An English teacher in high school was told to conform to the Common Core standards by reducing fiction inhis classesand including more informational text. Here is his reading list:
“I put together this list of required readings for 9-12 when I was told by our curriculum director that we could, with few exceptions only teach “informational texts” in English class, because it was what Common Core Standards required. Here is my list with the explanation following of why it is an informational text:
A New Curriculum for the Common Core
Ninth Grade
1. The Odyssey – A Traveler’s guide to aging gracefully, with sections on Parenting, building effective life-long relationships, and finding peace with God.
2. Oliver Twist – The young person’s guide to life on the streets.
3. The Sea Wolf – A guide to success in the workplace and getting along with difficult people.
4. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – A how to guide to getting in touch with the darker side of our natures and learning to manage it.
5. Romeo and Juliet – A guide for young people on the consequences of unhealthy relationships with a section on community policing.
6. To Kill a Mockingbird – A handbook on effective lawyering and making the legal system work for you with a section on making lasting friendships.
Tenth Grade
1. The Secret Life of Bees – A manual for raising bees and strong families.
2. Hamlet – A useful guide on how not to build a happy family life, with a section on madness in children and how it can be recognized.
3. Fahrenheit 451 – A manual on how to establish an effective school curriculum and how to deal with books that do not belong in the curriculum.
4. Catcher in the Rye – A do it yourself guide to recognizing sincere and insincere people with sections on telltale signs to insincerity.
5. The House on Mango Street – A guide to building a healthy community.
6. A Separate Peace – A guide to knowing who your friends are with a section on athletic training and perseverance.
Eleventh Grade
1. The Last of the Mohicans – A manual on cross cultural relationships and diplomacy.
2. The Red Badge of Courage – A guide to effective soldiering.
3. Walden – For a change a story about a man living in the woods.
4. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – A handbook on deception, parenting, and human discord.
5. The Crucible – How to recognize and treat witches, warlocks, and wizard. An antidote to Harry Potter.
6. Ethan Frome – A do it yourself guide to domestic tranquility.
7. Grapes of Wrath ¬– A how to guide to surviving the coming economic collapse.
8. Their Eyes Were Watching God – A how to guide to living the good life, with a section on raising capital and a gamblers “how-to”.
Twelfth Grade
1. Beowulf – A manual on leadership and crisis management.
2. The Canterbury Tales – A brief history of the rise of the middle class.
3. Le Morte d’Arthur – A manual on statecraft and creating a just society.
4. Macbeth¬ – A guide book on goal setting and how to execute those goals, with a novel approach to the execution of goals.
5. Gulliver’s Travels – Travelogue recounting trips to unusual places.
6. Frankenstein – A handbook on cloning and the development of artificial intelligence.
7. Great Expectations – A handbook for the quintessential gentleman.
8. Wuthering Heights – A guide on how to establishing one’s self on the property ladder with a section on effective community relationships.
9. The Importance of Being Ernest – A guide to the proper naming of children, with a section on giving them a good start on making a life of their own.
10. The Dead – A how to guide to planning the perfect dinner party and Christmas celebration.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In the same vein, the EngageNY books modules, which are for fiction, are so very boring. They’re basically case studies on how to turn kids away from literature. I will also add poorly designed, sloppy, lacking clear focus, and occasionally very inappropriate. I encountered some accidental racism while teaching the “To Kill A Mockingbird” unit.
Yes, common core requires more informational text, but it’s over the course of the school day, not 70-30 per class. Taking away literature from students is doing them a vast disservice. For example, a study was done that concluded kids who read Harry Potter are more empathetic and accepting. What manual can teach that? What manual can open new worlds and perspectives and cultures to kids who haven’t, nor some who never will, experience them? Kudos to this teacher for doing what his system asked him to do; he has very clever ideas. I, however, am saddened by less literature in the classroom.
I don’t know…the manual for the Insignia Model NSDXA2 Digital Converter Box has helped me in many of my relationships.
I’m certainly more receptive to new ideas…
The Common Core advocates are giving out contradictory information.
Are they still insistent on 70 per cent of reading in English be in so called informational texts or is this a misunderstanding
as argued by–here in California– byCarol Jago and Jim Burke? Both Jago and Burke
believe that the 70 per cent applies–if at all-not to lit courses but to reading and writing across the
entire classes in high school: i.e. History, the Sciences and Math….I find the whole idea of
percentages wrong and I still don’t understand how informational readings and
writings are defined… However, I was cheered by Jago’s and Burke’s “corrections.”
What is happening? Are these quotas still in place?
I think it important that we have a broad coalition and we make our
case based on facts. I still don’t understand the true situation re
the 70 per cent and info texts…what is actually going on? I am not teaching
on the basis of percentages of info to non info texts though I have included
a lot of creative non fictions–as always.
The CCSSO initially stated quite clearly that they meant 70 percent of texts in ELA classes, but they backed off on that and claimed that they meant 70 percent across the entire curriculum after the ensuing uproar.
