David Coleman, as everyone knows, is the architect of the Common Core. He is hot stuff.
Peter Goodman, observer of Néw York politics, saw Coleman strutting and preening. He says he wanted to be a high school teacher, but went to McKinsey instead. Then he became an eduentrepreneur and started the Grow Network, which was a way to track student performance data. The word on the street is that he sold it to McGraw-Hill for $14 million. Then he started Student Achievement Partners, which played the lead role in writing the Common Core.
Goodman attended the famous meeting at which Coleman made his infamous statement. Goodman writes:
“As my mind was wandering I was jolted upright, Coleman told us,
“…the most popular form of writing in American high schools today …it is personal writing. It is either the exposition of a personal opinion, or, it is the presentation of a personal matter. The only problem, forgive me for saying this so bluntly, the only problem … as you grow up in this world you realize that people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”
Goodman recently heard Coleman—now CEO of the College Board–describe the new and redesigned SAT.
Goodman said:
“The revolution that rolled over New York State over the results of the Common Core state tests will be dwarfed by the tsunami of parent anger if hordes of students “fail” the redesigned SAT. As the SAT team projected “old” SAT questions and “new” SAT questions eyes rolled. The room was packed with principals and superintendents and scores of people with PhDs after their names. Had we all suddenly undergone a plague of “dumbness” or is it the new SAT?
“How many thousands of dollars in tutoring fees will parents have to spend to prepare their urchins? And, how about the kids who can’t afford $100 an hour tutors? The current yawning achievement gap will become a chasm.
“Regent Tallon is fond of referring to the “folks cross the street,” on the other side of Washington Avenue, where the legislative and the executive branches of state government are housed. As parents railed against the state tests legislators and the governor squirmed, the public’s angst was directed at government officials who have to stand for election every two years.
“As College Board revenue shrinks and colleges and state governments retreat the overseers of the SAT will be looking at the bottom line.
“One of the lessons of history is that reforms imposed from above without buy-in from below are doomed and ignoring history has dire consequences.
“Perhaps David Coleman should consider his original career choice – a high school teacher.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“The only problem, forgive me for saying this so bluntly, the only problem … as you grow up in this world you realize that people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”
Too bad we have to listen to David and his.
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We don’t. The SAT has run its course. Parents can stop paying good money for a test their students don’t need. As the backlash of CC continues parents will catch on and enroll their students in colleges that don’t require the SAT. The CC may contribute to the demise of the SAT and college board. Many people already believe it has lost its place in identifying college success.
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“Many people already believe it has lost its place in identifying college success.”
How can one lose something that one never had to begin with???
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Not fit for teaching anywhere.
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With normal economic growth, and normal population growth, College Board revenues should grow, and state governments should spend more.
Whose secret agenda is he referring to there, and how do we stop it?
I’m reminded of the warning David Gardner and the Excellence in Education Commission gave us in 1983: If a foreign nation did that to us, we’d consider it an act of war.
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Coleman said he thought, “as you grow up in this world you realize that people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”
I think he was talking about himself.
What he thought was probably true about David Coleman, who for sure is a narcissist, sociopath and probably a psychopath, but someone should knock on his head anyway—and all the other narcissists and sociopaths leaping on the gravy train called Common Core Inc—and teach them a few facts.
If you get hold of one of these fake-reformer vampires, you may have to tie them down and tattoo the facts to their forehead so they read them every time they look in a mirror.
In 2013, there were 10,842 new biographies/memoirs published in the United States, and 29 percent of nonfiction sales were biographies/memoirs.
How many books does that translate into?
In 2013, 252.2-million nonfiction books sold in the United States, and 29% of those sales were more than 73-million biographies and/or memoirs that were about what people feel and think.
Getting back to what kids write in essays. One important reason we have kids write what they think and feel as they connect with history and literature is because it helps them get in touch with who they are so they are writing more for themselves than an audience of readers.
These essays that focus on what children think and feel and they help the child get in touch with themselves through history and fiction, and that guides them to who they are becoming. That writing helps them focus on issues that they would have never done without those essays.
