Two very good and very similar novels came out within months of each other in the summer of 2010: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, and The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman.
Both are comic-realist novels about recent history, family stories and love stories with subplots about technology and the environment. Both are ambitious books that attempt to examine the struggles of contemporary America, and both writers model their novels on great 19th Century realist fiction. While Franzen invokes Tolstoy, Goodman (without ever announcing it) structures her book loosely around Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.
Both books are concerned with authenticity, and both books’ protagonists are obsessed with environmental preservation. In Freedom, Walter Berglund wants to protect songbirds. In The Cookbook Collector, Jessamine Bach wants to save redwood trees. In both, the main character’s environmentalism is posed against a second major character’s struggle with aesthetics and materialism. Both Freedom’s Richard Katz (a musician) and The Cookbook Collector’s George Friedman (an antiquarian) make long speeches about the commodification of beauty. And in both books, there’s a subplot concerning a dickish and acquisitive young man, aggressive and faux-heroic, who gets into some morally disreputable W. Bush-related business by going after money: in Freedom it’s war profiteering and contracting, in The Cookbook Collector it’s Internet invasion of privacy and eventually government surveillance. As Freedom gets much of its ripped-from-the-headlines feel from subplots about the Iraq war, so The Cookbook Collector with the boom and bust of the Internet era.
Both are loose, baggy novels that move from character to character and year to year, with great big imaginative sweeps. Both books center around a family (the Berglunds, the Bachs), both books climax with a love triangle and a trip to a place of environmental crisis, and conclude with a violent death and the consolation of marriage. Both novels have big canvases that the writers attack with comic gusto. (The Cookbook Collector moves from boardrooms in Boston to communal houses in Berkeley; it makes you cry about 9/11 and makes you think about David Hume and culinary history.) Both novels are really books about value, both material and moral. These are serious books that question value in American life in light of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the Iraq war.
Both are addictive reading. I couldn’t put either one down. And both books were well received. Reviewers really liked The Cookbook Collector. They marveled at its intelligence and grace. It was called “a feast of love;” critics said that Goodman “makes us care,” and that her books was “enchanting and sensuous,” and “flush with warmth and color.” Critics were somewhat more divided over Freedom, but those who liked it liked it a lot: “A masterpiece of American fiction,” said Sam Tanenhaus in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, “an indelible portrait of our times,” said Michiko Kakutani in the daily. And this difference in response mimicked the gap between the two books’ pre-publication hype. Franzen’s was sold as “The Great American Novel” (that’s what Esquire called it), while The Cookbook Collector was (I guess) just another good book by Allegra Goodman.
Why such a big gap?
I’m sure that a lot of the hype probably has to do with vagaries of the publishing marketplace, mysterious stuff that I can’t speak to. (Like, how’d they get Obama to buy it?) A lot of the gap in expectations also has to do with the relative success of the authors’ previous books—on the one hand, there was that long wait after Franzen’s mega big hit The Corrections, on the other, a shorter wait after Goodman’s well-regarded Intuition. (I, for one, sort of expect that every few years Allegra Goodman will give me another terrific novel to read.) I’m sure part of the wide gap in response has to do with the genders of the authors. It’s as impossible to imagine Goodman on the cover of Time magazine as it is impossible to imagine Jonathan Franzen getting called “warm and sensuous.” (There’s a subtext to the praise of The Cookbook Collector that I quoted above, and it’s: Allegra writes like a girl.) But the difference also is in the books themselves, in the way they approach their readers and their subjects. As a hundred critics before me have argued, Franzen’s book swaggered out and demanded the response it achieved. Its title, its 561 pages, and its sweep boldly proclaimed it a Major Novel and critics had to deal with this claim to Majorness. If you didn’t compare it to The Great Gatsby or Moby-Dick, that was almost a diss.