The standards themselves seem fairly straightforward on this point: “Because the ELA classroom must focus on literature (stories, drama, and poetry) as well as literary nonfiction, a great deal of informational reading in grades 6–12 must take place in other classes if the NAEP assessment framework is to be matched instructionally.” The footnote clarifies: “the percentages on the table reflect the sum of student reading, not just reading in ELA settings.” Not sure how something so clear could be so widely misunderstood: by teachers, publishers, educators.
I may do math and science but I come from a liberal arts background. I wouldn’t feel educated without Auden, Yeats, or even Dan Jenkins.
But given that, there is a real deficit in reading and writing skills not just in natural sciences but social sciences. I’ve seen researchers struggle to actually write. Reading and producing content is a pretty necessary thing to be able to do.
Reading literature is essential; but so is being able to read critically about say, climate change or credit default swaps.
I’m not really sure that “70%” thing is really getting at that.
Where do people get the skill set to read and post to this blog? To read Reign of Error?
Since it was exactly that, a footnote, and afterthought, added after the fact, it is not at all hard to understand why there is continued confusion. If you listen to Dr. Stotsky reporting on her participation on the validation committee, she states quite clearly that the original intention was a 70/30 split in ELA.
Again, this was all backpedaling that the CCSSO did after the initial uproar over the Philistinism of the first public draft of the “standards.”
However, I am all for people doing a LOT of reading of nonfiction across the entire school, in all classes, including English classes. I would LOVE to have our math clases reading Godel, Escher, Bach and selections from Kline’s Mathematics for the Nonmathematician and Gullberg’s Mathematics from the Birth of Numbers and Petzold’s Code, for example. But that’s not going to happen if we have a narrow focus on math text prep. A shame, too, for if kids read such work, they might begin to get an inkling why there are peole who actually CARE about this stuff, passionately.
Where the rubber meets the road, literature is being killed by CC. My son has not read a piece of fiction in TWO YEARS at his high school.
A good friend of mine has for years done novel studies with her fifth graders with enormous historical and cultural geography tie-ins, and these were extraordinarily successful, leading to parents and kids coming back years later to say that they were pivotal in kids’ lives. Now she is being told to kill those in favor of LDC modules on snippets of informational texts.
The AP Lit class definitely includes literature.
How are our students going to be college ready if they have no experience reading any classic or universally lauded literature?
The trouble with the CCSS is that the actually results run counter to the stated goals. In other words, you can’t get there from here.
Ellen T Klock
It should be noted that the problem here is not the CCSS themselves, which do not necessarily reduce fiction.
The issue is a district and director who doesn’t understand CCSS.
Like or dislike CCSS, this is what can and does happen with any standards, especially state standards. It’s an indictment of those put in charge. Too many are equal-opportunity incompetents.
The problem absolutely is the CCSS, which makes strong but ambiguous statements in the introduction which are completely unsupported by the standards themselves, i.e., the range of reading can and should be clearly delineated in the dozens of versions of the range of reading standard — #10. There should also be examples and an explanation of the rather obvious questions that immediately arise about how this seemingly precise figure is to be calculated.
Further, this is just a brain-dead way of classifying text and structuring ELA instruction.
Here’s how they break it down in Ireland:
The language of information
The language of argument
The language of persuasion
The language of narration
The aesthetic use of language
This recognizes that “The general functions of language outlined here will continually mix and mingle within texts and genres. So, there can be an aesthetic argument, a persuasive narrative, or an informative play. But if students are to become adept with language, then they need to understand that it is through these functions, used within a variety of genres, that language achieves meaning, power, and effect.”
Isn’t that clearly a superior, more *literate* model?
Click to access SCSEC14_English_Syllabus.pdf
“It should be noted that the problem here is not the CCSS themselves. . . ”
If I may reword that false statement and then add a few thoughts:
“It should be noted that the MAIN PROBLEM here is CCSS themselves. . .”
The CCSS suffers all the inherent epistemological and ontological problems that Noel Wilson identified in his never refuted nor rebutted 1997 dissertation. I challenge you Peter Smyth, to refute and/or rebut what Wilson has proven before spouting anymore propaganda (misinformation, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view).
May the conversation begin!
“Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
By Duane E. Swacker
Duane, despite all your words, you miss the point. Administrators and other suspects can misimplement even the best of standards. If CCSS were (subjunctive intended) flawless, would these people would get it right?
Peter,
That’s just it the standards can’t be “best” as the concept as an educational “tool/device” is so fundamentally epistemologically and ontologically flawed that the concept itself along with its standardized testing is COMPLETELY INVALID.
And no doubt, just as a blind and anosmic squirrel occasionally finds an acorn some administrator might be able to figure out how poorly conceived and executed these standards-CCSS are and refuse to go along to get along. But I’ll put my money into Powerball before putting it on any administrator doing so.