If Coleman wins the Common Core War he started and has his way, he will turn every child in America into another narcissist and sociopath like him and his followers in the private sector who only think of how much money they can earn and the power they gain from that wealth over the rest of us who actually care about what we think and feel.
There’s a term for people who think and feel. It’s called empathy—something I’m convinced David Coleman doesn’t have.
And of Coleman and his army of zombies wins the Common Core War then what is tattooed on foreheads will be ID numbers for identity purposes as humanity is removed during the process of growing up and going through the Common Core created schools that will replace the democratic public schools that focus on the whole person and the values that come with being human.
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Wow..you said it Lloyd. Just got home from a long week. “Coleman and his army of zombies” as you put it. Yup, It reminds me of that film, “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers”….
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LIKE is all I have to say to this comment…and dead on!
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In 2013, 252.2-million nonfiction books sold in the United States, and 29% of those sales were more than 73-million biographies and/or memoirs that were about what people feel and think.
Well said, Lloyd. Coleman’s comments exhibit cluelessness, but, and this is the significant thing, it’s an essential cluelessness–it’s cluelessness about something that is absolutely fundamental to the education of the young.
Narrative is one of the fundamental means by which we Homo sapiens make sense of the world.
Find two people, in a social setting, engaged in a deep, one-on-one conversation. What are they doing? They are sharing/swapping stories.
Go back to the font, the spring, of literature, to the ancient oratures that gave birth to all our literary forms, and what do you find? Our ancestors gathered around fires at night, telling stories.
Of the three primary modes of thinking–inductive reason, deductive reasoning, and abductive reasoning–the third is all about the what if–it posits what might be the case. The lawn is wet. What’s the story there? Well, perhaps it rained last night. The hypothesis–the basis of our science–is a story that we tell ourselves about what might be true.
When we dream, recently engaged neural circuits are replayed, and that part of our brains that makes sense of the world tries to do with that material what brains are built to do–to tell stories about those that tie them together in a way that makes sense. So, for example, I once had a dream that I was on a prop plane, flying into Cuba, but in the dream, Cuba was a white sheet cake floating miles below the plane in an emerald sea. Beside me on the plane was a red orangutan smoking a cigar. Weird, huh? Well, the days preceding this dream, I had read a story about the ill health of Castro, had been to a wedding where there was a white sheet cake, had flown in a small prop plane, and had seen an orangutan at a zoo, and had been on a golf course with guys who were smoking cigars. What my sleeping brain was doing was what all our brains do all the time–they take in sensory information and attempt to weave it together into a coherent narrative, into on that makes sense.
Years ago, the great historiographer Hayden White, in “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” pointed out that we fancy that we “understand” a historical event when we impose a narrative on it. This is the conflict. This is the protagonist, this the antagonist. This is how it is resolved. We make sense of events as stories.
And what are these stories about? Well, they are about processing our experiences, in their totality. They are about not treating ourselves as vehicles for carrying our heads around but as whole persons–integrated heart/minds. They are about integrating our experiences into wholes that make sense.
Coleman is the inheritor of a deeply discredited, dangerous positivism and verificationism, which is bizarre given that he studied philosophy. It doesn’t speak very highly of the institutions that he attended that he should have come away with degrees in philosophy but should have missed the fact that much of twentieth century philosophy was about discrediting those simple-minded, reductionist views. I would advise that he go read some Heidegger and Rebecca Goldstein’s wonderful short story “The Legacy of Raizel Kaidish,” from her collection Strange Attractors. If he has ears to hear, both will go to the heart of what is wrong with his worldview. He might also read Herbert Dreyfus, the great Heidegger scholar and student of attempts to create artificial intelligences, on the subject of how human brains are primarily storytelling mechanisms. Our brains do induction and deduction, certainly, but their fundamental mode is one in which a current experience calls forth a whole complex of previous experience, to which is added a lot of confabulation by the narrative-spinning parts of our brains, in order to make sense via comparison of the current experience. It’s not a linear process. It’s a comparison of gestalts and the spinning of just-so stories based on such comparisons. Or Coleman might read Donald Hoffman on perception, from whom he will learn that we see what we believe, and we believe based on those stored and storied gestalts.