Freedom got more negative press than did The Cookbook Collector, but that hardly means it’s a weaker book: it just got more press period, and probably much of the nastier criticism was just counterreaction to all the noise around the novel’s release. But the book was part of that noise. Freedom is a terrific performance, but it also sometimes feels like a guy at a dinner party who’s talking very, very loudly. It mentions War and Peace so many times you’d have to be a dolt not to get the Tolstoyan ambitions. And some of the book’s weaknesses are part of its terrible roar. As Charles Baxter wrote in The New York Review of Books, “Freedom’s ambition is to be the sort of novel that sums up an age and that gets everything into it, a heroic and desperate project. The author all but comes out and says so.” And Franzen’s characters’ actions are sometimes presented with such broad irony that they better serve his point than his plot. As a result the characters can seem dimwitted; as Baxter put it, “almost every reader of Freedom will be more worldly than its protagonist and will have anticipated several of its key moments many pages before they arrive.”
Meanwhile, for all its sweep and ambition, The Cookbook Collector comes on quite modestly. As Ron Charles said in The Washington Post: “Goodman is a fantastically fluid writer, and yet for all her skill, she’s a humble, transparent one who stays out of the way, never drawing attention to her style or cleverness.” Goodman’s gaze is always on her subjects, and she handles her big themes lightly, submerging them in the lives of the books’ characters. The Cookbook Collector’s literary elegance is part of what made the book invisible to a broad public, while Franzen’s roaring crassness is part of what made his book such a smash. He’s just a lot louder than she is.
Which is not to say there aren’t lots of ways in which I prefer Franzen to Goodman. He’s much more interested in the dark side of life than she is. He writes with sympathy and intelligence about addictions and failed marriages, career failures, and failures in raising children—almost everyone in Freedom is some kind of anxious wreck. Meanwhile The Cookbook Collector has a pretty uniformly well-adjusted, privileged cast (that’s what you get for following Jane Austen, the lives of the smartest rich girls in the county), most of whom are either making a mint in computers or are enjoying tenure at MIT. The exception is Goodman’s heroine, Jessamine, the family flake, a confused grad student at Berkeley (egads!), but by the time the novel is done she’s found love, money, and has embarked on a promising academic career.
When people have sex in Freedom, heads bang on walls. In The Cookbook Collector it’s a finger on the chest and then fade out. (Goodman does write a very sexy scene of a girl eating a peach.) There are gorgeous flights of imagination in The Cookbook Collector—like the scene where George stumbles upon the collection of its title, 17th Century manuscripts stored in the cabinets and ovens of a musty Bay Area kitchen:
For a moment, he thought she was searching for the iodine, and then he saw them. Leather-bound, cloth-bound, quartos and folios, books of every size. The cabinets were stocked with books. Not a dish or cup in sight. Only books. Sandra bent and opened the lower cabinets. Not a single pot or pan. Just books. She stood on a chair to reach the cabinet above the refrigerator. Books there as well.
George stepped away from the sink without noticing that he had left the water running. Injury forgotten, he gazed in awe. He leaned against the counter and stared at bindings of hooped leather, red morocco, black and gold. Sandra opened a drawer and there lay Le Livre de Cuisine. She opened the drawer below and took out The Accomplisht Cook: or, The Art and Mystery of Cookery. He opened the book at random: Section XIII: The First Section for dressing of fish, Shewing divers ways, and the most excellent, for dressing Carps, either Boiled, Stewed, Broiled, Roasted, or Baked, &c. He had never tried to roast a carp.
But there’s nothing in The Cookbook Collector like the scene in Freedom where a young adulterous husband digs through his own shit for the wedding ring he has swallowed:
He knelt on the cool floor and peered into the bowl at the four large turds afloat in it, hoping to see the glint of gold immediately. The oldest turd was dark and firm and noduled, the ones from deeper inside him were paler and already dissolving a little. Although he, like all people, secretly enjoyed the smell of his own farts, the smell of his shit was something else. It was so bad as to seem evil in a moral way. He poked one of the softer turds with a fork, trying to rotate it and examine its underside, but it bent and began to crumble, clouding the water brown, and he saw that this business of the fork had been a wishful fantasy. The water would soon be too turbid to see a ring through, and if the ring broke free of its enveloping matter it would sink to the bottom and possibly go down the drain. He had no choice but to lift out each turd and run it through fingers, and he had to do this quickly, before things got too waterlogged. Holding his breath, his eyes watering furiously, he grasped the most promising turd and let go of his most recent fantasy, which was that one hand would suffice. He had to use both hands, one to hold the shit, and the other to pick through it. He retched once, drily, and got to work, pushing his fingers into the soft and body-warm and surprisingly lightweight log of excrement.