Peter, Have you read Wilson, and his shorter take down “A Little Less than Valid: An Essay Review” found at:
http://www.edrev.info/essays/v10n5.pdf ?
Duane Swacker: such deflections as “poor implementation” aside, let’s see what a truly expert opinion, voiced by a charter member of the “education reform” establishment—Dr. Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute—has to say about the CCSS:
[start quote]
In truth, the idea that the Common Core might be a “game-changer” has little to do with the Common Core standards themselves, and everything to do with stuff attached to them, especially the adoption of common tests that make it possible to readily compare schools, programs, districts, and states (of course, the announcement that one state after another is opting out of the two testing consortia is hollowing out this promise).
But the Common Core will only make a dramatic difference if those test results are used to evaluate schools or hire, pay, or fire teachers; or if the effort serves to alter teacher preparation, revamp instructional materials, or compel teachers to change what students read and do. And, of course, advocates have made clear that this is exactly what they have in mind. When they refer to the “Common Core,” they don’t just mean the words on paper–what they really have in mind is this whole complex of changes.
[end quote]
For the link to the original blog posting, and much contextual information—
Link: http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/12/28/the-american-enterprise-institute-common-core-and-good-cop/
In memory of the recently deceased Robert Gomez Bolaños aka El Chapulín Colorado & El Chavo del Ocho and other memorable characters—
No contaban con tu astucia/they didn’t count on your astuteness. [Si no sea descortés usar del tu/if it’s not discourteous to address you in the familiar mode]
And as you’ve so cogently explained before, just putting a number on something doesn’t mean that it’s been measured in a trustworthy, accurate and meaningful way. It’s just a number drawn out of the sky, as W. Edwards Deming has said—like Bill Gates just throwing out the number “ten years” when guessing how long it will take before he knows whether his ‘education stuff’ is working or not.
And how many times will Bob Shepherd have to point out flaw after flaw after flaw of the CCSS before people finally accept that they shouldn’t “pedir peras al olmo” [ask for pears from an elm tree]. That is so say, that you can’t fix the problems with CCSS by simply trying to force them, with ever increasing threats of punishment, onto the vast majority of schools.
The problem isn’t the number of times they are being forced down people’s throats.
Opt out. Of the CCSS and its conjoined twin, high-stakes standardized testing.
But of course, the “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” crowd, always following their dream of that pot of $tudent $ucce$$ gold at the end of Rheephorm Rainbow, are “in it to win it” for themselves, er, the kids, and nothing, I repeat nothing, will stop them.
Or as El Chavo del Ocho [The Kid in Number 8, an orphan living in a barrel in the patio of an apartment building] would say, with the same logic and consistency—
“Primero muerto antes que perder la vida.” [free translation: I’d rather be dead than lose my life.]
😱
Go figure…
😎
I am a former English and 5th grade teacher that always had the choice of what I read with my students. I currently working at the district level in California and am in agreement that this should still be the norm. New teachers often build their reading selections around what veteran teachers are using in the beginning and then find their own library as they get more familiar with appropriate text thematically for their course of study.
It was hard to motivate students to read literature when I was in high school in the 80’s, so this is not a new phenomenon. I will admit that I did not complete at least half the books that were assigned as I had not personal connection to them or had a teacher that did give me the opportunity to make a connection myself. A few good English teachers did know how to make literature relevant and helped focus me on studying literature in college. If students are not engaged with the learning, they could be reading Huck Finn or a district selected non-fiction text and they would experience the same amount of apathy,
Realistically students own personal reading is probably 90% non-fiction informational text that they read off their phone or computer. Probably more likely a blog post like this, rather than one of Diane Ravitch’s books. The classroom for most students is where they are given the opportunity to understand great literature and how it reflects the humanity in all of us. Close reading happened all the time in my class and I did have to teach students this skill, just as I was taught it in high school and college.
In elementary school the split is 50/50 for literature and non-fiction. Good informational text informs students of the world that they live in. Great fiction informs them about their place in the world. We should not be turning fiction into merely a way to practice the skills identified.
The language arts fiction standards identify the technical expectations of reading, but a great teacher will still meet this expectation without students thinking it is a technical activity. I don’t see anything inherently wrong with these standards by themselves, but the application of them will determine how well the quality of the text the student is reading in their learning, not the quantity of a specific type of text.
While that’s a clever work around, I’m very concerned that the curriculum director has so badly mangled the CCSS informational text breakdown advice. According to this page:http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/introduction/key-design-consideration/ (scroll down half way) the reading material should mimic the NAEP breakdown of informationional to fiction. 70/30 in High School. So if all other classes use informational text, ELA could use exclusively fiction and still not hit the 30% of reading material as fiction suggestion. I’m not saying this ratio is good or bad or needed or whatever; I’m saying this is a great example of school administration not understanding the standards. Imagine now that this admin is also going to evaluate this teacher. Sounds like the admin needs to brush up on reading for information.
