A reader of Mercedes Schneider’s blog asked her to investigate a new curriculum that the state was imposing on all teachers. Schneider took the challenge, which resulted in this post.
I play a role in this venture so I want to explain how I got involved. In 2007 or 2008, I was invited to co-chair a new organization whose purpose was to advocate for the liberal arts. The other co-chair was Antonia Cortese, Secretary-treasurer of the AFT. The board was bipartisan. Our goal was to take a stand against the narrow test-based focus of No Child Left Behind and make the case for the importance of literature, history, and the arts. The organization was called Common Core Inc., but it had no connection to the “Common Core State Standards,” which did not then exist.
At some point in 2010, the executive director Lynne Munson decided to take money from the Gates Foundation to expand into “curriculum mapping,” changing the original focus from an advocacy group to a purveyor of services, selling its wares. I quit the board. During the two years of my association with the board, I never received any compensation.
As Schneider shows, Common Core Inc. is now “Great Minds,” and it has a large budget.
It is big business, a part of the education industry.
Oh, so YOU were behind Common Core, Inc:-)
Ha! I bailed.
Smart move. It saddened me to know end that Hirsch, who had always railed against skills-list “standards,” went along for a time because the Common [sic] Core [sic] people promised him a great return to the teaching of substantive texts. He later regretted this and denounced the trend that I discuss in my longer note, below.
cx: to no end. A Freudian slip. LOL.
Our Kids Face Unprecedented Crises. Standardized Tests Won’t Prepare Them.
https://truthout.org/articles/our-kids-face-unprecedented-crises-standardized-tests-wont-prepare-them/
I had some issues with the treatment of the arts in the ELA curriculum. Lynne Munson replied to my email, but went full speed ahead with the ELA curriculum minimizing the arts component. Here is an early powerpoint of that work on ELA. Free units and lessons were posted on the internet for a short period. Then they went behind a paywall. This slide presentation was made to market the ELA program. https://slideplayer.com/slide/5672161/
This excellent comment was posted by DanG on Mercedes’ blog:
“For many years, I have been convinced that the buffoons who concocted this hash of Common-Core middle school mathematics have either contempt for, or an almost total ignorance of, the cumulative nature of mathematics.You cannot create a rigorous curriculum by simply extracting (or plagiarizing) and bundling items from upper level courses.The laborious (and often tedious) accumulation of facts, postulates, theorems, and techniques, built on and added to , grade after grade and year after year is what creates mathematical maturity. But the reformniks have successfully marketed the idea that you can skip this approach and “get your cash now.” They can not only build Rome in a day, they can do it before lunch! And as long as the public can be swayed by Madison Avenue hucksters promising a quick fix, don’t look for any real relief. It has taken twenty-five plus years for math education to sink to this state, and I do not believe that much will change between now and Labor Day.”
“One example should be the disastrous Eureka Math Curriculum. After its dismal failure in NY, under the name of EngageNY, I guess that the suits in charge decided to rebrand it Eureka Math and to try to sell it to the hicks in the mildew belt. And guess what? THE HICKS BOUGHT IT! After two years of trying to implement this compost, which seemed like an incoherent and disconnected collection of plagiarized items from some precalculus textbook, I gave up and left public education. And from what I hear, most Louisiana parishes have carted it to the curb at this point after squandering how many thousands of taxpayers’ dollars. With greed driving so much of education policy now, it is hard to fight back the feeling of rage and futility at what has been done to an education system that was the envy of the world when I was a child.”
Especially like this: “The laborious (and often tedious) accumulation of facts, postulates, theorems and techniques, built on and added to, grade after grade and year after year is what creates mathematical maturity. But the reformniks…not only build Rome in a day, they can do it before lunch!”
These programs are the results of NCTM’s “standards” and NSF funding. These are 1990s products, and they failed back then. CC was a Trojan Horse to allow them back under pretense that they are “aligned with CC”. These are the same programs, even the typos are still there. Publishers simply did not want to lose money they put into making of those programs, so here we are. NCTM does not conceal the fact that it participated in creation of CCSSM, and it considers CCSSM a “next step” in NCTM’s school math programs.
Why do you think NCTM is so wedded to bad ideas?
Ponderosa,
I guess, the easiest and the most correct answer would be money. In the late 1980s NCTM came up with its so-called “standards”, and several teams from several universities came up with programs, there were about a dozen of them, funded through NSF. Then the programs were licensed/sold to publishers. Clearly, the publishers wanted to make money, but these programs largely failed. I assume NCTM colonels were in it, at least personally, if not the whole organization. Maybe they were offered kickbacks, maybe they had some sort of an agreement with publishers, this I don’t know.
