1.
When I started teaching high school English, I was fresh out of a graduate program that made reading feel mostly political. While I once fell in love with the escape a good book provided, Deconstructionism and Post-Colonialism had turned reading into something I loved less. It was through a colleague that I discovered Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth interviews with Bill Moyers, and then through Campbell that I felt a return to the inarticulable reasons I’d loved to read as a child.
What spoke to me about the Campbell interviews was the secular morality of his message. I was raised in a church-going family, but formal groups of any kind have always made me uneasy. Still, I believe in being a good person, in striving always to be kinder, gentler, more patient, more generous. I was lonely and scared I’d always be lonely, and embarrassed to encounter the worst sides of myself that this loneliness highlighted. Because Campbell’s ideas are rooted in mythology, I didn’t feel like I’d given in to reading self-help or inspirational literature, and yet I really did feel uplifted if not inspired by reading the transcript of the interviews. He analyzes mythology and theology to suggest that not only is the archetype of the hero universal in literature but in the world we inhabit. That we are everywhere surrounded by our individual hero’s journey inward — simply to be a better person — seemed almost like a roadmap to self-improvement.
When Moyers asks Campbell — with what I have to believe is wonderment manufactured for the dramatic purposes of the television interviews — if all heroes must be male, Campbell replies that of course women can be heroes, but that “[t]he male usually has the more conspicuous role, just because of the conditions of life. He’s out there in the world, and the woman is at home.”
I’m inclined to understand what he’s saying as an honoring of motherhood. But, even in this generous reading of Campbell, I cannot deny the problems with his narrow view of a woman’s role. While he doesn’t overtly refute the possibility or importance of women making heroic contributions to a more public sphere, he also never mentions women outside the context of marriage and family. And yet, if I once felt pride in the work I did teaching the next generation of students about literature and writing and compassion and decency as much as curricular flexibility would allow, why shouldn’t I also feel pride in the work I hope to do with my own daughter? Campbell’s entire worldview springs from the assumption that what makes the hero’s journey universal is the biological and spiritual imperative to give life to the next generation. Campbell sees womanhood, even more than manhood with its history of war and scholarship and theology, as inextricable from parenthood. Academically, I see a lot of problems with that line of thinking. But personally? Being a mom does feel like the most important thing I’ve ever done.
2.
I felt more certain with each year I spent in the classroom trying my best to care for, guide, instruct other people’s children that what I really wanted was to be a mother myself. I was already 32 when Nick and I got married, and I had a profound and urgent sense that there was no time to waste. This feeling was so strong that sometimes I worried I was intuiting some danger coming my way.
Of course I worried. I was nervous about pregnancy itself. I wondered how my life would change, how my relationship with my husband would change so early in our marriage. I wasn’t sure what I would do about childcare or work.
During those Joseph Campbell years, my favorite poem was Stephen Dunn’s villanelle “Tangier.” I had the poem up in my classroom, and I’d look at it when I was deep into my third hour of grading papers, fantasizing about running away to a village in Nova Scotia where I would wear sweaters and drink coffee by a fire, and though I know only one person in all of Canada, it did not sound as lonely as teaching high school English in Connecticut. The poem opens with the lines: “There’s no salvation in elsewhere;/ forget the horizon, the seductive sky./ If nothing’s here, nothing’s there.” Tangier becomes a stand-in for any escape where one might leave the burden of the self behind. Dunn explains that there is no escape: “unless, of course, your motive’s secure;/ not therapy, but joy,/ salvation an idea left behind, elsewhere.”
If you’re motive’s secure — not therapy, but joy. I hoped mine was. When I was pregnant, I couldn’t stop thinking about how I was neither a mother nor not a mother. Suspended in this liminal space, I felt lonely and scared and ashamed of feeling both of those things. I was profoundly grateful for an uneventful pregnancy, a loving husband, and financial security. I knew, on an intellectual level, not to take these things for granted. But I felt powerless to speak honestly about how afraid I was of labor. What if something happened to the baby? I couldn’t even say, to myself, what I meant by “something.”
Through all of the major transitions in my life, even when I’d gone to some Tangier, there I was. Now, with pregnancy, I’d gone somewhere and for the first time did not see myself there. That was the idea, wasn’t it? To leave the capital I behind. To find my life filled with so much more than myself. More than teaching and running and writing and cooking and laughing and friendship and all the things for which I’d gladly sacrifice. I have, obviously, brought with me my own imperfect air. But I sensed and now, on the other side of that liminal space, I see that I could not remain the person I had been.