Wow. Informational…that’s a heck of a typo…too much coffee this AM!!
Kimberly. Same page! They are mangling math as well.
It is mangled but probably related to the tests, PARCC and SB. What are the percentages in the reading passages? IF English teachers are being evaluated on informational texts, it only makes sense for building principals, who are also protecting their ratings as well, to “encourage” teachers to concentrate on that 70/30 breakdown.
“. . . it only makes sense for building principals, who are also protecting their ratings as well. . . ”
Yep don’t we love systems, bureaucracies, businesses, schools, whereby the main job is to COVER YOUR ASS and not give a crap about the effects of one’s actions/decisions on those who are in our care or are subordinate in the pecking order. GAGAers all of the CYAers or to put it in more mundane language, chickenshits all of them.
And Dwayne, that’s why so many of my fellow teachers are either retiring or counting the days until they retire (at least in NYS where we still have a pension). There are more and more mid year retirements as a teacher’s last day is their 62nd birthday.
Ellen T Klock
We English teachers oversee the 30% of student reading that is fiction. The other content area teachers are teaching the non-fiction/informational reading. To say that great literature is not informational is ludicrous; it informs our lives. I appreciate this teacher’s humorous response to the absurd request that 70% of his assigned reading be informational, but we must also continue to take a clear and direct stand against this “misunderstanding”.
Where are the Walmart Employee Manuals? That’s what Common Core is really about…
Clock punching 1.01
Bagging 1.01
Restocking Shelves 1.01
Applying for Public Assistance 1.01
Choosing Comfortable Shoes 1.01
Know Your Register 1.01
How to be subservient and friendly 1.01
Brainwashing (literally–with strobes and such) 1.01
Exactly! Lol, they only want worker bees! Follow the money!
Thanks to the person who wrote this for a good chuckle.
But there is also a serious issue here. One of the things that 20th-century literary criticism in its structuralist and poststructuralist incarnations taught us was to be suspicious of the neat binaries by means of which we unthinkingly attempt to carve the world at its joints: liberal/conservative, male/female, sacred/profane, developed world/developing world, and, yes, literary/nonliterary.
Consider, for example, “anchor standard” 8 from the CCSS for ELA:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.8. Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.
Amusingly, we are told again and again in the “standards” that this particular anchor “standard” is “not applicable to literature,” that it applies only to “informative text.”
That would be news to the speaker of Milton’s Paradise Lost, who invokes the Holy Spirit, at the beginning of the poem, and asks this Christian Muse to help and him, in the poem, present an argument to “justify the ways of God to men.”
Maybe it’s been a while since you read or thought about Paradise Lost. Go have a look at Book I. You will find, at the beginning of it, something the author actually calls “The Argument.” It’s a brief preface that serves as an abstract of the claims, reasoning, and evidence to be presented in the book.
Did the folks who put together these “standards” actually think that literary works never present arguments, make claims, use reasoning of varying degrees of validity, nor present evidence of varying degrees of relevance and sufficiency?
Do they actually think that Ambrose Bierce‘s “Chickamauga,” Thomas Hardy’s “Channel Firing” or “The Man He Killed,” Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” do not present implicit and explicit arguments against war, do not advance specific claims, and do not employ reasoning and evidence in support of those claims? And what on earth would they imagine such poems as Hesiod’s Works and Days, Lucretius’s De rerum natura, Pope’s “An Essay on Man” and “An Essay on Criticism,” Wordsworth’s The Excursion, and Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature to be if not, primarily, arguments?
And do they really think that arguments are not put forward in, say, Rumi’s “Like This,” Donne’s “The Sun Rising,” Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” “Gray’s “Stanza’s Wrote in a Country Church-Yard,” Burns’s “Song Composed in August,” Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died,” FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Yeats’s “Adam’s Curse,” Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,” Wallace Stevens’s “Credences of Summer,” MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica,” Frost’s “Directive,” Levertov’s “A Tree Telling of Orpheus,” Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day,” and Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry”?
Really? Seriously? I know, it’s almost unimaginable that they do, but they say this quite clearly, again and again and again.
Or consider the distinction that the CCSS attempts to make between persuasion and argument–another simple-minded one that would reduce persuasion to emotional appeals and argument to rational appeals, despite the facts that
a) to act rationally is commonly to do what matters–that is, to do that which has emotional appeal, and
b) rationality itself matters and so appeals to us emotionally.
We cannot neatly carve ourselves down the middle, into our emotional and rational selves. To do so is a grave error, and much of 20th century Continental philosophy–work as different as much of the work of Wittgenstein and Heidegger–was about that very topic.
And don’t even get me started on the breathtakingly crude distinction that the CCSS draws between informative, narrative, and argumentative writing, as though these were neat little separate categories.