Our very identities–the selves that we carry around with us–are confabulated characters in ongoing stories that we tell ourselves. There is even a school of clinical psychology called cognitive narrative therapy which is all about teaching people to tell themselves more empowering stories about their own lives–not, for example, to cast themselves as victims in a Naturalist morality play of the kind Ibsen was famous for.
In other words, storytelling is fundamental. Good teachers understand that if they are to be effective, they must work with brains as they are made, harnessing the capabilities and characteristics of those brains AS THEY ARE. You don’t use a $400 micrometer as a hammer because that’s a misunderstanding of how micrometers work and what they are for. Well, here’s how brains work: they tell and interpret stories. Good teachers, even if they have not articulated this to themselves as plainly as Lloyd has, above, or as I have, here, understand this. They understand that the brains of their students are instruments for interpreting and telling stories and that those stories are about whole persons, not about isolated heads. As Kenneth Richardson puts it, bodies are not simply vehicles for getting our heads to meetings (or to classes). One cannot separate the cognitive and the emotional, except via a kind of violence. In reality, these are seamless parts of whole experiences by whole persons. Our business as teachers is to create whole persons. Even the most purely intellectual of activities–solving a complex equation, for example–is an activity of the heart and mind and senses and body and involves a lot of stories–the narrative of how to apply this heuristic to the solving of the equation; the narrative of how one learns this in order to master mathematics in order to pass exams and get into medical school or an engineering program; the narrative about who that character, the Self, the Ego, will be perceived by others–by the teacher, by Mom and Dad, by classmates, if the mathematics is mastered.
By denigrating narrative and feeling, Coleman shows himself to be utterly clueless about one of the golden keys to successful teaching. Good teaching is storytelling AND is about training kids to tell themselves certain kinds of stories to themselves about who they are and about their own relations to the subject matter and to other learners in a learning community.
I teach subjects. Human subjects. And those human subjectivities are storytelling creatures, each and every one of them, and the storytelling that they do is absolutely fundamental to the whole enterprise of learning.
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Sorry about the many typos in the post above. I read this arrant, deranged nonsense from Coleman and think, such a man should be receiving treatment. He certainly should not be in any position of responsible authority in U.S. education. His ideas are simple-minded, deluded to the point of derangement, and extremely dangerous.
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Bob,
That treatment for David Coleman should be a straight jacket and a padded room.
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Given the absolutely fundamental nature of storytelling, we had better be giving it pride of place in our instruction. All good teachers know this. Whatever they teach–art, history, music, science, literature–those good teachers are storytellers. And their business is to influence the stories that kids tell themselves about themselves. Those kids who come away from their educations healthy are the ones who have learned positive, life-affirming stories to tell themselves about who they are, who conceive of themselves as ongoing projects that they are in control of, who conceive of their own lives as stories that THEY author. In other words, they have become self-creators.
Here’s my one-word summation of education: It is frumsceaft.
David: remedial classes for you, for you do not understand it. And it’s basic.
Basic.
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Yikes. correction:
Given the absolutely fundamental nature of storytelling, we had better be giving it pride of place in our instruction. All good teachers know this. Whatever they teach–art, history, music, science, literature–those good teachers are storytellers. And their business is to influence the stories that kids tell themselves about themselves. Those kids who come away from their educations healthy are the ones who have learned positive, life-affirming stories to tell themselves about who they are, who conceive of themselves as ongoing projects that they are in control of, who conceive of their own lives as stories that THEY author. In other words, they have become self-creators.
Here’s my one-word summation of education: It is frumsceaft.
David: remedial classes for you, for you do not understand this. And it’s basic.
Basic.
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Ironically–and it’s a dark, dark irony–the very speech in which Coleman derides storytelling about one’s feelings, as he puts it, is one in which he tries to sell his story about his feelings about what is happening in U.S. education.
Really, that much OUGHT TO BE obvious.