I do know, that in my local district one of these programs received a glowing review from a high-school math teacher, this review was proudly displayed by the publisher. The program was dropped within a year after parents’ indignation. After CCSSM was adopted, the course has been re-labeled as “aligned with Common Core”, and the program — with minimal changes, mostly a different cover — was adopted by the district. Now, who do you think is the main guy for the math curriculum in the district? The same teacher that 25 or so years ago “evaluated” and praised the program. Can I prove that he received kickbacks from the publisher? No, I cannot, but it does not look good to me.
Ponderosa,
after posting my message I realized that you asked about bad ideas at the first place, not bad products for which a ton of money was spent. I really cannot say much about NCTM and bad ideas, but this organization is consistently disturbing the math education in this country, starting from New Math, then their famous “standards” which they published after “A Nation at Risk”, then they came up with a couple of other publications, then they participated in creation of CC, and it looks like CC pulled a lot of verbiage from NCTM’s proclamations. Now they claim CCSSM as the inheritor of NCTM standards.
NCTM was founded in 1920, largely at the instigation of the MAA. Originally its purpose was to counter the progressivist educational agenda for mathematics, but I guess everything changes over time… water to vinegar. As David Klein writes, “The NCTM Standards reinforced the general themes of progressive education, dating back to the 1920s, by advocating student centered, discovery learning,” that is, in the 1980s NCTM reversed its course vis-a-vis progressive education. Why? I have no idea.
Pond: thanks for posting this. I have long bewailed the tendency of the most contemporary mathematics approaches to have students learning to us a theorem befor they know how to prove it. Two math examples.
Some curriculums introduce the distance formula early in algebra, before the children have looked closely at the Pythagorean theorem. Since the distance formula comes from the Pythagorean theorem, we ought to wait to introduce it. But you can teach children to plug in points and memorize the formula (or not) when they are young. Then you can boast of it, grabbing your self like a proud baseball batter.
Another example is teaching children formulae such as the factorial or the combinations and permutations patterns for the same reason. The basic idea is that students are “getting ahead” in the game and demonstrate it on tests. When it comes time to use the ideas, the students have to revisit the manipulation of the formulae as though they never saw it before. You might just as well have taught them them about the price of swine in 1877.
The fellow was behind the math standards , Jason Zumba, is a physicist.
He knows math but doesn’t know about brain development.
So he jumps right into abstraction at an early age before kids are ready for it.
But Zimba won’t EVER acknowledge his “errors”.
He blamed all the problems with CC math on poor implememtation — effectively, on teachers.
He made hundreds of thousands of dollars off of the standards, which he himself claimed he developed “in his garage.” (I believe it) The 990 tax returns for his company (Student Achievement Partners)are available online. In 2016 alone he made close to $350,000.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/274556045/201743139349302854/IRS990
Zimba
Self correct likes Zumba better.
The 2016 earnings were not for Cc development, of course, but the earlier 990s show that he got several hundred thousand for development.
Zimba and David Coleman made more off the standards in just a few years than most teachers earn in a decade.
Not sure how they got away with this, but they sure convinced a lot of people that they knew what they were doing.
Did you ever see the video of David Coleman and Lauren Resnick from 2011?
She and Marc Tucker tried to write their own national standards in 1992 or so but never thought of asking Bill Gates to pay for it.
In the video, Lauren introduces David in a jocular way, saying that to her knowledge p, he had never been a teacher, had no credentials. David continues the joke, referring to the people who wrote CCSS as ”unqualified,” but they knew evidence. It has always puzzled me that someone who is unqualified by their own admission has the “evidence” to write national standards.
See the video.
https://truthinamericaneducation.com/common-core-state-standards/david-coleman-2-years-ago-we-were-a-collection-of-unqualified-people/
Ponderosa, BA & Roy, pls chime in on my Q to math mavens below.
Squinting here, trying to connect this info to my own kids’ math curriculum experience, particularly elemsch [”92-’97] — tho all 3 escaped hisch before CCSS-M was implemented. Our elemsch experience was that the ‘conceptual’ folks had won the math wars [vs rote] – which would be cast in concrete by CCSS-M. Neither made any real sense to me (as a person w/strength in logic/ geometry, but great difficulty w/algebra back in the day).
Rote obviously has its place, & my kids suffered from a lack of memorizing times tables etc. That aspect of mid-20thC arithmetic pedagogy gave me by contrast a rather good grip on mental math/ estimating that came in handy in biz. It struck me that the elemsch ‘conceptual’ version, w/ its verbose & grindingly literal ‘estimating’ exercises introduced estimating prematurely, sans firm numeracy grasp built on rote & repetitive practice. Worse: the elemsch emphasis on “explaining” concepts in writing was all out of synch w/ level of reading/ writing ability. And worse yet: that was preceded by K-2 conceptual exercises for visual learners– repetitive replications of circles w/dots, lines etc– that were age-inappropriate for pencil-grip/ manipulation ability.