It’s Philistine to divide the world up into the literary and the informational. Are Plato’s dialogues literary or informational? A great book on Plato was entitled Plato: Dramatist of the Life of Reason, and Plato is rightly condemned for banning poets from his Republic, for what is the allegory of the cave from that very book or the allegory of the twin horses of the chariot in his Phaedrus but poetry, and what are these dialogues but little dramas? From Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Chaucer we learn a vast amount about how people of particular times and places lived and thought.
It’s typical of a certain kind of Philistine to divide the world neatly up into the objective (informative works) and the subjective (literary works) and so to think that simple-minded categorizations like the ones to be found in the Common [sic] Core [sic] make sense. The same sort of person thinks that one can reduce learning to a bullet list in a stack of Powerpoint slides or to a list like the CCSS in ELA.
“There’s no bullet list like Stalin’s bullet list.” –Edward Tufte, “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint”
The unexamined life is not worth living, and “standards” that were unexamined by their “architects” are not worth using.
David Coleman and his colleagues don’t think that people without money have meaningful lives;hence, they don’t need education, merely training-for me that is what the Common Core actually is, and it is deeply disturbing that this man,with his massive contempt for humanity, has been allowed to have any kind of role in education.
“The Billistines”
The Billistine’s divide the world
‘Tween money and the rest
Emotive stuff should just be hurled
It doesn’t pass the test
The problem Robert is that you assume the designers of CC are familiar with the above texts. They probably used cliff notes to get through Animal Farm and The Grapes of Wrath. I doubt if they read any of the literature you mentioned and they probably have never heard of the listed poets. Well maybe Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, but not those specific poems.
How do you expect them to know anything about such topics? After all, they all attended private schools, not public schools where their English Teachers have to be certified and receive a Master’s degree to keep their jobs (at least in NYS).
Ellen T Klock
I think Bob Shepherd has summed it up very accurately. Now we are paying
for what the big wigs have foisted upon us.
“The Cult of Information”
The cult of information
Informs the Common Core
And culture cultivation
Reformers want no more
My view: Several years ago a professor at the University of Chicago made his list of great literature: the Syntopican [cannot recall exactly the spelling off hand]. The inherent problem as I see it is that:
1. An exact list excludes some other great literature. It tends to be exclusive rather than inclusive.
2. A listing such as the one shown here may be great for the school for which it is compiled but not so great for another school district in which children come from a different societal background. The books may be great in themselves but to get to them other books may pique children’s interest and must be utilized first.
3. In the same manner, different classes in the same school vary from year to year in that children have reached a different level of maturity.
My view: flexibility on the part of a teacher is essential for expert teaching. As has been said so many times: one size does not fit all.
I totally agree with you, Gordon.
However, if I were to compile a list I would use literature whose themes have become mainstream. Probably the most repeated storyline is that of A Christmas Carol. You also have The Gift of the Magi, Dr Jeckle and Mr Hyde, Romeo and Juliet, . . . You fill in the blanks.
Exposure to such “classics” allows kids to be in on the “joke” and to be able to recognize these oft repeated themes. Even animated series, such as South Park, The Simpsons, and Futurama, heavily lean upon these stories. And why not, they are the best of the best.
Isn’t the goal to develop well rounded citizens?
Oops! That was the old goal.
Ellen T Klock
I actually know the stories you listed above not from the original texts, but all the derivatives that have showed in our culture. I may not have gotten to the essence of each, but I still get the jokes. We are never going to have the perfect list. I will say that reading Jack London in school probably inspired me to read Jack Kerouac. Reading Jack Kerouac opened up all the beat writers, as well Buddhist texts. You never know what the knock on effect of a good book and a great teacher can lead to.
Mguerena –
The point is that you realize these themes come from classical literature and, if that peaks your individual interest, you can seek out the originals to read (if not the complete text, the spark notes or Wikipedia version).
As you said, you never know what will appeal to any individual child (my own children never seemed to appreciate my personal favorites). And that is why there is no perfect list, just a starting point for discussion.
Ellen T Klock
Great job!
The goal of Literature is Awareness. Its greatest power is that it transcends categorization. Its defiance to conform to multiple choice style answers is why reformers shun it. Because they can’t “own it” and never will. LONG LIVE THE ARTS: “A EQUALS A IF AND ONLY IF A DOES NOT EQUAL A.”
As a district level curriculum administrator for ELA, I say shame on your supervisor for spouting out mandates without a thorough knowledge of the whole CCSS document and its appendices. Your supervisor seems to need a lesson in close reading, as she has delivered a mandate that is counter to the explicit intention of the authors of the standards as explicitly addressed in a footnote on page 5 of the Introduction to the CCSS-ELA. In reference to a set of tables on page 5 of the standards, which presents this 70% Info Text and 30% Literary Text ratio that is based on the content of the NAEP passages, the following footnote appears to prevent the exact sort of misinterpretation that your supervisor is mandating: ” The percentages on the table reflect the sum of student reading, not just reading in ELA settings. Teachers of senior English classes, for example, are not required to devote 70 percent of reading to informational texts. Rather, 70 percent of reading across the grade should be informational.”