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Very well stated, Robert, about the mind and its relation to the body and “being”. Bergson’s concept of “flow” is an interesting ancillary to what you have written.
Another good book, which I’m rereading for the ?th time is “Truth” by Simon Blackburn. He touches on many of the things you have mentioned in trying to outline both the absolutist and relativist arguments for what is “truth”.
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Bob Shepherd:
With respect to your comments about narrative above, September 26, 2014 at 10:32 pm . . . See my earlier comments about narrative below, September 26, 2014 at 8:52 pm.
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“as you grow up in this world you realize that people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”
That’s basically been my experience, at least if we’re talking about the workplace.
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I am sorry , FLERP, that no one cares what you think or feel. You express your thoughts and feelings frequently on this blog, so it seems you ha e found a place where you assume people do care. Otherwise why comment?
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As I said, I was referring to the workplace. But indeed, “why comment?” is not an easy question to answer.
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I comment, therefore I am.
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But FLERP, children are not merely miniature adults. Their ideas and emotions are very different than adults’, and should be celebrated as such. Even if no one cares what an adult thinks or feels (and people SHOULD care), that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t care what children think. Some of the best analysis and ideas I have ever seen have been from my 8th and 9th graders.
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TC, very, very true. Exactly.
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Or talking about the classroom. Now you know what teachers are saying.
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The real problem with Coleman’s comment, in my meaningless opinion, is not that he sees limited value in navel-gazing essays (he’s partly right here), it’s that he ignorantly inflates this one possibly negative attribute of schools into the central problem of schools, which conveniently sets up his two pet ideas, close-reading and evidence-based writing, as the silver bullets to fix all that ails our schools. Adopting these pet ideas may have some salutary effects for schools, but such benefits are likely to be canceled out by the ham-fisted way they’re implemented (e.g. close reading in kindergarten!) and by the destruction of other valuable curricular features that they displace (e.g. actually learning stuff). Why have we invested such authority in a guy who clearly knows so little about the reality of our schools and teaching? That almost the whole profession of teaching bows to this impostor galls me.
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Ponderosa,
There’s also the fact that the kids have to read the material—no matter what is assigned—and then do the work that is associated with the reading material in addition to studying for any bubble test.
I taught for thirty years in schools that had 70-percent or higher poverty rates among the children we worked with, and I can testify that at the start of each school year about 5-percent of the kids I taught went home and read the material and then did the homework. That was usually the norm and not the exception, and this was after I made/attempted 30 to 50 phone calls to the parents of the most at-risk kids for just one assignment. If I continued to make those daily phone calls, maybe by the end of the school year, homework completion might reach 30 to 50 percent. To achieve that goal, meant that I had to work 60 to 100 hours a week.
There’s a lot of dysfunction and resistance to compulsory education among children who live in poverty. In fact, the most common complaint I heard from these kids was that school was a prison, because they had to be there.
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Lloyd,
Yes, lots of kids hate reading, and when reading becomes school’s Holy Grail (as it has been since NCLB), kids hate school. I have noticed that many bad readers tend to like my class because I show and tell them things. Suddenly they understand the subject matter! They don’t feel so dumb. They are experiencing some pleasure. They’re used to being marooned with a text –often badly written –and told to extract meaning from it (or, more likely, asked to perform meaningless operations upon it.) This stems from the pervasive belief that school is not about learning things, but about acquiring literacy and numeracy skills. Common Core’s extra-sadistic literacy drills, far from turning bad readers into good readers, are only going to deepen the alienation of the poor readers. The sad irony is that showing and telling kids interesting STUFF, because it builds up their world knowledge, does more to help kids become good readers than the gray literacy kudzu that has taken over American schools. World knowledge is word knowledge. Word knowledge, not hours logged in reading skill drills, is the key to reading comprehension. Legislators, in their great wisdom, decided that literacy should precede learning stuff and schools have obediently complied. But they got it backward.
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“impostor” That just about sums it up, Ponderosa. Well said.
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Yep. I’m forced to test my 1st graders on tests where they are expected to do a close reading of a passage and answer complex, text-evidenced questions all because of David Coleman and CCSS.