There were a few brilliant moves in there. My youngest acquired 3-digit mult & long-div skills well beyond my own 5th-gr skills via unique visual mapping grids. But that was it, bright-spots-wise.
Then ‘conceptual’ elemsch methods dove directly into classic midsch word pbms & soon quadratic equations, leaving my kids in dust– except eldest, who tho brain-wired for math had scored terribly in elemsch due to LD issues affecting reading/ writing. This was a kid who could summarize quad equation concept for math-dumb mom in a couple of sentences, but could not actually complete one in writing. (Thank god for a devoted 8thgr teacher’s 1-on-1 that got him through).
I’ve often thought on what would have helped me [the artsy visual learner w/logic ability] do better in K12 math (esp algebra). My answer is Asian. 1st & foremost, family use of abacus at home from age 2 & in early grades. Then, starting in later elemsch grades & continuing thro midsch & hisch, Chinese math pedagogy, starting w/math pbms worked via manipulables, & eventually, math formulas derived by the class from working problems. The opposite of US method, which is to rote-teach a formula as tho God-given, then work it to death on varying sets of data. In Chinese classrooms a problem [data-set] is posed to team groups. Each solves acc to whatever method they come up w/ & all assays are presented. Methods are compared/ contrasted & reduced to formulas; class discusses which formula produces correct answer, & among those, which is most user-friendly.
Any feedback from math mavens?
Curriculum and testing are big business. I can remember working on two curriculum projects for New York State. Those were the days when states actually got involved in the process instead of buying ready made products from corporations. Participating teachers from around the state got a per diem rate when we worked on the weekends or holidays and nothing other than our regular salaries from our districts when we worked during the week. We also had our travel expenses covered. We were a real cheap date!
Mrecedes’ story is not surprising. Dissembling corporations are the norm today.
This reminds me of what I’ve read as to how NY Regents’ Tests were developed back in the day. A panel of teachers from across the state developing Q’s that were field-tested for 3 yrs before being added, during which teachers of field-test groups provided feedback. Those were the tests I took, & I remember being very proud to have a Regents Diploma [which provided me w/scholarship that afforded me an Ivy League ed]. Those were the days…
From the beginning, there was a strange multiple personality phenomenon going on in Common Core ELA “standards.” On the one hand, the text incidental to the Common Core bullet list of vague, abstract skills gave lip service to use of substantive texts (Shakespeare, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, foundational documents from American history), and Common Core proponents often insisted on the importance of familiarity with the great works and authors of the post and of building knowledge (in line with the arguments made by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., and his Core Knowledge Foundation). On the other hand, the Common Core ELA, itself, was simply a skills list.
Proponents of Common Core have responded to this criticism by saying, look, the standards are not a curriculum. To get results, you need to wed the standards to curricular materials that are knowledge rich and that employ complete, authentic, complex, challenging texts.
But here’s the problem: The current accountability system makes the state ELA tests all important. And these tests don’t test knowledge of ELA concepts or familiarity with some canon of significant texts, for the most part; they are instead made up of multiple-choice questions, each of which is supposed to test the student’s possession of one of the abstract skills from the Common Core list. The state tests won’t find out whether the 11th grade student has ever heard of Emerson or T.S. Eliot, and it won’t discern whether he or she knows that parables and fables are both very short, fictional works, originating in the oral tradition, told to express a moral but differ in that the former have human characters and the latter animal ones. In other words, the tests don’t test knowledge AT ALL. And because schools and teachers are judged based on their students’ success or failure on these tests, what the tests do becomes all important. And so we’ve ended up with test preppy ELA curricula consisting of random exercises in which kids apply to random snippets of text random skills from the Gates/Coleman bullet list.
In the past (quite a long while ago), the authors of an ELA textbook could start with a body of knowledge that he or she wished to convey (understanding of the structure of fiction or of genres of literature and their characteristics or of character development in literature or of figurative language or of prosody or of genres and archetypes of the folktale) and create a unit that would systematically and coherently build knowledge in that domain. Typically, these units would use smaller pieces (poems, short stories, essays) chosen specifically to exemplify the concepts being taught. The important thing to note, here, is that the knowledge in the ELA was approached systematically, and a body of knowledge was imparted. Then, after units on these various topics, the authors could have students plunge into some larger, complete works (novels, plays) and apply the concepts learned in previous units (think of this as cumulative mixed practice).
And, in the past, after kids had had many years of this kind of approach, in Grade 11 they would get a survey course in American literature and in Grade 12 a survey course in British literature that would introduce them to the great works and authors of the canon.