Goodman glides through her fiction, while with Franzen, it’s always a triple lutz with a camel. When Jessamine Bach joins an environmental group it’s the prosaically named Save the Trees, and like a real environmentalist, she sits in a treetop canopy to preserve the redwood from loggers. (That scene in the redwood is beautifully turned.) When Walter Berglund starts an environmental group, it’s called the Cerulean Warbler Mountain Trust, and Walter’s got a scheme wherein he’ll give over some pristine wilderness to a coal company and then after they’ve removed the mountaintops and fouled the groundwater, he’ll replant the place as a songbird preserve.
Franzen has written a lot about his break from difficult, satiric post-modernism. In his essay “Mr. Difficult,” he pronounced his split from his one-time hero William Gaddis. He doesn’t want to write really, really hard intellectual books anymore. Thing is, Franzen’s over-the-top satire and his pressing of his characters’ faces into humiliation and into the meaningless void—these things really do derive in Franzen from Gaddis, from a dire, post-Beckett aesthetic. Part of what makes Franzen so exciting to his admirers and so frustrating to his critics is his attempt to wed whacked-out and dark postmodern irony to sympathetic humanist realism. And in this unlikely marriage problems do arise. In a crazy-ass postmodern spoof, you can have a character dig through his shit or have an environmentalist join up with a coal company, and this can be part of the cold icy whacky comic mayhem (like in Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own, a novel about a set of interrelated lawsuits, where the cars are called Isuyu and Sosume). But in a realist novel, this kind of irony can shade into something ugly, can make characters seem plastic and thin and (as Charles Baxter argued) a little stupid. Franzen’s willingness to abase his characters often reads as if he holds them in contempt.
Part of the difference in reception of the novels might actually have something to do with the two books’ Jewishness—and here we come to another one of the weird parallels between the books. Both of these are very Jewish novels, and their subplots about Jewishness mirror each other. In both books, mothers hide their Jewishness from their children, children discover their secret family histories, and these discoveries of secret histories coincide with violent global convulsions.
In Freedom, Patty Berglund, Walter’s wife, keeps her Jewish identity a secret from her kids, and her son Joey (the one who digs through his own shit, the one who gets mixed up in phony arms deals in the Iraq war) discovers his Jewishness late in the novel. After he makes this discovery of his identity, Joey gets involved with in a scary Jewish family—one that might be modeled on the Kristols or the Wolfowitzes, rich Jews whose interest in Joey’s Jewishness is almost as creepy as their interest in right wing politics, Jews who distribute false information that leads to war.
In The Cookbook Collector, Jessamine and Emily Bach’s mother is dead, but her Jewishness is similarly locked away from them, kept hidden from the girls by their father. They both learn about their Jewishness at a post-9/11 memorial service—the Bach sisters are related not to assimilated or political Jews, but to Hassidic Jews, in fact to the Bialostoker Rebbe himself. Goodman’s treatment of Jewishness has a completely different purpose than does Franzen’s. For Franzen, Jewishness marks another opportunity to explore self-loathing and to memorialize the times—here, to skewer neo-conservatives. In The Cookbook Collector, the presence of Jews—of rabbis—allows the novel to contemplate value in a whole new light. Religious value is a central value for Goodman, and one that underpins the whole of her work. In this book, it is contemplated alongside other human values—material, aesthetic, filial, and romantic. And all of these things, in Goodman’s eyes, have worth.
