makes you wonder about the decision by the writers of the Common Core standards to downgrade fiction.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I just can’t believe the timing of this very inspirational post.. I woke up to prepare a tutoring lesson for high school senior in the allegory used by Isaac Bashevis Singer in “the Key” and some of his other short stories as a part of literature unit on short stories from the 70s and 80s. This particular student is quite bright and she flunked math this semester (for many reasons , one of them being the flu and losing 10 pounds, having a mom recovering from cancer etc). Thanks for reminding me of the importance of what teachers do and thanks to ALL of the teachers who do this for their lives … don’t get discouraged ; our grandchildren need you.
(The book used by the high school is quite interesting: American Short Stories , 2003, Perfection Learning Corporation … I hope a lot of the high schools have it on the shelves).
At National Review magazine, Fordham Institute published recently an article on the amount of literature that will be part of common core. I think it was written in an attempt to appease the “tea party” . They are very proud at F.I. when they get an article into National Review.
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sorry, I just misquoted Petrilli; he said “olive branch” not white flag.
quotefrom F.I.headline.
An olive branch on voucher accountability
Michael J. Petrilli
June 20, 2014
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citing Fordham Institute from the National Review: “Common Core suggests that, as a student progresses through the grades, the nonfiction proportion of materials should increase until …it represents 70 percent of total reading in all classes. The standards explicitly warn that English teachers are not required to devote 70 percent of reading to informational texts…informational texts include foundational documents of American history — the Gettysburg Address, Common Sense, and works of thought leaders like Emerson and Thoreau. Given the evidence that most American students cannot identify the decade in which the Civil War occurred, one would think that enhancing student knowledge of our nation’s rich history would be welcome.”
The author of the article just doesn’t know what we are doing in the high schools — the standards in MA I believe are sufficient ; the authors of these articles at F.I. reduce the teacher’s role ; they belittle, ridicule our work and condescend to professional educators in an attempt to push their own value system.
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The basic principle the “Common Core” transgresses is that teachers teach in order to learn. They learn from their students far more than the students learn from them, but…the students themselves also learn from each other, so schools actually do “school” each new generation.
That principle is absolutely counter to the claim that teachers transmit all knowledge into the vacuum heads of kids. Yet the volumes of serious academic scholarship that proves that claim is ridiculous is well beyond the “paygrade” of the CCSS and Pearson and current Duncan peons.
The proof of the principle of teachers’ learning from students is how one of my students, walking through a bookstore a few years ago, mentioned he’d like to read Machiavelli. He’s got some autism and has long been in special ed, but is bright and an excellent film maker (which is how I know him), so I bought him The Prince. He read it. And he read it again. And he re-reads it every other year or so. And he still asks me if or when I last read it. And what I think about how it relates to politics, or to tall buildings or to anything that we encounter. He’s still teaching me about Machiavelli. That’s why we teach, just as its how and what we teach. For him, and for me, the “common core” is inquiry, not the questions on a test produced by a British company to insult American academic standards.
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The National Review has been going downhill for decades now, but it’s still sad to see Emerson and Thoreau referred to as “thought leaders.”
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I have long believed that the “great ideas” and “trends in thought” approaches were extremely valuable, though there is always the danger of oversimplification. One can do worse than to survey with students great ideas in Eastern or Western or American thought. I agree with you, though, that the “thought leaders” phrase is overdone.
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Narrative is one of the fundamental ways in which we humans are built to make sense of the world. About 80 percent OF ALL writing is narrative. Narrative is found absolutely everywhere. Scientific reports have Methods sections that are primarily narrative.
Our brains make sense of the world by putting bits and pieces together to form coherent narratives. When you dream, neural pathways that have been recently activated are revisited pretty much at random, and the part of your brain that narrativizes attempts to weave those random firings into a coherent story because that’s what brains do. So, for example, I once had a dream that I was on a small prop plane flying into Cuba. Cuba was a white layer cake floating below the plane in an emerald sea. Next to me on the plane was a big, red orangutan smoking a cigar. Well, in the days before this dream, I had flown in a small prop plane, read a story about Castro’s ill health, been to a wedding where there was a cake, and played golf with some hefty guys who were smoking cigars.
The historiographer Hayden White long ago pointed out that we tell ourselves that we have understood historical events when we have imposed particular narrative frames on them.