Now, instead, every publisher of K12 ELA curricula, print or online, starts, instead, with a spreadsheet containing the Common Core bullet list in the far left column and plugs in the places where these “skills” are “covered” in the columns to the right. The whole idea of systematic, coherent teaching of concepts in a literary domain (genre, style, structure, archetypes, prosody, etc) is out the window, and so is the notion of systematic, chronological exposure to the classic literary canons, including treatment of literary periods and styles, the genres typical of these, and the relations of literary history to the history of ideas generally. Instead, students take up one snippet of text and practice one or two Common Core skills and then go to some other snippet of text and practice two other, unrelated Common Core skills, and so on. And perhaps the selections are chosen to be related by having to do with some vague “theme”–nature or whatever.
So, the practical result of the Common Core is that it has NOT given us coherent ELA curricula that build knowledge in particular domains and introduce young people to the greatest authors and works of the past but these incoherent, random collections of Common Core skills practice presented in no sane, coherent order. Why would anyone think that what I call the current curricular design formula, the Monty Python And Now for Something Completely Different approach to ELA? Well, a little background.
Many years ago, the state of Texas issued an ELA adoption call for the creation, for challenged, low-level students, of an “Integrated Language Arts” program. Before that, students had separate grammar and composition texts and literature. The idea of the Texas adoption call,was that instead of teaching a grammar unit and a unit on writing paragraphs and a unit on writing compositions and a unit on plot structure in the short story, skills would be taught INCIDENTALLY, in connection with reading of literature. Why? Well, the idea was that literature was more fun and grammar and writing were boring, so if they approached the curriculum in this way, challenged kids would find it more interesting. At the time, McDougal, Littell had a flagship literature program that followed the older organization, described above. But it did a program for the Texas call, an integrated language arts program, thinking that this would be a small market program (for challenged students in Texas) and that would be the end of it.
But here’s what happened: English teachers didn’t like teaching separate grammar units (boring) and writing units (a LOT of grading all at once), and they loved teaching literature. So, the McDougal integrated language arts program ended up being the bestselling literature program in the country. It took over the market for many years. Kids would read a selection and then do some activity at the end of the selection on some random grammar skill and another on some random writing skill. Integrated language arts became the standard curriculum model in ELA.
And that became the model on which subsequent ELA curricula were based. And when Common Core was foisted on the country, it was implemented in ELA curricula in the same way. Random selections with random exercises in which students practiced random skills.
At the time, schools around the country were still, as always, teaching an American lit survey in Grade 11 and a Brit lit survey in Grade 12. But Lord Coleman, the “architect” of the puerile ELA “standards” knew so little about actual schools and what they taught that his “standards” called for reading of foundational American literature texts in BOTH grades 11 and 12. Yes, he was that ignorant of ELA curricula.
So, here we are. The Common Core cheerleading squad keeps pointing out that standards are not curricula, but they completely ignore the fact that the puerile Gates/Coleman bullet list has become the DE FACTO CURRICULUM MAP in ELA curricular offerings, leading to the randomness and incoherence and triviality that we find in so much ELA curricula today.
It’s time we started, again, to organize our ELA literature curricula in a coherent way. And we can do that while still integrating writing and language instruction into it.
I’m sorry about the length of that post, but these issues are complex and cannot be addressed adequately in soundbites.
“it won’t discern whether he or she knows that parables and fables are both very short, fictional works, originating in the oral tradition, told to express a moral but differ in that the former have human characters and the latter animal ones.” — I did not know the difference. Oh, well.
“in Grade 11 they would get a survey course in American literature and in Grade 12 a survey course in British literature that would introduce them to the great works and authors of the canon.” — What “works and authors” they would learn in the earlier grades?
“Before that, students had separate grammar and composition texts and literature.” — Ah, the good old times. In some places of the world they still do this.
“And we can do that while still integrating writing and language instruction into it.” — So, you agree with the integrating of reading/writing and literature classes?
The thing about knowing the motifs, structures, symbol systems, and so on specific to particular genres (e.g., the fable, the eclogue, the pourquoi tale, Space Opera, etc) is that this knowledge is a) a valuable interpretive tool, b) essential for doing writing in the genre, and c) essential for breaking the genre rules in order to push the envelope creatively. So, for example, a press release or a Hollywood romantic comedy follows a very specific structural formula; if you know the formula, you can write one; if you don’t, well, good luck. Anything you produce will be extraordinarily amateurish. The structural knowledge is KEY, and it can’t be taught in a random soundbite or brief activity at the end of a selection.
Though in the old days there was little in the way of federal or state micromanagement of curricula, there was remarkable uniformity in the selections that were taught at various grade levels because of social sanction and habits of the tribe (of English educators), but there was also room for innovation. Selections before Grades 11 (American lit survey) and 12 (Brit lit survey) were typically drawn from the classics of American and British and world literature and tended to be canonical. They were either canonical classics like Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” or Langston Hughes’s “A Dream Deferred” or what people refer to in the vernacular as “modern classics” that were accessible at the grade level–stuff like Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” or Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt.”
