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Jamie Gass: Is Moby Dick the Greatest American Novel?

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2019 //
108

Jamie Gass writes often about classic literature and what it says to us today. In this post, he writes about the relevance of Moby Dick, which he thinks may be the greatest American novel ever written.

The nature of a classic is that it is always timely. It speaks to us at different times in our life, and we understand it in relation to who we are. As we change, our perceptions of the classic change.

I have read Moby Dick three times: once in high school, and it bored me. Once in college, and I began to understand it. And about three years ago, on a flight from New York to California. The last time was the first time I really understood it.

I had the same reaction to Silas Marner; in high school, it was dull (to me). When I read it as a mature adult, I was deeply moved.

Same book, different reaction.

Jamie writes:

American students should appreciate Melville’s magnificence. A full decade before the Civil War’s carnage, only a highly unconventional writer of profound depth could craft a poetic novel using an enlightened cannibal to devour America’s racial, nativist, and religious stereotypes. Truth-telling and genre-shattering to a fault, Melville never really earned a living as an author and died a forgotten customs house clerk in New York City.

“Who would have looked for philosophy in whales, or for poetry in blubber?” remarked an 1851 London book review of “Moby-Dick.”

As America’s cultural ship of state seems awash in crazy sea captains, ignoble savagery, and uncivilized oddities who offer more whale lard than illumination, maybe Herman Melville and his friendly cannibal Queequeg can help keep students intellectually buoyant in the rough seas ahead.

Jamie and I don’t agree on anything having to do with school reform, but I always enjoy his efforts to restore classic literature to its exalted station in our schools and our lives.

Categories Literature

Ariel Sacks: Teach Whole Books or Excerpts?

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2019 //
63

 

Teacher Ariel Sacks notes two clashing trends in teaching literature:  teach whole books or excerpts.

The recent trend toward short texts seems to have come from the Common Core State Standards and accompanying standardized tests. As Peter Greene explains in a Forbes Magazine article, Common Core Testing and the Fracturing of Literature, “Both the standards and the tests are focused on ‘skills,’ with the idea that the business of reading a play or a story or any piece of text is not for the value of that text, but for the reading skills that one acquires and practices in the reading.” This limited focus on skills overlooks so much of what literature offers young people. But my issue with excerpts goes beyond the skills versus content debate, which has been going on many decades.

I question the choice to alter a novel’s form by excerpting it. This is partly on principle—the author didn’t intend for it to be read in bits. But more importantly, I believe reading excerpts puts students at a disadvantage in developing a love of reading and their skills in literary analysis.

The Whole Story Advantage

Literature is art. When we read a novel, we are reading an author’s artistic production, which was created intentionally in a specific form. The novel as a literary form asks readers to spend time living in a world and experiencing the story subjectively as it unfolds, detail by detail. Sure, the length can be prohibitive at times on a practical level; but fundamentally, the work of art begins at the beginning and ends at the end. Without the whole story, our experience is incomplete, and we really can’t know what the author is trying to convey with major gaps in our knowledge of the text.

I like to compare this to looking at a work of visual art—a painting, for example. Yes, we can study a corner of a painting, but we would almost never do so without first viewing the painting as a whole. Without seeing the whole, we miss out on the experience of the art as it was intended. And we are at a gross disadvantage in analyzing even the details we see in one corner, because we don’t know what purpose they serve in relation to the whole.

I agree with Sacks. A writer goes to great lengths to create a novel. Teaching only an excerpt does violence to the work and destroys love of literature.  Excerpting is butchery.

Categories Art, Common Core, Education Reform, Literature, Real Education

Peter Greene: The Writer Who Could Not Answer Standardized Test Questions About Her Poems

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2019 //
42

 

Peter Greene writes here about Sara Holbrook, a poet whose poems have been used on standardized tests.

Back in 2017, Holbrook wrote an essay for Huffington Post entitled, “I Can’t Answer These Texas Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems.” The writer had discovered that two of her poems were part of the Texas STAAR state assessment tests, and she was a bit startled to discover that she was unable to answer some of the questions….

To approach any poem with the notion that each word has one and only one correct reading when language at its most rich involves shades and layers or meaning–what my old college writing professor called “the ambiguity that enriches”–is one way to stifle thinking in students. In many states, we are doing it in grades K through 12.
There are so many layers to Holbrook’s situation. The test manufacturers could have contacted her and talked to her about her poem (though Common Core architect David Coleman would argue that doing so was both unnecessary and undesirable), but they didn’t. So here we sit, in a bizarre universe where the test writer knows the “correct” answer for a question about a poem, but the person who wrote the poem does not. And at least Holbrook has the option of publicly saying, “Hey, wait a minute,” which is more than the deceased authors used for testing can do. But she was only able to do so because somebody risked punishment by sharing test materials with her. Particularly ironic is Mentoring Minds’ promise to build critical thinking skills in students, even as Holbrook, by taking reading, writing and speaking out to students in living, breathing, dynamic workshops, is doing far more to promote critical thinking than can be accomplished by challenging students to guess which one of four available answers an unseen test writer has deemed “correct.”