It is ridiculous. In that wonderful 1st grade way of creating one’s own reality many of my children WHO CAN’T READ YET simply select random answers, smile, and move on to something far more developmentally appropriate and fun.
This idiocy is obvious even to 6-year olds. One said to me yesterday: “Teacher, why do they think I can answer those questions when I can’t read yet and they won’t let the computer read it to me?”
Why, indeed? David Coleman, ‘rigor’, ‘grit’, and BS are the only logical explanation for this farce.
As I find time I am going to create a Hall of Shame website of all of these reformers to document in one handy place the parade of idiots who have wreaked destruction on my precious little ones. They should be tarred and feathered.
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Oh My! I’m so sorry to hear that.
First, know that many of you ‘readers’ here on this blog value your input. Also know that many on the ‘outside’ would also be interested, if you could reach them.
Have you tried writing ‘letters to the editor’ in your local paper? Have you tried joining (or forming) a group to fill a weekly column space on the editorial page? If you do, you will find that MANY ‘non teachers’ actually ‘give a shit’, but have been so thoroughly repressed that they feel alone and marvel that someone else shares their perspective.
Teachers CANNOT win the current battle by themselves. Instead, they need to use their natural relationship with caring parents. They need to fight the corporate jerks that would divide parents from teachers in order to make money. Go local. Go to your local paper, introduce yourself and volunteer to fill a column space (get three or four of your colleagues to help).
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If anything, communication skills are more important today. Few managers have time to read multi-page reports. If you cannot express an opinion in a one paragraph or even one sentence email or text, the delete button is used. Inboxes fill up quickly.
One college we talked to for our child laughed at the SAT. They said they found no real correlation to college success and prefer examining past experience. So Coleman had better strut around – the SAT has a branding issue. He may have to up his game and drop the f-bomb.
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A little ditty for Mr. Coleman and Company. (All apologies to Mr. Young)
The Testing and the Damage Done
We caught you knockin’
at our classroom doors
Test them, baby,
with your Common Core
Ooh, ooh, the damage done.
You hit the cities
all across the land
We watched your testing
and your voodoo VAM
Wrong, wrong, the damage done.
We sing this song
because We hate your plan
We know that none
of you can understand
o u r – k i d s
they will be op – tin’ out.
We’ve seen the testing
and the damage done
We want no part of it for anyone
Now your reform is
like a settin’ sun
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This is wonderful! Made my Friday at the end of the school day!
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Testing is like heroin to the reform addicts.
You done Neil Young proud.
I’m pretty sure he’d approve.
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SomeDAM Poet: what you said!
😎
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That was very good!
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Come on folks, we haven’t had a TAGO! yet for this post???
TAGO, NYS Teacher, TAGO!
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I do not know how Regent Tallon got mentioned in this article but the man is an absolute gasbag who does education in NY no good in his leadership role as a Regent. First, he is very cozy with the legislators so in his role as chairman of the Regents State Aid Committee he annually develops a low ball state aid proposal so is friends “across the street” can look good adding very little to his lowball proposal. Frankly, he sets them up to look good with a low ball proposal–way too cozy!. Even worse, Gasbag Tallon is “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” How can a man closely tied to NY’s large medical sector be put in charge of writing the Regent’s State Aid Proposal. Every dollar he proposes to be spent on education is one less dollar that can go to Tallon’s true priority–funding the hospitals controlled by his fat-cat operated hospital systems. This smells, and people like Meryl Tisch see no conflict of interest having a man who benefits directly from hospital funding being placed in a position to impact how the state’s other major state funding priority will be funded. On it’s face this is a huge conflict and needs to be addressed! Tallon should not be a position to shape the Board of Regent NY’s State Aid Proposal–he is selling education down the river to benefit his top personal priority–funding for hospitals!
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God help the kids if Coleman should ever become a high school teacher as Mr. Goodman posits at the end of his comments.
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With Coleman’s attitude, I think he’s the one would really need the help if he ever became a teacher.
As soon as the students picked up on his vibe, he’d get treated like a substitute’s worst nightmare.