BTW, these incidental, random exercises and activities in contemporary ELA texts, print and online, ignore essential prerequisites. So, there will be a random exercise in a Grade 10 textbook on agreement in verb tense, following some random snippet of literature, but there will be, before this activity, none of the considerable amount of prerequisite material that is necessary in order for people to understand what the various English verb tenses are and the rules for their formation. Our ELA curricula contain all these tiny, random activities on random topics, but the truth is, for people to understand x, more often than not, you need to stop and do a mini unit on x. So, for example, you can’t just throw in an activity about iambic pentameter, as our current texts do, and expect kids to understand it. You need at least a mini unit on meter generally. Now, why would someone want to teach such a thing? Well, if you understand the basics of the English metrical system, then you can write a proper lyric or limerick or ballad. And later, the kid who wants to write a song for her band or a jingle for her employer’s radio commercial spot will have a clue how to do that. It’s empowering. And if you don’t know those basics about meter, you will produce unreadable (or unsingable) garbage.
So, this randomness and incoherence in our ELA curricula is a very, very bad thing indeed. I’ve met a lot of young English teachers who couldn’t write a proper iambic pentameter couplet if there were a ten thousand dollar prize for doing so and who wouldn’t know Ibsen from Kurt Cobain or be able to name two poems by Emily Dickinson.
I think that kids should write in response to literature as part of their literature instruction. However, I also think that you have to have dedicated writing units because there is a lot to be taught in order for kids to have the necessary knowledge, descriptive and procedural, to write a particular type of piece well. And if you are going to teach traditional grammar, as the Common [sic] Core [sic] suggests, well, that’s very much a cumulative subject in which one concept builds upon another. So, for example, there is a random standard in the Common Core, Grade 8, that says that kids will be able to identify verbals and identify their functions. No way that can be done without a LOT of prerequisite instruction. Consider one type of verbal, the gerund. How does it function? Well, a gerund or gerund phrase can function in any of the ways that other substantive, such as nouns and pronouns, do. Well, a noun or pronoun can act as a subject, direct object, indirect object, object of a preposition, predicate nominative, retained object, subjective complement, objective complement, or appositive of any of these. Those are all possible functions of gerunds and gerund phrases. No way the “standard” can be met without a LOT of prerequisite work. A five-line activity on gerunds won’t cut it.
Everything Bob says about ELA—the right way & the CCSS wrong way to teach it—resonates w/me. I am a lit-reader/analyst nut (in 3 langs) as a product of the’old way’ pretty much as he describes it.
I would answer your Q about lit content for earlier grades [before 11th-12th] w/ Ponderosa’s cite from a commenter at Mercedes’ blog post: “the buffoons who concocted this hash of Common-Core middle school mathematics have either contempt for, or an almost total ignorance of, the cumulative nature of mathematics.You cannot create a rigorous curriculum by simply extracting (or plagiarizing) and bundling items from upper level courses.The laborious (and often tedious) accumulation of facts, postulates, theorems, and techniques, built on and added to , grade after grade and year after year is what creates mathematical maturity.” Change a few words & you’ve got the CCSS-ELA approach. We worked our way up to the major American-Brit canon via shorter, less complex, age-appropriate works like Romeo & Juliet, Cather’s My Antonia, short stories of O’Henry, Sherwood Anderson, DeMaupassant, Gogol, Chekhov, works by Verne, Twain, London. Lord of the Flies. Nowadays The Giver’s on that list, The Bridge to Terabithia, The Outsiders.
Yes!
Sadly, many of our young English teachers have lived so long with the random, incoherent “And now for something completely different” ELA curricula that that’s all they know. They don’t even understand that there are actually bodies of knowledge related to, say, prosody, literary genres, folklore archetypes, literary periods, figurative language, rhetorical techniques, discourse structures, characterization, etc., and that command of these bodies of knowledge VASTLY improves one’s ability to read in a sophisticated way. And many are profoundly unfamiliar with the traditional canons of American literature and British literature (much less the recognized classics of world literature). I’ve worked with far, far too many who have never heard of Yeats and wouldn’t know a quatrain or a couplet or terza rima from a moose.
The practical consequence of the Common [sic] Core [sic] has been a vast dumbing down of ELA curricula. And oddly, those curricula are more complex than ever before. That’s because any disorganized mess looks complicated.
Now, you might be asking yourself, “Why would it be of any value for students to learn the characteristics of works in a particular genre, for them to learn, for example, that both parables and fables originated in the oral tradition, are very short anecdotes, and impart a moral lesson and that they differ in that the former have human characters and the latter animal ones? Well, one reason for systematic acquisition of knowledge is that it helps a person to see. Knowledge undoes inattentional blindness. And another important reason is that if you know the characteristics, then you can create one. Hmmm. You want me to write a campaign commercial or the intro to a business talk for you? How’s this for an idea? Let’s tell a parable or a fable.
