proximoception | (no subject)

From an article HuffPo redubbed "No More Catcher in the Rye":

The Common Core State Standards, academic benchmarks that have been adopted by 46 states, call for 12th grade reading to be 70 percent nonfiction, or "informational texts" -- gradually stepping up from the 50 percent nonfiction reading required of elementary school students.

The Common Core standards focus on teaching fewer subjects in greater depth, replacing a melange of educational expectations that vary wildly across districts and states. Proponents of the standards, like the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, say too many students are not college or career-ready because they have suffered from years of easy reading and poor training in synthesizing more complex reading materials.

But the new guidelines are increasingly worrying English-lovers and English teachers, who feel they must replace literary greats like The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye with Common Core-suggested "exemplars," like the Environmental Protection Agency's Recommended Levels of Insulation and the California Invasive Plant Council's Invasive Plant Inventory.

Jamie Highfill, an eighth-grade English teacher at Woodland Junior High School in Fayetteville, Ark., and 2011 Arkansas Teacher of the Year, told the Washington Post she's already had to drop short stories and a favorite literary unit to make time for essays by Malcolm Gladwell from his social behavior book The Tipping Point.

So at least the kids'll understand how the technocratic tidal wave carrying their souls away occurred.

Or some apter metaphor featuring invasive plants choking out insufficiently-insulated native ones.

Relatedly, when will someone replace Huffington Post with something sensible? Google News isn't that - it has too few headings that link to too many articles, many from sucky sources. But I'm tired of "shockers" and whatnot.

Though I've grown fond of the "It's Over" articles where I have no idea from the picture who or what they're talking about. It's fun wondering what "it" might refer to in the photo - a hairstyle? A type of facial expression?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

See, I don't get this. It's not that 70% of English or literature reading is supposed to be "informational texts." But apparently a lot of schools think it is. Or is it that it's only in English that they read anyhow? Aren't they reading biology or history or geography or whatever?

I'm not sure. The general move back at S. Carolina was definitely away from lit texts and toward Gladwell type stuff.

The people destined to find great books will find them. Screw schools.

...

Someone should take away my keyboard.

Except I almost agree with this. I hated passionately every novel we were ever assigned. I felt, passionately, that no-one would ever talk with us about them honestly. Let's read Death of a Salesman and not talk about families fighting! Let's read The Glass Menagerie and not talk about people being depressed! Let's read Tess and not talk about rape or starvation or alcoholism. This, children, is a simile.

Really, let's read a series of books about women punished/ridiculed for sexual misconduct (Bovary, Tess, Jane Eyre), in an environment very much judgmentally obsessed with female sexual misconduct, and never address the issue. (I realized last week that rape was never mentioned to me in high school. It was literally never mentioned that you could say no to sexual advances. At the same time, we were constantly bombarded with what we couldn't do in order not to look sexually available (never be photographed holding a glass). The message was, if you look available, someone will have sex with you, and then your life will be over. And meanwhile these books, like some kind of constant fucking propaganda.

If kids aren't presented with emotional narratives by people who are completely unprepared to handle what they're presenting, I can't feel terribly bad about it. I really don't care whether Highfill can't teach her favorite books - we don't know from this piece whether she's emotionally competent to handle connecting with her students over them. My English teachers loved their books. They loved teaching us rape stories and never saying rape was wrong. I'm sure, I'm certain, doing it out of no nefarious motive.

But you know the other side to this and can answer yourself better than I could, hence that opening almost, hence your ability to feel even sub-terribly bad about this shift.

The abuse of a thing is not the reason to get rid of a thing. But my attitude and suspicion kinda looks like Dickens and Bronte observing the passion with which educators in their days taught children religion. And I don't even like Bronte or Dickens. Functionally I try to agree always with the pro-lit side by being endlessly at odds with myself.

I hated most of the texts assigned and had listless contempt for nearly every second of the teaching itself, which probably was lousy but I've mercifully forgotten all of it. While remembering nearly everything about the books.