Twenty years ago, David Foster Wallace wrote an essay called “E Unibus Plurum: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in which he worried that the irony of his favorite post-moderns (Pynchon, Delillo, Gaddis, Barth) had been co-opted in his generation of post-modernists’ lives by television, in particular leering, cynical “I know this is just an ad” kind of TV ads. Wallace worried that his generation of post-modernists had fallen into a trap, a reflexive, cold irony he called “televisual,” and he described this irony’s gaze as “the girl who’s dancing with you but who would rather be dancing with someone else.” Allegra Goodman, of course, is in no danger of falling into this trap. At the end of The Cookbook Collector, Jessamine Bach’s newly discovered uncle, Rabbi Helfgott, presides over her and George Friedman’s marriage, and it’s clear that the book believes in God and in love, and that Goodman’s fiction exists in a stable, meaningful, social world. Her subtle literary ironies are of a piece with this large-hearted view.
Meanwhile Franzen’s novel—his whole career, really—is a struggle with this postmodern ironical trap, a struggle to inhabit it and get out of it, to be humane and to be ironic. At the end of Freedom, when the Berglunds, Walter and Patty, huddle together after 500-plus pages of humiliations, affairs, failures, and addictions, and in the ruins of their marriage find some comfort from the horrid world all around—well, it’s proof (if proof was ever needed) of Franzen’s extraordinary gifts. This final section succeeds movingly.
But he never can quite turn it off, and you feel it, the televisual irony, all throughout the course of Freedom. Franzen is dancing with you, sure, and with Walter and Patty as well, and his moves are wild and Tony Manero dazzling—but he’s not wholeheartedly on the floor with his partners. Allegra Goodman loves her characters—they absorb her attention as if she could wish for nothing more, and she offers them intimately to her readers, so much so that the author herself all but vanishes. Franzen’s characters meanwhile exist somewhere beneath the glory of his prose. His book is not so much addressed to the intimate reader, it’s addressed to the judges and the crowds. His characters are anxious, but he is supremely confident. He has managed to shuck the difficulties of postmodern fiction while retaining much of its cool and distant pose.
David Foster Wallace had lots of moral and aesthetic problems with televisual irony—he ends that essay about it with an interesting call for earnestness—but he also noted how well it sells. Half a year after its release, The Cookbook Collector, full of earnestness and love, is between hardcover and paperback editions, and it’s hard to find at your local bookstore. Meanwhile, cool and calculating Freedom sits high on the bestseller list, alone among its literary contemporaries. That’s some kind of triumph.
Many points in the article are well put. At the elementary level many or most schools in our nation participate in a motivational reading program called Accelerated Reader. The volume of reading at these schools is fairly high with high library circulation rates. However, the knowledge base of children’s literature within the teaching profession has declined to the point of non-existence. Teachers do not read children’s literature. Teacher preparation programs do not address this. NCLB and Reading First put the basal text with its focus on excerpted literature and sub skills at the center of instruction. Without guidance our students read fun, humorous books with little substance such as Wimpy Kids, Dork Diaries, and the most popular Captain Underpants. Elementary school librarians (not library clerks) are rare. What is needed are teachers that can recommend the right book to a child because they have read it. When a child reads Harry Potter, the teacher should be able guide him/her to Lloyd Alexander or Susan Cooper for the next book to read. The teacher should be able to talk to children about great books they have read and pass on a sense of passion. This dialogue is absent. Let’s all go to the library and read Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry and get a few students to read it.
The most difficult aspect of instilling children with a love of books is that many
of them simply do not live in socioeconomic conditions that will enable them to secure quality books. In America, we’ve collectively decided that it’s more important to use our vast resources to murder people overseas and promote militarism than it is to learn and develop critical thinking skills.
Giving kids a list of books that are “good” and having them “journal” about them sounds like lazy teaching to this high school English teacher. It also sounds like a way to make good kids who like to read read more, and kids who hate to read hate it even more by turning it into an exercise of pushing papers.