If you are unfamiliar with prosody (many young English teachers don’t even know what this is), then you are going to miss A LOT of what is going in a great poem like “Ode to the West Wind” or “Dover Beach.” You just won’t see it because you don’t know what you are looking for.
Imagine trying to teach biology with a textbook that contained in Lesson 1 an activity on estivation and another exercise on staining a slide, in Lesson 2 an exercise on citing a journal article with multiple authors using APA style and an exercise on variations in finch beaks on the Galapagos islands, in Lesson 3 the chemical formula for dopamine and a discussion of why there are fewer apex predators than decomposers, in Lesson 4 a passage from one of Darwin’s journals about lichen and a discussion of vestigial organs and a special feature on the Fibonacci sequence in the petals of flowers.
Or imagine a European history textbook in which Chapter 1 was about the SALT Treaty, Chapter 2 was about Trajan’s villa on Capri, Chapter 3 was about uses of barley among medieval peasants, Chapter 4 was about Beria, the head of Stalin’s secret police (the NKVD), and Chapter 5 was about the Diet of Worms.
Well, that’s what our ELA curricula have looked like for a long time now. Random exercises on random Common [sic] Core [sic] skills attached to random snippets of literature. And millions of English teachers think that this is unremarkable.
cx: in Lesson 4 a passage about lichen from one of Darwin’s journals
The tests based on the CCSS reflect “bipolar thinking.” Topics are fragmented and random.
Well said!
Although I demur about teaching prosody, discourse structures, etc. except sparingly and to advanced students. Go light on the analysis; focus on comprehension and enjoyment of literature. Focus on the content of literature, not form.
Ponderosa,
I’m in total agreement.
Students should read literature for insight, pleasure, joy, understanding, not to analyze technical details.
I recall a post several months ago where a poet saw the standardized questions about a poem she had read and didn’t know the answers.
I agree, of course, that we should concentrate, in our English classes, on reading great works for what they have to say. However, this other, technical knowledge, needs to be taught because it is extraordinarily empowering to readers and writers. If you know how a short story works, if you know the basic recipe, you can write one. Same as for lemon meringue pie. If you don’t have the recipe, well, good luck.
But I emphatically agree that a lot of the reading in literature classes should be purely for the sake of enjoying the works and what their authors have to say. That’s first. But the other is also needed, in extended, coherent lessons.
So, in addition to just reading and responding naturally to the experiences that literary works offer and to what authors have to say via those works, there’s also a lot of craft to learn. How did they do that? And the craft stuff needs to be learned in dedicated, extended (but fairly short) units, because they are bodies of connected knowledge, and some of this knowledge of the craft (of a poem, of a folktale, of a joke, of a drama, whatever) builds on other, prior knowledge.
If David Coleman has multiple personalities, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that all of them are a-holes.
But yes, Ponderosa, one of the reasons why I detest the stupid Gates/Coleman bullet list is that the reading of a text becomes, in Common [sic] Core [sic] curricula nothing but an opportunity for some Core-y skills practice. The whole point of why we read literature (to have significant, meaningful experiences that teach us who we and others are and how we tick) is lost.
How Poetry (and Literature in General) Means
Perhaps the most important lesson that I received, in college, about reading poetry occurred on a day when, in a class on nineteenth-century American poets, I commented that unlike just about everyone else, I wasn’t a fan of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry—that it seemed to me phony through and through. The guy made significant innovations in the short story. He invented BOTH the detective story and the madness/supernatural ambiguity on which so much horror and science fiction rides, but his poetry, mostly, seems to me contrived and false. The professor said, “Hmm. That’s a problem, your not believing him, because you can’t read a poem well without being willing to take the author’s trip.” And then he shoved everything off his desk and lay back on it and closed his eyes and recited “Annabel Lee” from memory. I still cling obstinately to my opinion about Poe. But I’ve never forgotten that lesson.
One thing I tried to teach my students about reading in general and, in particular, about reading poetry, is that they have to enter into it—they have to go into that world of the poem in their imaginations, and then they have an experience there, and that experience has significance of some kind, and that’s what meaning means in poetry. It’s the significance to the reader of that experience that he or she had. That doesn’t mean that any reading will do. If the poem is well-constructed, that experience will be quite specific, and the reader will be led inexorably to have something very like the experience and to gain from it something very like the significance that the writer intended. The whole thing is an exercise in bridging an ontological gap–my mind and experiences and understandings over here, yours over there. Poetry is a form of communication that tries—sometimes successfully! —to do the impossible. It’s the heavy-duty artillery for doing that job.
This is why it’s so awful that some English teachers approach poems by reading them aloud and then asking, “What does this mean?” as though poets were these perverse people who hide their true meanings and as though the meaning of a poem is some blithering generality (the answer to that English teacher’s question: e.g., Life is transitory. It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved. Some such generalized bullshit).