Respect is a two way street and that’s basically what caring what people feel and think is about.
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“as you grow up in this world you realize that people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.” — David Coleman
The really interesting thing about that comment is that Coleman’s father is/was a psychiatrist.
Wonder what Freud would have to say.
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“The ego is not master in its own house.”
____Dr. S. Freud
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FYI, the sale price was $85 million, not $14 million.
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I can verify that the above is true.
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David Coleman should have done a close read of his now infamous statement. If the deep meaning of “you” is any one individual, his comment might be debatable. In my close read, “you” means hundreds of thousands of NY parents and tens of thousands of NY teachers. The they WILL HAVE TO GIVE A SH@#$ when we speak out against Coleman’s Core.
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NY Teacher: which is exactly why I generally use “edubully” for many of the self-styled “education reform” leaders as a descriptor, not a judgment.
They can’t make a case for their policies and behaviors so they mandate, enforce, measure and punish, rank and yank—they consider themselves successful when they get compliance and silence.
Agreement? Mutual respect and support?
“I reject that mind-set.” [Michelle Rhee]
😎
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Even a first year teacher has to prove their effectiveness after just 9 months of experience under APPR. The Common Core standards have had two years and the evidence is in. By their own reform metric, CC is an abject failure on a monumental scale. Millions of taxpayer dollars spent implementing the CC standards.Millions of teacher-hours spent “unpacking” the standards, posting learning objectives, creating data walls, and listening to know-nothing consultants. Hundreds of millions of student hours spent struggling with EngageNY modules. Countless lost opportunities for authentic, joyful learning and excitement. All for naught. What an utter and shameful waste. And way too much silence and compliance on the part of teachers. That has to change.
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And then, what result? Pass rates of 44% or lower. I can’t figure out how ANY of these stuffed shirts (and I include state and district offices) can justify a test where less than half of students are “proficient.” And we’re being told in Utah that we’re supposed to justify the testing to parents as “a new, higher, bar,” and that’s why so many kids “failed.” I refuse to say that to parents. If anyone asks, I will tell them that it’s the TEST and the CORE that are the problem, NOT the teachers or the students or the schools or the parents. I hope parents will realize that on their own.
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Coleman’s most-quoted comment here, and perhaps everywhere, is striking, not because it doesn’t jive with others’ somewhat cynical perceptions of reality, but because it is in the context of students forming and expressing their identities. In that way, it is unforgivably outrageous. We are more than sets of skills or masses of humanly recognizable and quantifiable intelligence. We are more than anything Coleman imagines he can measure.
I would hope that even in the workplace, any halfway decent workplace, people care about whether others are happy, content, bored, looking to get out, angry, resentful, unfulfilled, have brilliant ideas that are largely unheard or just very bad ones they repeat to others over and over.
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What you said!
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Wish David Coleman was not a rich man who can happily ride off to the sunset never having to work another day in his life while we poor schleps have to pick up the pieces on our measly salaries. He should have to pay restitution for what he has wrought on education. May there be a place in hell….
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“May there be a place in hell….”
How about this:
Karmic Gods of Retribution: Those ethereal beings specifically evolved to construct the 21st level in Dante’s Hell. The 21st level signifies the combination of the 4th (greed), 8th (fraud) and 9th (treachery) levels into one mega level reserved especially for the edudeformers and those, who, knowing the negative consequences of the edudeformers agenda, willing implemented it so as to go along to get along (see GAGA). The Karmic Gods of Retribution also personally escort these poor souls, upon their physical death, to the 21st level unless they enlighten themselves, a la one D. Ravitch, to the evil and harm they have caused so many innocent children, and repent and fight against their former fellow deformers. There the edudeformers and GAGAers will lie down on a floor of smashed and broken ipads and ebooks curled in a fetal position alternately sucking their thumbs to the bones while listening to two words-Educational Excellence-repeated without pause for eternity.
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Duane, my how you feed my deepest fantasies!
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Es mi placer.