The article should be amended: the problems detailed are not found in “all” public schools. They are specific to public schools that are located in places where administrators and school board members are easily terrified by scores that have no connection to the actual “education” of their students. I teach in a public high school where independent reading of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry is encouraged from 9th-12th grade. We’re going to be a part of the Common Core testing system. We have no plans to change the way we teach our kids. In fact, the state of Illinois has been using the ACT to measure student achievement for the last 10 years. No standardized test in history has changed more local school curricula across our state more insidiously than that test. No standardized test values creativity less than the ACT. And yet, and yet.
These new tests will not dominate my life as a teacher. I know this because people said the same thing 10 years ago with NCLB. And 10 years before that. And 10 years before that. And 10 years before that. Part of the problem with reforming education in this country is that teachers act like the sky is falling with every reform. Every new movement is worse than the last. It’s just not the case.
Want students to love reading? Read lots of books. Be ready to recommend some of those books to each student on an individual basis. Teach books that have the qualities of great literature but also tell meaningful stories (three of the best, in my opinion: Cuckoo’s Nest, The Great Gatsby, The Things They Carried) instead of books that meet canonical or diversity checklists. Stop making everything about “theme.” Talk about actions, psychology, relationships. Let kids speak their minds. You’ll get kids to love reading.
While I agree that the focus on testing is lamentable, and detrimental to students, readers, authors, and our general culture, I can’t blame the Common Core. The Common Core only instructs teachers on what to teach, it doesn’t address how. Teachers are still free to give lists of amazing books to children, to read aloud everyday, and to choose books to share with care. The subtle shift of focus away from solely fiction to a balance between fiction and non-fiction is a reasonable response to our high tech, STEM focused world. The issue is with testing. The issue is with the idea that teachers and schools and students can only be evaluated using a test. If we could all agree to evaluate using portfolios, journals, authentic responses, and other metrics, the tests would die. Additionally, if parents embraced a more difficult curriculum while rejecting the tests, the tests would wither and fade. Embrace a better curriculum, but reject the tests!
This article’s logic, particularly the position implied by the title, is absurd, and I’m forced to wonder if Mr. Kalamaroff genuinely understands the Common Core or if he is being intentionally misleading. More accurately, Mr. Kalamaroff might argue against high stakes testing and purely objective tests are detrimental to teaching students to enjoy reading. That at least would have some merit, but that’s not quite what he’s done, instead opting to conflate high-stakes testing with CC reading standards, which ensure students can read informational texts as well as fiction (also a CC standard).
Looking back, I don’t know why I got a degree in English because the literature instruction I got in middle and high school was mostly terrible. I think it comes down to one teacher, 9th grade. I think it’s more about finding teachers who reach you than it is about any particular “method.”
Other than 9th grade, here’s what I remember: books and stories and poems were drudgery. They weren’t fun, they weren’t amazing, they didn’t help me make sense of my life. Their key moments were to be memorized, their symbols and motifs understood. Everything was presented as hard, awful work. Reading Ethan Frome or Beowulf seemed like punishment, it really did.
Granted we needed to be weaned off the light fare we had grown up reading. But there was no effort to cajole us to actually like the material. I’ve talked to a number of people who feel the same way. (All public schools of course.) I’ve asked them, why don’t you read? And they cite red hunting caps and green dock lights that never seemed to actually mean anything to them. They felt like they didn’t get it, and they never would.
Reading, even great literature, even difficult literature, is supposed to be a pleasure. It’s not worth doing if it isn’t. I agree that it’s down to teachers to find ways to reach their kids, no matter what the obstacles. But the first thing I would do is stop treating books like puzzles, stop focusing so much on symbols and motifs. Symbolism is just one of many many aspects of literature, but in my experience and the experience of many I’ve talked to, it’s like the only thing that seems to matter in scholastic lit study.