And, of course, every traditional culture communicated its highest aspirations and values in the form of stories–myths and legends, folk tales and fairytales, fables and parables, and the parable was the fundamental teaching tool of all the great religious teachers and philosophers throughout history–the Buddha, Zeno, Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, Mullah Nasruddin, Rumi, the Baal Shem Tov. Yeshua of Nazareth chose to communicate via parables–the stories of the prodigal son, the Good Samaritan, and so on. In our own era, the most fundamental new ideas in philosophy are made clear and memorable via narrative descriptions of situations–Nietzsche Madman in the Market, Sartre’s Waiter, Turing’s Test, Searle’s Chinese Room, Philippa Foot Trolly Car Problem, David Chalmers’s Zombies, Frank Jackson’s tale of Mary the Color Scientist–there are many, many others. That these narrative situations are so common in philosophy indicates that careful thinking typically involves looking at exempla–at instances–and their characteristics and ramifications.
There is a school of clinical practice in psychology called Cognitive Narrative Therapy that is all about teaching people to tell themselves more life-enhancing narratives about themselves and others–ones, for example, in which they are not continually playing the victim role or the role of the caretaker of an abuser.
A great many studies in cognitive psychology (see the work of Elizabeth Loftus on this) have shown that when people remember, they do so in narrative form, and that much of memory is confabulation–it’s made up; it’s “just so” stories. The extent to which this is so is one of the most shocking and surprising findings of 20th-century science.
Our very idea of Self–out personal identities–who we are–is a story that we tell ourselves. Who am I? Well, I am in part that boy in the Doctor Dentons in the creaky old farmhouse reading “The White Snake” with a flashlight under the quilt at night with the rain pounding on the tin roof. We are our stories.
Given the absolutely FUNDAMENTAL nature of narrative and giving its ubiquity, and given the absolutely FUNDAMENTAL nature of personal narrative, it would behoove us to know something about it.
Or, we could spend our time having our students do close reading of paragraphs 23-26 of that report on the production of pig iron and pork bellies to find what evidence the author uses to support the argument that pig iron and pork belly production are suffering because workers aren’t gritful enough.
It was pretty clear, in the beginning, that the 70 percent figure at the end of Grade 12 was meant to apply to English class and that the reinterpretation of what was being said was a face-saving reaction to overwhelming negative reaction to the requirement. There are other indications that aspects of the new standards were not thought through. For example, we are told attention is to be given in Grades 11 and 12 to foundational texts in American thought, but in most high schools in the United States, American lit and history are studied in Grade 11, and the 12th-grade English class is a survey of British literature or, sometimes, of world literature.
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The moral of all this is that thoughtful people will take the standards as guides adapt them and transcend them where they fall short. As teachers and as curriculum developers, we must never stop subjecting our practice to critique, to thoughtful reflection.
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yes, Bob; this is accurate….
quoting Bob: “t was pretty clear, in the beginning, that the 70 percent figure at the end of Grade 12 was meant to apply to English class and that the reinterpretation of what was being said was a face-saving reaction to overwhelming negative reaction to the requirement. ”
Petrilli has another “safe facing” at Fordham Friday where he says he is extending a “white glove” or something like that.; but they have been leading the propaganda band wagon with education next with NCTQ etc…. makes me exceedingly annoyed.
Thanks for your eloquent words, Bob, they are inspirational
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On so many levels, social, emotional, physiological, etc., great fiction is powerful. Each reader’s interpretation is unique. Providing students access to great books, the choice of what to read, and the time in school to read them is the most powerful way to differentiate learning and to promote critical thinking.
Please read, “Your Brain on Fiction” …
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I was born to poverty, had severe dyslexia and my mother was told I would never learn to read or write.
How did my mother overcome that? She refused to let me grow up illiterate and taught me at home—using physical punishment if I didn’t cooperate—and along the way, I fell in love with science fiction and fantasy. My mother and father—both high school drop outs— were both avid readers of romance (my mother) and mystery/western (my father). Therefore, I saw them reading paperback books (mostly from a nearby used bookstore because the books where cheaper) every night even after we finally had our first black and white TV. Even with the TV on, we all read as a family.
In school, the textbooks were mostly boring so I ignored them and read my paperbacks hidden inside the textbook during class.
I barely graduated from high school but loved reading. I could read two paperback science fiction books a day while ignoring homework and what was going on in class.
After I was honorably discharged from the U.S. Marines and went to college on the GI Bill, my literacy level was so high from reading all those fun to read science fiction books, and by then historical fiction too, that when I started college I didn’t have to take any remedial English classes.
The hardest part of college for me was learning how to do the school work, read the often boring nonfiction assignments and do the homework, but I had no trouble doing the work because I had read thousands of books by the time I left Vietnam. In fact, in Vietnam, I read the “Lord of the Rings” (I’ve read that trilogy three times now) inside underground bunkers when we weren’t in the field being shot at or shooting back.
If Common Core takes away the fun of reading for most children, I think that will totally destroy the publishing industry.
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