In case, your supervisor has similar pronouncements regarding the types of writing, point her to this footnote that appears on the same page of the CCSS-ELA: “As with reading, the percentages in the table reflect the sum of student writing, not just writing in ELA settings.”
My advice to you is to keep advocating for your students. You are there one shot at this year of English education, so do right by them. Stand tall. Refute the mandate using this evidence.
But it is not only curriculum coordinators misconstruing the percentage of informational text to be taught. In New York, state education “fellows” have publicly stated that the English classroom itself should focus on 70 percent informational text. So with the blind leading at the state level, including Regents exam design, it’s easy to see why local districts are interpreting this dictum as they are.
As Bob Shepherd pointed out, the footnote correcting the 70/30 standard was added after the outcry over limiting fiction in the English classroom. There is definitely room for debate over what the original intent of the architects of CCSS was. I tend to side with Mr. Shepherd; this is not “footnote” information.
“Common Core Foot Notes”
They put their foot on schools
Then noted it in the doc
The David Coleman rules
Are walking as we talk
Oops, I got passionate in my response and had a typo in my last paragraph. I do know the difference between “their” and “there,” so did I have to include this typo just when I was standing so tall on my soapbox and doling out my sanctimonious response? Karma, right?
WordPress could use an edit feature!
I think that the business about this being 70 percent ACROSS THE GRADE was a change made after the initial uproar. But yes, the document does now say that.
Wonderful! I’ve always thought that fiction teaches the real truths- the bigger messages.
It seems like that should read, “An English teacher in high school was told to conform to [an administrator’s misunderstanding of] the Common Core standards by reducing fiction in his classes… ”
I’m not really a huge supporter of Common Core, but most criticism of it seems to be based on misguided interpretations of the standards at the district, school or classroom levels, rather than on the standards themselves as written.
How soon we forget. When the CCSS was first delivered, this increased emphasis on informational text was strongly emphasized in the accompanying materials, but there was quite an uproar about this, and the CCSSO backed off and did some hasty revisions.
There are a lot of misguided interpretations. Throughout the country, now, teachers are going to trainings where they are being told not to provide background information for selections because the Publishers’ Criteria document and some of Mr. Coleman’s videos stressed allowing the text to speak for itself and not saying things, up front, that would stand in lieu of the actual reading (e.g., “Today, class, we’re going to read a poem on the theme of the fleeting nature of happiness.”)
That’s reasonable enough advice IF IT IS NOT TAKEN TO MEAN THAT ONE SHOULD NOT PROVIDE STUDENTS WITH THE NECESSARY CONTEXT FOR UNDERSTANDING THE PIECE. One cannot simply write off all that is outside the text, for interpretation is critically dependent upon extra-textual matters–genre, the historical or social occasion of the production of the text, the particular usages of the community in which it was produced, the habits of thought of the author at a particular time in his or her development, etc. Unfortunately, the advice about letting the text speak for itself verges on or goes right over the edge into discredited New Critical notions about texts creating their own little worlds.
Texts exist in context. Of course they do, and of course that context commonly has to be provided if the text is to be at all accessible. In fact, it is in the very nature of language that it is meaningless sans context.The CCSS mention Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as a great text for 12th graders. Well, it requires a lot of setting up the context for that text to make any sense at all to the average 12th grader. If the reader doesn’t understand what kind of question Plato is addressing, then he or she is not going to have a clue what Plato’s answer to might mean.
Usually it is up to a third party to provide wildly distorted interpretations of the standards serving preexisting hobby horses and pet theories. With Common Core, you got it all in one tidy package straight from the authors!
lol
Inspirational and quite poignantly brilliant!
“The 70-30 Common Core Split”
30 is the percent
Of brain that folks were using
When Common Core was sent
To schools for their abusing
Incidentally, what is it with the numbers 70 and 30 that keep popping up not only with regard to the CC split for text but also (coincidentally?) with regard to the percent who pass/fail the state tests? ( which turns out to be almost exactly 30/70 across the country, with very little variation from state to state)
Does David Coleman like the numbers 70 and 30 for some reason? Is there something magical about them?
Or is it simply that 70% will generally be interpreted as “vast majority” — ie, “vast majority of text must be informational” and “vast majority of students and schools are failing”
With regard to the percent failing the tests, call me skeptical. It looks to me like the “70% failing” is more than mere coincidence and that the failing percent is likely being “fixed” at around 70 (with a little variation thrown in)
purest numerology (aka “data-based decision making”)
I guess they could have said. Read more non-fiction than fiction. Would that have been better?
Or how about simply stating to be sure to use both fiction and nonfiction selections and let the teacher determine which texts best support any particular lesson.
I especially liked the description of Fahrenheit 451.
I don’t have the wherewithal to read every single comment, but here is my two cents:
It seems like the term ‘informational text’ is narrowly defined by those negatively disposed to Common Core as only being a pickup truck manual or some such. But this guy, while being smart-aleck-y, is making those books sound more compelling to me. Just reading them to analyze the prose or compare them with other authors is less interesting than using them as a springboard to other subjects or topics.