I teach high school science and have been adapting primary source, classic maritime books into Google Earth chapter tours. I have found it is a fun way to engage students as they virtually travel to oints of interest mentioned in the text. This multidisciplinary approach introduces science, history and geography in my marine science class. Feel free to read the books at: http://Sailthebook.net
@ Kristen: I’m afraid that’s not the case. Take it from a product of the East Asian high-stakes test-taking culture: Regardless of tests, as long as grading and assessments have standardized rubrics (and they will, if high school diplomas are to mean an equivalent mastery of subjects), there will always be drudgery and forced learning. Changing tests to portfolios, journals, etc. simply means that students will learn to write the “correct” essays and journal entries. It also means that the sphere in which they have to “get it right” will no longer be limited to test-taking, but will start to permeate more and more of school life. This is the main criticism of the educational reforms currently being pushed through in my own country (Taiwan).
There is an even more insidious danger here as well. When essays, journals, etc. start to have “correct” answers, it also means that the system is engaging in thought-censorship. Think of the the scene discussing Hitler in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys: Would you, as a grader of essays, give as high a grade to an essay discussing the attractions of Nazism (before attempting to refute them) as one that discusses the merits of democracy? Freedom of speech and thought is easy to pay lip service to, but when actual speech acts (including written ones) conflict with the grader’s personal beliefs (or those held by most of society), then it’s not just an abstract question. A kid’s grades (and, if the system is widely implemented, the kid’s future) are on the line.
That being said, I don’t agree with this article, either. The truth is that, even in the midst of high-stakes testing, those who love reading (or any other extracurricular activity) will still love it, be it due to an inspirational teacher or what they do with their free time. On the other hand, for those who don’t love reading, rigidly standardized tests can better ensure that they retain (to a certain degree) knowledge that is deemed essential to the information society of the 21st century. In Taiwan, we may not use school knowledge in daily life, but that knowledge often serves as a common cultural base, or even a surprising source of tangential inspiration.
Should life revolve around testing and only testing? No. And is ten hours too long a time to sit a multiple-choice exam? Most likely (unless it’s split among different days). But to say the the Common Core will kill the cultural future of the United States is not contributing to the discussion.
This makes sense. Growing up in Brazil, I was educated at a private school that focused on getting its students through the entrance examinations for the best colleges in the country. This meant millions of hours of multiple choice mock tests and teaching how to do well on them. Literature was reduced to memorizing a few facts about each mandatory book (short lists of ten brazilian classics for each college you were to apply). Suffice to say that my appreciation of literature was blocked until the moment I finally left school (and yes, I got into the college I wanted, but at what cost?) and managed to find time to actually pay attention to what I was reading, in levels other than mere fact recollection. Most of my high-school friends didn’t have that luck and even though they also managed to get into good colleges, they never found their way into the joys of reading. Don’t go that way, America.
Thomas Kilbourn. Joel Barlow High School. Redding, CT. The man is a legend.
I’m a new English teacher in NYC and keeping the CC in mind while preparing lessons has been a big part of my training. This article, like many others, focuses on testing and how this will change the direction of the curriculum. I think many are missing the point: testing helps us focus on what IS working, on what the students are not grasping, allowing us to revise and review areas of learning to make them more effective. By examining test results and making the appropriate adjustments, we can become more effective teachers.
Of course, there are some imbalances in the current approach; expected at the start of any “revolution.” Allowing this transition to be co-opted by politicians and voters who are attracted to this topic because they see it as a liberal/conservative “plot,” designed to further their own agenda has only illuminated the differences each and every state education system has when it comes to spending the taxpayer’s money.
The people who are enthusiastic about these tests (and I just had to listen to one of them for an interminable hour) and the people who are left absolutely cold by them….are just residents of two different planets.
There is no bridge. Teachers, be subversive.
This, like many articles, is a vast over statement of the CC approach to teaching English texts. My freshmen have been exposed to works from all sorts of writers of different styles and who write for different purposes. They are learning why people write, how to interpret what people write, and they are writing themselves in response to those texts—in terms of style and substance.