There’s an old joke that asks, “How many Vietnam veterans does it take to change a lightbulb?” Answer: “You wouldn’t know because you weren’t there, man!” The reader who turns a poem into a blithering generality hasn’t taken the poet’s trip, hasn’t had that vicarious experience, hasn’t learned things from the experience that mattered, that had significance, that were meaningful in that sense. He or she hasn’t been there, man.
So, a poem is the very opposite, at its core, of a vehicle for expression of a general principle, though one can glean general principles from good poems, as from life. A good poem is concrete and precise. Every added detail further delimits the precision, the particularity, of the world of the poem. To be specific about this, to say that Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” is about anguish at the loss of faith is true enough, but if that’s it—if that’s its sole meaning to you—then you weren’t really there, man. The moment that Arnold describes so precisely, has to be experienced—that fellow, standing at the window, looking at the receding tide, which no longer speaks but is a freaking thing roaring mechanically, who tries to have this conversation with the woman in the room who isn’t really interested, whom he fears does not love him, is experiencing loss on so many levels—of faith, of hope, of belief in the progress of the world, of love. And if you’ve gone there, if you’ve inhabited him as you read the poem, and if you’ve experienced his PARTICULAR experience, then it’s not one that you’ll readily forget. It’s wrenching, and heart-breaking. And it will be quite meaningful to you.
Great poetic writing renders with a few incredibly deft strokes that entire world into which the reader enters. A few words are enough to bring it fully, hauntingly, breathtakingly into being in the mind of the reader. This is what Derek Walcott was talking about in the opening of his “Map of the New World: 1. Archipelagoes”:
At the end of this sentence, rain will begin.
At the rain’s edge, a sail.
Poof. Rain. A sail. A world. He’s talking about the freaking ancient MAGIC by which, via words, one brings a world into being. It’s what’s left for Homer to do now that Helen’s hair is a grey cloud and Troy is an ashpit in a drizzle.
So, poems mean in a way that treatises don’t. And this is why authenticity is so important in poetry—why that’s what separates the good from the bad, “Dover Beach” from the typical high-school versifying of adolescent angst and Valentines. If the poem doesn’t create an authentic world, you can’t go into it. There’s no coherent there to go into.
I love Edgar Allan Poetry
It was many and many a year ago,
in a Kingdumb by DC
That a Sec Ed there lived whom you may know
By the name of Elizabeth Dee
And this billionaire lived with no other thought
Than to loathe and be loathed by me
That’s wonderful, SomeDAM!!!
Thanks, but Poe did most of it. I just changed a few things here and there to bring it up to date.
Here’s the rest, for anyone who is interested
https://dianeravitch.net/2017/12/05/somedam-poet-betsy-as-annabel-lee/
But you’ve already seen it
Hear, hear.
Bob,
are you against any grammar studies at school, or you only detest a CC version of it? I cannot figure it out. Because if you favor reading great literature over learning grammar, and at the same time you preach prosody… then something does not click.
Comparing grammar to prosody, I cannot help but mentioning that knowledge of basic grammar allows fishing out subject, predicate and object, and helps comprehending a sentence, while a knowledge of what is iambic pentameter adds nothing to ones toolkit besides da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM.
Cannot help mentioning.
Thanks for your questions, BA. These are complex questions with complex answers. Let’s start with grammar. It’s important to distinguish a three meanings of this term. For simplicity’s sake, let’s forget about the totality of what a speaker learns or acquires of the rules of his or her native tongue and limit ourselves to that component of a grammar known as syntax–what can go where and in what order.
First, there is what I call the folk theory of grammar. This is the traditional model that used to be taught in schools in books like Warriner’s English Grammar. Second, there is the grammar in a native speaker’s head. It is far, far more complicated than is the folk or traditional model–orders of magnitude more complicated–was intuited from the ambient spoken linguistic environment, and was acquired largely unconsciously. Third, there are models of the second of these, like the generative grammar taught in introductory syntax courses by departments of linguistics.
So, your question, I believe, is about traditional grammar of the Warriner’s English Grammar variety. The quick and simple answer to your question is that if people think that grammatical competence is acquired by learning a traditional grammar, they are woefully mistaken. Way back in 1935, the Encyclopedia of Educational Research published a metastudy showing that having studied traditional grammar had no significant correlation with the frequency of grammatical errors in student writing or speech. This is not surprising because a grammar of a language is almost entirely acquired unconsciously. So, for example, no native speaker of English will say “The green great dragon” Instead, he or she will say, “The great green dragon.” That’s because there are rules for the order of precedence of adjectives in English that are intuited (unconsciously learned) with the rest of the grammar of the language. People acquire and follow syntactical rules that they have no explicit knowledge of. They literally don’t consciously know what they know of the rules of their own language. Those are the rules that are studied in an introductory syntax course, and they bear little relation to the folk theory.