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I couldn’t help but to LOVE the inadvertent typo when Ravitch is addressing Coleman’s infamous speech in the article and inadvertently wrote, “Colemanade” instead of Coleman made. .. This blip is a priceless cross between “cool aid” and “lemonade” neither of which we are drinking these days when branded by Coleman!
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Funny.
“Coleman
made”Colemanade
Is Coleman made
And Coleman aided
Is culminated
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The College Board issued a statement supporting the students protesting in Jefferson County, Colorado – http://www.9news.com/story/news/education/2014/09/26/college-board-supports-jeffco-protests/16281847/ – I’m surprised that isn’t receiving positive attention on this blog and others.
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The CB is protecting its AP “property”, that’s all.
From the article:
“All the polls indicate that this generation is much more liberal than previous generations and they’re convinced that at least part of it is because of what they’ve been taught,” Ciruli said.
Ciruli believes that AP U.S. history curriculum is being targeted for specific reasons.
“Those are your best history teachers. Those are your best history students,” Ciruli said. “That’s the place where you would be the most concerned that the history is from, the point of view of a conservative, balanced.”
Balanced in the sense of Faux, oops I mean Fox News type balance.
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The classic Coleman soundbite should be taken at face value. It should disqualify him from having anything to do with education or public policy. Only anti-democratic sociopaths say things like that and mean it. Or was he just trying to be funny?
Practically speaking, though, another of his facetious comments shows how really ignorant, out of touch, and inapt his rhetoric can be.
“It is rare in a working environment that someone says, ‘Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood.’ That is rare. It is equally rare in college by the way.”
He posits a workplace straight out of a Blondie comic strip, where Mr. Dithers, the boss, is constantly hounding Dagwood to finish yet another overdue report. Is this the way Google does it? I don’t think so. In the same sentence he summarily dismisses the work of people like Donald Graves, Ken Macrorie, and the founders of the National Writing Project who promoted the ideas of authentic personal writing, writing for an audience, writing with a purpose, and so on.
Just to correct one thing, I believe there’s an error in the transcript the writer used. (I may be wrong, but I listened to this section of the speech many times.) Here’s my transcription:
“The fifth point is about writing. Do people know the two most popular forms of writing in the American high school today? [Audience comment.] Sorry? ‘Texting,’ someone says. I don’t think that’s for credit, though, yeah. But I would say that, as someone said, it is personal writing. It is either the exposition of a personal opinion, or it is the presentation of a personal narrative. The only problem—forgive me for saying this so bluntly—the only problem with those two forms of writing is as you grow up in this world people really don’t give a s___ about what you feel or what you think.”
My transcription says, “It is either the exposition of a personal opinion, or it is the presentation of a personal narrative.” “Personal narrative,” not “personal matter.” If I’m right, I think it’s an important distinction.
Narrative isn’t something to be scoffed at. I’m not alone in believing that narrative is fundamental to human understanding and human communication. What’s more, I own a whole library of books written in the past dozen years that emphasize the importance of storytelling in business and in everyday life. Coleman is way behind the times.
Furthermore, I don’t believe Coleman is right about the supposed imbalance in writing modes. I taught English at a suburban high school for 26 years. The most popular form of writing assigned at my school was writing about the literature.
One last Coleman-related comment . . . There’s a very good opinion piece in USA Today promoting the 2009 documentary The Race to Nowhere, which is being aired on PBS this week:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/09/25/vicki-abeles-stressed-students-balance-column/16110085/
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Here’s a sampling of books (some theoretical, some practical) for anyone interested in the importance of metaphor and narrative:
Mark Turner, The Literary Mind
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor
Kendall Haven, Story Proof: The Science Behind the Startling Power of Story
Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories
Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel
Annette Simmons, The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence, and Persuasion Through the Art of Storytelling
Stephen Denning, The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations
Lori Silverman, Wake Me Up When the Data Is Over
Peter Guber, Tell to Win
I hope Coleman and his backers start educating themselves on this subject. For what it’s worth, it’s a subject that has been embraced by outfits like the Harvard Business Review, the Gates Foundation, and every PR firm worthy of the name. Coleman himself instinctively knows the power of narrative. He’s been pushing a false one for years.