The core is not designed to limit teacher freedom or student access to literature. Rather, the goal is to remove the teacher-as-interpreter model that has been pervasive in our culture for far too long.
What does it matter if students read eight novels a year if they are only able to understand those novels in the presence of a teacher who forces the information in front of them? The CC goal is to develop the skills so that a student can independently approach texts that they find interesting or need to interpret in their own lives. These skills are more important than notches in the literary belt. They are also of use across content areas, allowing students to own the skills and see the purpose (something that cramming books does not allow them to grasp). Additionally, I have not sacrificed any compelling literature in my classroom. My freshmen (mark that–freshmen), have read full works and selections ranging from Donald Barthelme, Thoreau, Cormac McCarthy, Steinbeck, Barbara Kingsolver, Shakespeare, Petrarch, John McPhee, Jonathan Safran Foer, Cisneros, through Harper Lee and James Baldwin. They journal and write constantly.
If anything, the CC opens up room for a wider range of text that are more compelling, and more complex. We’re educating citizens, not English majors. To teachers who feel there is not as much room for the classics I say this: read farther and wider. Literature comes in many lengths, shapes, and colors. I would love to introduce students to the books that made me fall in love with literature in high school, but that is not necessarily going to prepare them when they meet texts that require them to rely on their own abilities without a teacher at the helm to support them.
Many teachers decrying the loss of literature seem to be frustrated over the challenge of incorporating a wider range of texts into their classrooms, as well as having to restructure the models with which they have grown accustom to in the teaching of texts that they have grown reliant upon. This is a poor reason to stand in opposition to a curriculum that aims to prepare students for thinking independently and critically without the teacher as authority.
The key factor in children becoming avid readers I is the influence of a teacher passionate about reading. The solution is more teachers who are passionate about teaching. Too many teachers hanging around the profession because they are making six figure salaries ( for those who would argue that teachers don’t make six figure salaries check out teacher salaries in IL which are publicly available) Children may have actually better off when more of the teachers were motivated by love of teaching than the relatively good salary retirement they could earn.
Yes, it’s the teachers making above the national median income who are dragging the nation’s love of reading into the toilet. I work in a district in Illinois. Lots of people here make more than $100,000 per year. They’ve also been teaching for 25 years or more and have one or two Master’s degrees. (Granted, many graduate programs are worthless. But that’s not our fault.) My desire to teach good literature is the same as it was 10 years ago when I started. Paying me more isn’t going to change that.
To say motivation is replaced by complacency the moment a person starts making money is foolish.
12 years of school in Louisiana and i never had one English teacher try to get me to read any books. It was all “nouns and adverbs, and spelling words”. There were times they would offer book reports for extra credit but reading was never a part of the curriculum. There was a library close to my house that i could walk to and my parents would visit book stores where i could browse. Reading for me began and ended at home. I don’t see how Common Core affects reading books. We didnt’ have Common Core in the past and teachers never pushed anyone to read. or is Louisiana just that terrible in Education? I attended both Catholic private and Public schools.
As an elementary school teacher who taught for 40 years ( 1964-2003) in the bowels of the NYC public school system, I can testify to the change of focus,slow but definite, from teaching kids the necessary skills to function well in society to teaching them to be good little test takers. Now living in upscale New Hope Solebury, Pa, all I hear from the supt. is that we ( the administrative staff and teachers) MUST align our curriculum with the new state standards. The result of all of this is a proclamation put on the district’s Home Page (nhsd.org) is a declaration that we are # 2 in Bucks County and #37 in the state.
I found it interesting that the article never mentioned the influence and impact that having a credentialed Teacher-Librarian running a dynamic school library program can have. The trend, at the local, county, state and national level, has been to gradually eliminate strong school library programs, and with that the elimination of access to qualified Teacher-Librarians. Through direct contact with students, and working with teachers to develop quality curriculum and instruction based on a strong foundation of reading and writing, the Teacher-Librarian, along with Public Librarians, have likely had a stronger influence on the reading habits and development of our youth than any other group of individuals. Even with the explosive growth of digital delivery of information, the Teacher-Librarian has a central role in providing students direction and clarity in exploring multiple areas of interest and discovery.