 

Categories Common Core, Education Reform, Literature, Standardized Testing

Bob Shepherd: The Six Hundred, a Riff on Tennyson

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2018 //
26

Our reader Bob Shepherd has his own blog. As you may have deduced, I’m just wild about Bob.

Here is a wonderful parody of Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” who was writing about the British troops who blindly followed orders in the Battle of Balaclava in 1854 in the Crimean War and perished.

Bob calls it “The Coring of the Six Hundred.”

My generation memorized the Tennyson poem. Thanks to the Common Core, this generation will be lucky to encounter any poetry.

Here is the beginning. Open the link and read it all.

Row on row, row on row,

Row on row stationed

Sick at their monitors

Sat the six hundred.

“You may now type your Username”

Said the test proctor.

Set up for failure

Sat the six hundred.

“Enter your password key!

“Mercy upon you!

“During the testing

“No one can help you.”

Someone had blundered.

The unspoken truth. But

Theirs was not to make reply,

Theirs was not to reason why,

Theirs was but to do or die,

Theirs was but to try and cry.

Set up for failure

Sat the six hundred.

Text to the right of them

Complex, out of context,

Bubbles in front of them,

Plausible answers,

Tricky and tortured,

Boldly they bubbled and well

Though smack in the mouth of hell

Sat the six hundred.

This is what reading means,

Now that Gates/Pearson

Has reified testing

Far beyond reason.

Pearson not persons.

Plutocrats plundering

Taxpayer dollars

Spent to abuse.

The children are used.

They bubble and squirm

To reveal their stack ranking

And never again

Will know joy in learning

Never again

Humane joy in reading

And writing, no never again,

Not the six hundred.

Categories Common Core, Education Reform, Literature, Testing

Jamie Gass: How “Frankenstein” Lost to Common Core

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2018 //
20

Jamie Gass of the Pioneer Institute (a think-tank in Boston with which I disagree about charters) wrote a terrific piece about the history of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, why it is a classic, and why young people today should read it.

Gass writes:

Until recently, Massachusetts’ nation-leading K-12 English standards were animated by such classic British literature and poetry. Great fiction contributed to the commonwealth’s success on virtually every K-12 reading test known to the English-speaking world.

But in 2010, Massachusetts took $250 million in one-time federal grant money to replace its proven English standards with inferior nationalized ones known as Common Core. These national standards – an educational Frankenstein’s monster – largely decapitated timeless fiction and stitched on brainless so-called “informational texts…”

Frankenstein awakens us to a key lesson of modern learning – science is a powerful tool, but when uncoupled from moral and ethical grounding, it can easily become monstrous.

After pseudo-scientific 20th-century totalitarian regimes – which manufactured mass murder, the Holocaust, and gulags – Mary Shelley’s central message about the limits of human power and modern science is even more relevant today.

How sad for students and teachers.

Categories Common Core, Literature

Robert Shepherd Pens a Meditation to David Coleman in Honor of Shakespeare’s 450th Birthday

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2017 //
20

Robert Shepherd, teacher, author, curriculum developer, and all-round educator, does not like Common Core. Since he returned to the classroom, he likes it less each day. He wrote the following commentary for David Coleman, developer of the Common Core and now president of the College Board.

A piece I wrote for David Coleman, in Honor of Shakespeare’s 450th Birthday

I once read, in “The American Scholar,” I think, or perhaps it was in “Verbatim,” a tragic report on the paucity of dedicated swear words in classical Latin. The Romans were always envious of the subtlety of the Greek tongue, of its rich resources for philosophical and literary purposes, but the Greeks were even less well endowed with profanities than the Romans were. The poor Romans had to result to graffiti, which they did with wild and glorious abandon, while the Greeks stuck to salacious statuary and decoration of vases.

I have a nice little collection of books on cursing in various languages. French, Spanish, German, Italian–the modern European languages, generally–are rich mines of lively expressions. But our language, which has been so promiscuous through the centuries, has to be the finest for cursing that we apes have yet developed. We English speakers are blessed with borrowed riches, there, that speakers of other tongues can only dream of.

So, when I watch a David Coleman video, there’s a lot for me to say, and a lot of choice language to say it with.

Those of you who are English teachers will be familiar with the Homeric catalog. It’s a literary technique that is basically a list. The simple list isn’t much to write home about, you might think, but this humble trope can be extraordinarily effective. Consider the following trove of treasures. What are these all names of? (Take a guess. Don’t cheat. The answer is below.)