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Did anyone mention Daniel Taylor’s Tell Me a Story: The Life-Shaping Power of Our Stories? This is an accessible and practical account of the importance of narrative in forging identity. I especially recommend it for elementary teachers as well as English and history teachers. Sorry if I missed it in these comments.
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Retired Teacher:
I’m glad you mentioned that title. I have a copy checked out of my public library but haven’t read it yet. So far I’ve renewed it once, which means I should probably be reading that instead of spending so much time reading blogs. Thanks for the recommendation!
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an awesome list. Thank you!
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beautifully argued, Randal!
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Maybe the PROBLEM is that as we grow up no gives a Sh*& what the other feels or thinks.
Is he suggesting we get our child “life ready” and make sure their teachers don’t give a sh*& about what their students feel and think?
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I’ve really enjoyed reading your blogs. I’m a British teacher and it seems that the American system is even more convoluted than the UK when it comes to policy and power plays at the highest level. Sadly, the same issue of people wanting self progression over the needs of students and teachers seems to prevail.
I’ve tried focusing on the little things that make teaching great and hilarious:
http://lovelanguageloveliterature.com/tag/teaching/
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I’m so glad to see that Peter Goodman gets it about David Coleman. I didn’t get to read the entire piece but did he include the fact that Coleman’s career was given a major push by Randi Weingarten and the UFT’s then Vice President David Sherman – later to go to the AFT – and that Coleman always refers to Sherman as his mentor? Just sayin’. If Goodman is going to report a story he would be more credible if he tells the whole story. There are few signs that the relationship between Coleman, Sherman and the AFT/UFT have been broken but it is a good sign that Goodman, often a shill for the union, has woken up.
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Coleman is reasonably expert in literary criticism. Based on the CCSS ELA standards, he knows very little about literacy. The standards are woefully narrow, excluding EVERYTHING but close textual reading which is a tool of Coleman’s obviously preferred brand of literary criticism: New Criticism, a formalist school of the mid-20th century.
CCSS is not wrong to include it, but to exclude every other way of interacting with a text betrays how incredibly uninformed Coleman was when he undertook this exercise.
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Right, so if curriculum provides close reading of instruction manuals and the like, void of character and emotion and …. plot … and the kids are given direction to write an answer correlating the text to its use of pronouns and adjectives and questions like “did paragraph A seamlessly dovetail into paragraph B”….”were the paragraphs/sentences grammatically correct,” etc. . . the kids learn what? How to dissect sentences? How to install an air conditioner?
The very choices of the texts themselves could be a scary deal for the kids. At least if they are allowed to actually…read a book…and write a book report or several answers to essay questions, they get to use their imaginations. The reformers want bubble-filling and no thinking, and no creative writing.
Would not close reading stifle would-be authors of the future? Isn’t that another feature of common core? Dumb down the math, keep the reading neutral or of an indoctrination type. The funny thing is, the “architects” who push the common core so hard have demigod-narcicissict personalties. THEY themselves very much care about what they themselves think, and they are never wrong, in their minds.
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“The Coleman Core”
Mirror Mirror on the wall, who’s the smartest of them all?
The mirror at the College Board
Is telling Coleman he’s a god
Though Coleman Core itself is cracked
And seven(ty?) years of bad luck fact
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Are you Calvin Trillin? If not, your poetic musings compare very well to his. And I mean that as a compliment 🙂 !
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Thanks for the great compliment, but, sadly, no, I’m not Calvin Trillin (or even a “real” poet). But perhaps we share the same goofy way of looking at things.
Education “reform” is a veritable mother lode of goofy (feel free to insert another similar word)
Despite all the goofiness, it is absolutely tragic that real educators have to put up with all the utter nonsense that is so damaging to education in this country and to our democracy as a whole.
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“. . . a veritable mother lode of goofy. . . ”
I prefer to use the phrase “exrcrement of bovine, equine or pocine origin.”
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If my recollection is correct, Coleman was rejected as a teacher candidate in New York. After reading his statements, I’m pretty sure he does not know shit about teaching- but you already knew that.
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