You don’t need to use a car manual or whatever as informational text to make ‘information’ compelling. I’m a complete sucker for historical non-fiction and have run into a whole slew of authors and books which impart information while being well-written:
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks – touches on science, education, blacks in America
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr
Bill Bryson’s At Home or A Short History of Nearly Everything or One Summer: America, 1927
Any of Kenneth Davis’ books in the Don’t Know Much About series
Any of Erik Larson’s books are very compelling historical non-fiction and usually touch on a bunch of different themes or ideas
Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map – touches on science, statistics, disease, poverty
David Rakoff and Sarah Vowell convey information in their books/essays, but do so with pretty good insight and personal commentary.
Nechama Tec’s Defiance, about Jewish partisans in WWII
Stacy Schiff’s A Great Improvisation would flesh out the American Revolutionary War story; her Cleopatra touches on Egyptian and Roman history and the role of women in those times
Many of Ken Follett’s books are well-researched historical fiction and could be used to discuss a given period or event, too.
The point isn’t whether informational text can be compelling or not. It can. The point is whether national standards should be expressing such an obvious bias as to what and how resources should be directed in ELA. (David Coleman’s close reading mandate mangles all texts in its refusal to consider context.) It does begin to appear nitpicky when we are focusing on one portion of CCSS. However, this is one of hundreds of posts that have dealt with a myriad of problems with CCSS identified by people who are quite qualified to be making such criticisms. I find the experts chosen to produce CCSS disturbing in their lack of experience in K-12 education. I also find it disturbing that the content experts in ELA and mathematics, along with three others on the Validation Committee, refused to sign off on the final product. Do we really need to try to “make a silk purse out of a sow’s ears”?
2old2teach, teachers should be able to choose appropriate reading material, fiction or nonfiction, based on their underlying goals for a particular class or group of students, not because some administrator arbitrarily decides to interpret the confusing CCSS and micromanage his staff.
Even farther removed from the reality of the classroom is the agency who created the CC and the suggested readings, without regard to the changing issues which must be addressed within the school system as the focus of society changes.
Life is not static and neither should be the curriculum.
Ellen T Klock
We are in total agreement.
I am a busy person, do you have some good sources for these criticisms. I like to have a well rounded opinion. I almost exclusively reading non-fiction books these days. Not sure this is relevant or not.
Here’s an easy intro. You don’t have to read anything. You get to listen to the only two content specialists on the CC validation committee who refused to sign off on the standards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjxBClx01jc
mguerana
— there IS a relevancy to your book selections.
You are making an informed decision based on past experiences. Children, however, need to be exposed to all sorts of written materials so that when they are adults, they, too, can develop their personal preferences based on a varied, enriched background.
Anything less is only one step above illiteracy.
Ellen T Klock
You have a valid point, ex preacher’s kid. There are some excellent nonfiction material out there, especially in the biography section. Who doesn’t love James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small or Gunthrie’s Death Be Not Proud. Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Album is another must read. How about Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings? These are books which read like fiction.
However, most nonfiction books written for kids are informational vs literary. As the librarian, I have seen many children take out books just to look at the illustrations,especially books about Sports or Animals. Few read books like Born Free by Joy Adams or Sea Biscuit by Laura Hilldebrand. Few libraries have a copy of Brian’s Song by William Blinn on the shelf, one of the most compelling sports stories ever written.
I also could make an argument for students reading books which influenced our society, such as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and even Mao’s Little Red Book. There are already a couple of nonfiction books in the curriculum on the Holocaust such as Night and The Diary of Ann Frank.
However, very few of such titles were written for children (including the excellent choices you suggested).
And ultimately, who is determining which nonfiction is a valid choice? We have to make sure our kids are spending their time on quality books, not “Harlequin” nonfiction.
I’ve seen the recommending fiction reading list and was not impressed (horrified would be a better description). I shudder to think what the CCSS has chosen in the nonfiction genre.
Ellen T Klock
Teachers should choose the reading material for their class–whether fiction or nonfiction.
Reblogged this on Vanessa's Blogueria.
The problem I have with any of these standards that are imposed on teachers by those outside of education (and some inside education, I suppose) is that they are predicated on a belief that teachers are lazy and will do as little as they can get away. The “reformers” believe that if they do not impose a standard on teachers there will be no standards. (This is giving the benefit of the doubt I suppose because I know there are some whose chief interest has nothing to do with education but with breaking units, but as I said I am giving the benefit of the doubt.) Every profession has those in its ranks who are lazy and lack industry and I suppose education is no different. But as with most professions this is the exception and not the rule (and in my experience it is the rare exception, but as Montaigne has instructed us, it is madness to judge the true and the false by our own experience). Also, as a professional, all I have to bring to what I do is my knowledge, my skill and expertise, and my professional judgment. If my knowledge, skill, and judgment are not to be trusted, I have nothing to offer.