When Campbell is explaining what he means by “the journey inward,” he emphasizes finding what’s already inside of you, tapping into the goodness, the magic, the bravery that you already possess — like Dorothy with her ruby slippers. Not so much slaying one version of the self as finding a self that you’ve always been meant to be.
3.
The word midwife means “with women.” That, as much as the promise of minimal intervention or a small group practice, lead me to my prenatal care. And, in the hours after having Thea, I felt profoundly grateful for the women — and they were all women — who’d been with me throughout the pregnancy, labor, and delivery. In college I remember learning some scientists believe humans evolved into a social species because it is nearly impossible for a woman or baby to survive childbirth alone. During labor I realized more viscerally what I had been afraid of. I was afraid I would die, or worse, that Thea would. And that all women — my mom, her mom, a woman who called in a rage about her son’s grade — had felt this too. Of becoming a mother, Campbell tells Moyers, “You have to be transformed from a maiden to a mother. That’s a big change, involving many dangers.” I’d considered myself an adult for a decade, but with Thea’s birth I was also someone new.
4.
A few months into motherhood, I was talking to the mom of a girl on the track team I coach. “Sometimes,” I told her, “when I’m feeding Thea at night, I just start to cry, thinking about how much I realize my mom loves me.” She hugged me tight, and we watched her 18-year-old daughter win the 800-meter dash. I hadn’t said it for this reason, but when we hugged, I hoped that I might have made the gulf between mother and teenage daughter seem as fleeting as it has come to feel to me.
When people learn that I taught high school, they often sigh sympathetically. Even my last year teaching when I was frustrated with parents fighting about grades and administrators marching out an endless series of initiatives, it was never the students — not them personally, and not the angst, energy, humor, fear, or bravery that exemplify adolescence — that made me glad to leave the classroom. I loved those teenage students.
The nearest I can remember to feeling the claustrophobia of pregnancy is the liminal years of adolescence. I wanted my parents’ and teachers’ approval. I wanted to be a runner, a writer. I wanted to kiss someone. I was afraid to kiss someone. I wanted to not care what other people thought. I wanted other people to think I was a fast runner, a good writer, that I had kissed someone. One of my favorite things to do was rearrange my room so that it looked like what I imagined a studio apartment looked like — minus the kitchen. I’d long wondered how I could travel to Tangier, deliberately clinging to my overweight baggage from yesteryear. But the physical intensity of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood made a break from the me I’d always been seem not merely possible but inevitable. While I felt in some ways like I’d spent the first decades of my life looking for such an escape, I also felt a kind of lonely fear once I saw that, at last, I was leaving maidenhood behind.
5.
When Thea only weighed 10 pounds at her four-month appointment, our pediatrician sent us home with a little bottle of ready-made formula. I was embarrassed. My baby weighed at four months what some babies weigh at birth. How had I not let myself realize sooner that she was not just “petite,” but skinny? Hungry. When I tried to nurse Thea after the immunizations she received at the appointment, my milk would not let down. Reasonably, Nick kept asking, “Is anything coming out?” while Thea screamed. He tried to touch me, and I pushed him away. Embarrassed, mad, trapped, my body’s failures on display, I felt feral.
In the hallway when Thea was still crying, we saw Cathy, the practice’s lactation consultant who I’d met with in the weeks after Thea’s birth. She smiled a sorry-that-sweet-baby’s-fussing hello. I whispered, “We have to start supplementing,” and began to cry myself. Cathy hugged me and said, “You did great for her.” I am crying now writing this. Partly I’m crying at the memory of my shame and loneliness. At my lingering guilt. At Cathy’s kindness. At the realization that her kindness felt like absolution.
“Isn’t it funny that we have lactation consultants?” my college roommate asked me when I told her about Cathy. There was a time, no doubt, when mothers, sisters, neighbors might have helped a new mom figure out that her baby wasn’t latching on quite right, told her about the milk-producing powers of Fenugreek, advised her to drink as much water as she could between feedings. But I, like most contemporary women, did not have this kind of a tribe. What my baby needed was something that I alone could provide, and yet, because I could not do so, I could not pretend anymore that I would have been capable of sustaining life alone.