So, if people think that they are going to eliminate or significantly reduce the frequency of grammatical errors in student speech and writing by teaching them traditional grammar, they are mistaken. Why? Because when people make grammar errors, that’s because they have automatically acquired a different internalized grammar than that of speakers of the standard dialect of the language, and the actual way to affect that internalized grammar is the way in which the brain is built to acquire such a grammar, automatically, in response to a different ambient linguistic environment–exposure to a lot of standard English speech and writing, for example. It’s a largely automatic process.
Once, years ago, I went through an entire Warriner’s English Grammar Complete Course and counted only 24 exercises that actually dealt with some “grammar error” like faulty comparison of adjectives (“I’m more better now) or use of the nominative case personal pronoun after a copulative verb (It’s me). All the rest of the literally hundreds of exercises in the book dealt simply with identification of forms. That’s because learning even the names of the parts in a simple folk “grammar” is a significant undertaking.
OK, all that said, I nonetheless favor teaching, over the K-12 course of study, a version of traditional grammar–the use of simplified syntax trees to diagram sentence structures identified using a modified version of traditional grammatical terminology. Why? Possession of such explicit knowledge, while it doesn’t affect the frequency of deviation from the grammar of standard English, does give students and teachers a shared language with which to talk about sentence constructions, even if it’s a woefully inadequate language. (Note, btw, that a smattering of traditional grammar exercises at the ends of selections in a so-called “integrated language arts program” of the kind that is ubiquitous now is not sufficient in order to teach even such a simple traditional grammar. You have to teach it in dedicated units.)
But more important, I favor systematically exposing students to increasingly syntactically complex language over time and having them MEMORIZE snatches of song or poetry or even prose that contain syntactic constructions that they have not yet internalized through automatic acquisition. The idea, there, is to harness the actual means by which students acquire the internalized grammar.
No textbook program, in print or online, has ever done these things. That’s because few English teachers and reading coordinators understand how the internalized grammar is actually acquired. We need curricula that works the way the brain does. Such curricula would be revolutionary.
With regard to prosody, learning the basic rules of English meter is valuable both because it provides a language for describing how a poet is achieving certain effects but also, more importantly, it provides news you can use to someone who wishes to write poetry or song. In other words, it’s part of learning the craft. You dismiss that by saying it’s just da DUM da Dum, but it’s surprising, really, how few people can write a line that keeps a beat and or a stanza that follows a consistent form. Even English teachers, in my experience, often can’t do this–especially the young ones who never learned, themselves, the basics of prosody. Most adults are not very adept at rhythm in language, and so they don’t really hear it, well, in a great poem, and they can’t create, themselves, works that keep a meter. I think that sad, and it’s because of the incoherence and randomness of our ELA curricula in the Common [sic] Core [sic] era. So, yes, I think we should bring back instruction in prosody. I highly recommend having kids beat out the rhythms of poems on their desks or, better yet, on drums.
cx: failure to use the nominative case pronoun after a copulative verb, ofc.
So, short answer. I do in fact favor the teaching of a version of traditional grammar informed by modern studies of syntax because a) it’s interesting in and of itself; b) it provides a useful, rough language for talking about sentence construction. However, other things need to be done in order for children to internalize a standardized grammar (e.g., Standard English) and still others for them to develop facility with interpreting and producing language that employs the full arsenal of syntactic complexity available in English.
And I think that all prospective English teachers should be required to take classes in introductory syntax, phonetics, and morphology over in the linguistics department so that they will have a better understanding of how languages work and of how competence in them is actually acquired by native speakers.
In fact, I think we should pile on a LOT of academic requirements for prospective English teachers. But if we’re going to do that, we’re going to have to pay them accordingly. Here, an outline of what I think should be in the undergraduate course of study for prospective teachers of English: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/04/09/what-should-be-taught-in-an-english-teacher-preparation-program/
There’s a lot for an English teacher to know, and I think we could do a much better job of preparing them. But it’s essential that we pay them well and give them a lot more autonomy if we are going to require of them the level of professional preparation that I’m suggesting.
“I think that all prospective English teachers should be required to take classes in introductory syntax, phonetics, and morphology over in the linguistics department” — are you saying that presently they do not take these classes?
I’ve worked in this field for a long, long time, BA, and I’ve met and worked with many hundreds of English teachers. Few had any knowledge of contemporary linguistics. I’m not familiar enough with the required courses in English teacher preparation programs around the country to say what the language requirements of programs are.
My own undergraduate program at Indiana University, many years ago, required, for a degree in English, one survey course in traditional grammar and one course in transformational, generative grammar. Those, I think, are the bare minimum–a traditional grammar survey course and an introductory syntax course from a professor in the linguistics department.
I’ve long wished that linguistics professors would get interested in the education of English teachers and that English teachers would get more interested in linguistics. A lot would change.