It seems that as a culture we are losing sight of what is important in a well-rounded education; why it is we educate our children in more than just a set of skills. As an English teacher I have always believed there was more to the Literature we study (be it fiction or non-fiction) than just the enjoyment they stories give or the ideas the poems and essays provoke. There is more to reading than just reading for pleasure (though that is certainly an important element). The study of Literature does more than tell stories and explore ideas. It encourages us to reflect on the characters and issues that are being explored by the writer and asks us to look at ourselves in light of these characters behaviors and experiences, in light of the ideas that are presented. We learn many of our values from stories. We learn, for example, more about injustice from the treatment of Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird than we do from reading the definition in the dictionary. We learn more about courage from Henry Fleming’s experience in The Red Badge of Courage than we do from the dictionary. My ninth graders are reading The Hobbit and in that book good and evil, generosity and greed, courage and complacency, sacrifice and comfort, selfishness and benevolence are contrasted throughout the story. Part of what attracts us to Bilbo is his basic goodness, and of course the story, which most students enjoy.
But reading good books does more than this; it develops the imagination. Books are written with words, which are just black spots on a white surface (usually). The imagination gives shape and substance to these words; brings them to life in our minds. Philip Ball wrote an article a year or so ago “Why Physicist Tell Stories in the Dark” that talks about the stories physicists tell themselves to begin work on difficult problems. He wrote:
“Theories at the speculative forefront of physics flesh out this unseen universe with parallel worlds and with mysterious entities named for their very invisibility: dark matter and dark energy. This move beyond the visible has become a fundamental part of science’s narrative. But it’s a more complicated shift than we often appreciate. Making sense of what is unseen—of what lies “beyond the light”—has a much longer history in human experience. Before science had the means to explore that realm, we had to make do with stories that became enshrined in myth and folklore. Those stories aren’t banished as science advances; they are simply reinvented. Scientists working at the forefront of the invisible will always be confronted with gaps in knowledge, understanding, and experimental capability. In the face of those limits, they draw unconsciously on the imagery of the old stories. This is a necessary part of science, and these stories can sometimes suggest genuinely productive scientific ideas.”
Usually the stories they tell themselves do not prove to be true, as was the case with myth and folklore, but they give them a way of working before the have the concrete materials with which to work. Many, perhaps most, of the scientists that worked on the space program in the 1960’s and 1970’s had their interest in science provoked by reading science fiction.
There is also value in training the mind to think in more than one way, to think mathematically as well as humanistically. Galileo changed the way people of his day looked at the moon. In an article in the Los Angeles Review of Books, “Faking Galileo” Massimo Mazzotti writes about Galileo’s discovery. He tells us Galileo was successful not because he had better telescopes than other astronomers of his day (well he did, but they did not make that much difference when it came to looking at the moon). Thomas Harriot, an English astronomer, published a book shortly before Galileo. His observations confirmed the belief of the day that the moon was smooth, pristine surface. He saw what he was trained to see as an astronomer. Galileo, though, had been trained as a draftsman. Mazzotti tells us, “Young artists in training during this period were drilled on treatises designed to, in effect, reshape their perception, so that they unthinkingly interpreted certain configurations of two-dimensional light and dark shapes as the surfaces of three-dimensional figures hit by a light source.” He saw the moon differently because he looked differently, as an artist, rather than an astronomer. The article itself was about a forged book and it is ironic that the forgers of the book depended on the experts authenticating the book to make the same kind of mistake Thomas Harriot made, in looking at the book they saw what they expected to see, what they had been trained to see and they did not question their training.
Not every student is going to be attracted to Literature just as every student is not attracted to mathematics or science. I was never very good at math or science but I was curious so I always got something out of these courses even though they were never going to be play a significant role in my life’s work. It is my experience that where you can provoke curiosity you are more likely to provoke interest. The Common Core the way it is being delivered, at least in my school (and this is true for most standards based reforms as they are implemented in my experience, but remember Montaigne) kills curiosity, it does not nurture it. We do not question Algebra or Geometry being taught in math class even though it is difficult and many students do not like it. Yet, there is an assumption that if students do not like a particular book, they shouldn’t have to study it. I believe it is important to incorporate the cultural heritages of our many students and the different backgrounds from which they come. It is important to incorporate the cultural values of the community, but we do this by exposing students to the best those cultures have produced.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
Excellent reply! Thank you for your insight.
I just want to add on a little tidbit – the writers of some action comic books also have their roots in science. Aquaman, Ironman, and the Hulk, among others, follow certain scientific laws. The popularity of Super Heroes goes beyond simple fantasy – there is much “unintended” knowledge imparted in the context of such reading material.
A teacher who knows their craft can find value in almost any piece of reading material. They just want to choose the very best for their students with the limited time they have available to influence possible future choices.
Ellen T Klock