I have some deep concerns with the article you posted in January.
Three things I see as concerns with this article: #1 You did not mention public or school libraries even ONCE in the article… while I lament, as you do, over stories lost, how can California foster an appreciation of literature when they routinely CLOSE school libraries and lay off Teacher Librarians as non-essential… I’ll take a sentence here to stand on my soap box: CA ranks 53rd of 53rd (dead last) in the ratio of qualified teacher librarians to students. (national average is 800 to 1, CA is 7000 to 1) – http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/cr/lb/schoollibrstats08.asp) #2 – Teacher librarians take up the slack in resources that English and other teachers simply do not have in a single classroom. One person can’t do it all, testing or not!! The Whole Child Blog (http://www.wholechildeducation.org/blog/it-takes-a-whole-school-school-librarians-roles-in-the-whole-child) states: “… often school librarians teach the crosscutting topics that don’t fit neatly into English language arts, science, mathematics, or social studies.” So qualified Teacher librarians are the ones that fill holes and often make learning relevant because the atmosphere is conducive to learning at a student’s own pace. Lastly #3 – You state, “If we want our schools to be transformative places, if we want students to develop a deep love for reading, then we must understand that the most fundamental parts of an education are those that cannot be easily quantified through standardized tests.” This is an agreement that most teachers would also make: it should NOT be all about the testing. But you also state, “ We should all advocate for a public education that engenders a love for reading in students.” Because of “ … impact on the number of active readers in America, a number that is already in noticeable decline.” And I agree. But if you truly want an education in California schools to make a difference or any other state, and NOT be all about the testing, then I challenge you to stand up and fight at least for California’s public and school libraries and Teacher Librarians, because without their help, I fear the war on literacy will truly be lost.
Yours in fighting the war,
So sad to read of another federal fiasco being imposed on the schools. The fact is we were doing O.K. with the basic 1950s system before the first federal assault began with the 1960s “reforms”. They got rid of the Dr. Suess readers (which can still be bought off Amazon for like 99 cents, that’s why there are so many copies still around). Then they trashed the phonics-based system with the “whole language” which is why I started to see high schoolers in the 70s who could not read unless they said is out loud (slowly).
There is no substitute for good books. I read “The Island of the Blue Dolpins” in 4th grade, happily there are still teachers using it but I fear this will change under the latest assault.
In 5th grade in the 60s we all got pocket sized copies of the Constituion courtesy of the John Hancock insurance company, I still have mine.Can’t beat the Bill of Rights for economy of language. But then the new mafia probably thinks it’s too white.
“Animal Farm” by Orwell in 9th grade. “!984” in 12th. There are solutions. Plenty of good historical biography suitable for Jr. High will prepare them for these.
This is a silly parody of a common core ELA classroom. Take it from a high school ELA teacher–none of what is described here is a necessary consequence of CC standards.
I am currently studying to become a high school english teacher and my biggest struggle with the common core reading is how it only holds specific capital L literature written predominately by american white men that no teen will find enjoyable. It is so important to incorporate diversity into teaching to keep students involved and interested. There is no choice in what the kids read anymore, it can be boiled down to Fahrenheit 451, The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, Romeo and Juliet, and To Kill a Mockingbird. While I would agree these text are important to the literary canon, they are not the only important literature that is out there. As a future educator I would rather have students develop a broad literary cannon that includes culturally diverse literature as well as being interested in class over them being able to identify the names of the children in Lord of the Flies. The joy of reading significantly decreases once high school begins and I hope the upcoming generations can change this. Test scores do not equate to knowledge. I received straight A’s in high school yet retained none of the knowledge because I was simply concerned with memorizing as many vocab terms as I could before a test. Literature and textual analysis are so much more than common core learning. Let’s teach kids something they will value and build off of there entire life.