This post was erroneously posted on December 20, 2015, because I scheduled it in advance for January 5, 2016, but forgot to change the year. So, instead of coming out when I planned, it came out the same day I posted it. If you tried to post a comment, you discovered that the comments were closed. That’s because the computer thought it had been posted 11 months earlier (January 5, 2015). If that sounds confusing, forget it. I made an error. Not unusual!
In a heated discussion of the Common Core’s recommendation of “close reading,” i.e., reading and analyzing what is on the page without reference to context or background knowledge, a reader who signs as Danielle sent this comment:
U.S. Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, writes about the over analysis of poetry in the poem below. Clearly David Coleman knows not what he is doing. He wants American students to beat literature, books and poetry with a hose to find out what it really means, which is exactly what the writers do not want.
Introduction to Poetry
By Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“I made an error. Not unusual!”
The fact that you single-handledly manage this blog – usually from a mobile device in the back of a taxi or in line at the airport or between bites at the restaurant – despite your admission that you are not the most tech-savvy person in the world is impressive enough. The fact that it doesn’t always work out perfectly just adds to the charm. Nice to know you are human like the rest of us, not robotic like the rephormers.
This is EXACTLY why, as I teach the ELA Common Core curriculum in name only, as well as recognizing the extremely LIMITED value of close reading, I refuse to destroy the ELA experience by teaching only that style. How arrogant and galling it is of these pols and educrats to think they know better than the rest of us teachers with way more experience than them.
Coleman is a privileged brat and, more to the point, a hack. He knows NOTHING about teaching.
mhartze1: you got me to thinking…
If I may rephrase your comments: you and your students are making progress in spite of the CCSS, not because of them.
Contrast your remarks with the stirring testimonials to CCSS and close reading of informational texts and rigor blahblahblah that have adorned MSM sites and even this blog.
This is why shutting up teachers, and forcing them to make vague statements that support rheephorm policies and initiatives, is so important: it covers up the fact that the entire corporate reform education effort covers itself with the fiction of 3DM [data-drivendecisionmaking] while the reality is that it’s GIGO [GarbageInGarbageOut].
Thank you very much for stating what I think is common across the country.
😎
“Close reading” is probably a useful exercise from time to time in a student’s career to learn to focus on exactly what the text actually says and try to eliminate pre-conceived notions and assumptions. But it probably belongs in a logic, rhetoric, law or government class as it’s really more geared to understanding legal documents and similar texts more than literature. This notion that it’s the only tool needed for an ELA toolkit is about as foolish as saying that addition is the only tool a mathematician needs.
Great poem that truly sums up the “Colemanization” of education.
I think close reading is where we begin, just like with every other skill we teach. We do not teach writing for the sake of writing or reading for the sake of reading, the important thing is what comes after we begin. Thoreau in his book “Walden” talks at one point about the Transatlantic Cable and how it will enable people in America to send telegrams to people in England and then asks, but what if they have nothing to say? What if we teach students to read, but they do not know of anything worth reading or we teach students to write, but they have nothing to say, or we teach students to read closely but are unmoved or unchanged by what they read.
John Connolly in “The Book of Lost Things” writes, “The stories in books hate the stories contained in newspapers, David’s mother would say. Newspaper stories were like newly caught fish, worthy of attention only for as long as they remained fresh, which was not very long at all. They were like the street urchins hawking the evening editions all shouty and insistent, while stories – real stories, proper made-up stories – were like stern but helpful librarians in a well-stocked library. Newspaper stories were insubstantial as smoke, as long-lived as mayflies. They did not take root but were instead like weeds that crawled along the ground, stealing the sunlight from more deserving tales.”
Or as T. S. Eliot said,
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
T. S Eliot, “Little Gidding” from The Four Quartets
Education is about the new beginning we make from the ending that is the mastering of certain skills. If we end at the ending what is the point? We need to make a new beginning; or do I need to read more closely?
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.