Green Darner
Roseate Skimmer
Great Pondhawk
Ringed Cascader
Comet Darner
Banded Pennant
Orange Emperor
Banded Groundling
Black Percher
Little Scarlet
Tau Emerald
Southern Yellowjack
Vagrant Darter
Beautiful Demoiselle
Large Red
Mercury Bluet
Eastern Spectre
Somber Goldenring

Back to my dreams of properly cursing Coleman and the Core, of dumping the full Homeric catalog of English invective on them.

I have wanted to do so on Diane Ravitch’s blog, but Diane doesn’t allow such language in her living room, and I respect that. So I am sending this post, re Coleman and the Core, thinking that perhaps Diane won’t mind a little Shakespeare. (After all, it’s almost Shakespeare’s birthday. His 450th. Happy birthday, Willie!)

Let’s begin with some adjectives:

Artless, beslubbering, bootless, churlish, craven, dissembling, errant, fawning, forward, gleeking, impertinent, loggerheaded, mammering, merkin-faced, mewling, qualling, rank, reeky, rougish, pleeny, scurvie, venomed, villainous, warped and weedy,

And then add some compound participles:

beef-witted, boil-brained, dismal-dreaming, earth-vexing, fen-sucked, folly-fallen, idle-headed, rude-growing, spur-galled, . . .
And round it all off with a noun (pick any one that you please):

Bum-baily
Canker-blossom
Clotpole
Coxcomb
Codpiece
Dewberry
Flap-dragon
Foot-licker
Hugger-mugger
Lout
Mammet
Minnow
Miscreant
Moldwarp
Nut-hock
Puttock
Pumpion
Skainsmate
Varlet

Or, if you want whole statements from the Bard himself:

“Thy tongue outvenoms all the worms of the Nile.” (worms = snakes)

“Methink’st thou art a general offence and every man should beat thee.”

“You scullion! You rampallian! You fustilarian! I’ll tickle your catastrophe!”

“You starvelling, you eel-skin, you dried neat’s-tongue, you bull’s-pizzle, you stock-fish–O for breath to utter what is like thee!-you tailor’s-yard, you sheath, you bow-case, you vile standing tuck!”

“Thou sycophantic, merkin-faced varlet.”

“Thou cream-faced loon!”

There. Glad I got that out of my system.

BTW. Those are names of dragonflies, above. Beautiful, aren’t they? Shakespeare loved odd names of things. Scholars have shown that he used in writing a wider vocabulary than any other author who has ever wrote in our glorious tongue. Again, happy birthday, Willie. What fools those Ed Deformers be!

Categories Common Core, Literature

Mike Rose: Reading Dante in the Age of Trump

By dianeravitch
February 20, 2017 //
52

Mike Rose is a justly celebrated author and a professor at UCLA. He writes like a dream, as the saying goes.

On his blog, he recently posted his musings about what the Trump administration would look like if seen through the lens of Dante’s Inferno.

Rose indulges in a great guilty pleasure by imagining the punishment awaiting some of the key players in contemporary American politics. Donald Trump, his cabinet, and his advisors present so many threats to all that’s holy that in addition to political action we need to draw on every artistic and cultural resource at our disposal to give us clarity and hope. If we’re forced to gambol on the edge of the abyss, let’s use every dance move we got.

Hell consists of nine concentric circles located deep within the earth: Abandon all hope ye who enter here. Each circle is the realm of a particular sin—lust, greed, violence, treachery—with each descending circle representing more and more grievous evil until, finally, there is the center of hell where in the lowest depth, Satan is frozen eternally in ice, futilely beating his massive wings.

Part of Dante’s poetic genius is that the punishment he creates for each of the sins is a physical analogue of the sin itself, and he renders the sights, sounds, and smells of the physical with grisly vividness. Gluttons, for example, wallow for eternity in a freezing slush of the rotted garbage their earthly indulgence produced. Fortune tellers and diviners (part of the circle of fraud) sought in life the unnatural power of foretelling the future, so in hell their heads are twisted forever backward, their eyes blinded by tears “that [run] down the cleft of their buttocks.” You get the idea.

In my Trumpian Inferno, there will be a special circle for the president’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, his chief of staff, Reince Priebus, and his counselor, Kellyanne Conway. These three long-time Republican operatives were each critical of Donald Trump during the GOP primary—Conway called him “a man who seems to be offending his way to the nomination”—but made their peace with the devil in exchange for power and limelight. Through an endless flow of double-talk, re-direction, avoidance, and flat-out lying, this unholy trio has thrown into fast-forward the degradation of our political language. For eternity, then, let them each be bound to podiums jammed close together in the blinding light of a press conference, repeating face-to-face ad nauseam and ad infinitum the blather that has become their stock-in-trade.

Chief strategist Steve Bannon who revels in provocation and shock-and-awe strategy would be buried forever in the middle of a vast desert, just enough below the surface that his endless flailing and blustering produces the tiniest puff of sand, seen by no one, not ever, affecting nothing at all.

What does he envisage as the fate of Donald Trump? Open the link to find out and don’t share the secret in your comments.

Categories Lies, Literature, Trump
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