Kate Taylor, NY Times - In Harrison, N.Y., 10th graders read articles about bipolar disorder and the adolescent brain to help them analyze Holden Caulfield. In Springdale, Ark., ninth graders studying excerpts from "The Odyssey" also read sections of the G.I. Bill of Rights, and a congressional resolution on its 60th anniversary, to connect the story of Odysseus to the challenges of modern-day veterans. After eighth graders in Naples, Fla., read how Tom Sawyer duped other boys into whitewashing a fence for him, they follow it with an op-ed article on teenage unemployment.
The Common Core standards, which have been adopted by more than 40 states, mandated many changes to traditional teaching, but one of the most basic was a call for students to read more nonfiction. The rationale is that most of what students will be expected to read in college and at work will be informational, rather than literary, and that American students have not been well prepared to read those texts.
At first, many English teachers and other defenders of literature feared that schools would respond by cutting the classics. That has happened, to some extent. But most districts have managed to preserve much of the classroom canon while adding news articles, textbook passages, documentaries, maps and other material that students read or watch alongside the literature, sometimes in strained pairings.
The new standards stipulate that in elementary and middle school, at least half of what students read during the day should be nonfiction, and by 12th grade, the share should be 70 percent...
Schools generally choose their own reading materials. For nonfiction, however, the Common Core standards specify that students should read certain "seminal U.S. documents of historical and literary significance," including the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter From Birmingham Jail," as well as presidential addresses and Supreme Court opinions. Many high schools have added these to American literature classes.
They have also added contemporary nonfiction by authors like Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Pollan and units on argumentative writing and debate. And along with "Romeo and Juliet," for example, students might be assigned readings about Shakespeare's life or a contemporary magazine article about teenage suicide.
....Eli Scherer, a special-education teacher, said he found that struggling readers were often more engaged by nonfiction because it seemed more relevant to them.
But Karma Lisslo, an eighth grader and an avid reader, said that while she appreciated that nonfiction could provide historical context for a novel, she got tired sometimes of the short informational texts she was assigned.
"We do so much nonfiction," Karma said. "I just want to read my book."
Kim Yaris, a literacy consultant, said her son had a similar reaction last year, when his fifth-grade class in Dix Hills, N.Y., began the year by doing a painstakingly close reading of sections of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights...
On the ninth day, she said, her son got into the car after school and started to sob.
...If some of the nonfiction texts that districts choose seem overly technical and abstruse, other choices -- like opinion pieces on whether cellphones should be allowed in schools or an article about injuries from cheerleading -- seem based on a set of low expectations about what students will be interested in, said Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University.
4 comments:
Was the kid who sobbed after reading the Universal Declaration of Human Rights sobbing because of the difficulty of the text, or because he saw that how the US currently operates is as if the document never existed?
The school librarian is perhaps the most important, stocking John R. Tunis, books that break through the daily grind. Given the de facto ban on celebrations of Washington and Lincoln, biographies of those two would be instructive. Washington Irving. Longfellow, Melville, Emerson. It is American culture that today's schools are prevented from teaching, being subversive. But the librarian can get away with making this available, offering one-on-one time with the authors in a reading environment.
From your description, it seems that the educationalist system has moved from a highly restricted list of fiction works to a highly restricted list of maybe fiction. Where are the great works of science, of maths, the works that are based on actual reality and not on the political and emotional filtering of social artificiality?
Slaves were not permitted to read, as it would render them less functional. "We the people" were readers, now replaced by "we the human resources". So there is a compromise being negotiated, let them read (let them eat cake), but non-fiction. We don't want any more Uncle Tom's Cabins.
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