I find myself, as I now know many new parents do, feeling visceral repulsion and fear when I listen to the news. I feel torn. On the one hand, I feel a newly urgent desire to prevent the world from becoming a dangerous, hateful place, to do what little I can to make our town, our country, our Earth the kind of place I want Thea to inhabit. But I feel a stronger and contradictory instinct to turn fiercely inward — not to change the world, but to shelter Thea from it. After I inadvertently learned that ISIS members had decapitated a man and played soccer with his head in front of his family, I cowered from all news. I thought, quite consciously, that I’d rather be ignorant than feel the kind of fear I did when I read the paper. I couldn’t stop thinking about all this horror in the world in the context of breast milk, which I knew was self-absorbed and narrow-minded. What if I needed to keep Thea quiet while hiding from terrorists and because my milk supply was so poor, she refused to nurse quietly? What if another hurricane came and we lost power and access to clean water? How much ready-made formula was reasonable to keep on hand?
Until I bought my first carton of Similac, I’d calmed myself by imagining that Thea could quite literally live off of my body. That, contrary to what millennia of societal bonds and protections suggest, this transition to motherhood required no one but myself. I imagined that even if we ran out of food and water, she would be okay. I still think about this sometimes and imagine that in such an emergency, my body might amaze me with one of those miracles, like adoptive mothers who eventually lactate.
When we started giving Thea formula, the knowledge that I alone could not sustain my daughter gave me sympathy for what I’d previously considered irritating doomsday prepping. Feeding Thea began to seem like the most apt representation of motherhood itself: something essential, nourishing, demanding, private, yet, for me at least, shockingly impossible to do alone.
After September 11th, my parents packed duffle bags for each of us and created an emergency evacuation plan. When Nick and I were looking at houses, he ruled out an entire neighborhood because it only had one way in or out, and he worried we could be trapped in an emergency. I rolled my eyes. Threats of terrorism or catastrophic flood were political, environmental issues. Until I had Thea.
My mom told me that when I was an infant, I was sick with a bacterial blood infection that came on quickly, and terrifyingly left me non-responsive in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. I stabilized and the doctor sent us home with strict instructions for my mom to call him when the office opened in the morning. Instead, in the morning, the doctor called her before hours with lab results. My mom reported that I was doing much better, but he told her to bring me in right away. Thinking aloud, my mom said, “Alright, sure, I’ll just take a quick shower, and we’ll be in.” He cut her off. “Do you have to take a shower?”
The whole way to the doctor, my mom replayed the conversation. A shower. The length of a shower might make a difference. When she told me this story, she said, “I thought to myself, ‘You are a grown up now.’”
I don’t mean, and I don’t think Campbell means, that the only way to become an adult — to follow one’s bliss, to escape the capital I, to slay the self that must be slayed in order to become who you were always meant to be — is to become a parent. But becoming a mother has meant all those things for me.
6.
Anticipating fear of the unknown, Campbell assures his readers that “we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves.” This self, the old self, was the self from whom motherhood finally allowed an escape. “Where we had thought to travel outward,” Campbell continues, “we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.”
By the time Thea was six months old, the woman who was once my best friend had stopped returning my phone calls. That same summer, a woman at the grocery store saw me juggling formula at the self-checkout machine, holding a crying, hungry baby, and said simply, “I remember those days. You do what you gotta do.” I can’t remember if she offered to hold Thea or to pour her bottle, or if she just smiled in a way that let me know she thought I was doing a good job, even though Thea was about to drink formula. But these isolated kindnesses, restorative though they are in my belief that the world is a fundamentally good place, are not what I long understood community to be. When I feared losing the life, friends, and self I’d known, I tried to tell myself that this transition would be like moving away for college or starting a new job, and that I’d soon have a new community to soothe the ache for what I’d lost.
Being with all the world doesn’t mean what I thought it did — not what I thought when I first read Campbell, and not even when I first considered the journey inward in light of motherhood. For me, at least, I am both more alone and less alone than I could have imagined. My intense love for Thea has, in some ways, been isolating. Not just from the person I was, and the friends that person had, but even from some of the other moms I’ve met in an attempt to build a new community.
Reading the phrase now, though, it strikes me that Campbell might intend “with all the world,” in a less literal sense. It’s the non-judgmental woman at Stop & Shop and it’s the fellow runner who just ran the Olympic A standard six months after having her second baby. Cathy who hugged me and rocked Thea’s car seat and showed me how to open the single-use formula bottle while I cried. But it’s also deeper. It’s my mom, and her mom. And the pieces of all those ancestors who raised the women before them. It’s me, and it’s Thea. A going and a return.
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.