My husband is a sculptor and he worships stone. Travertine, granite, marble, onyx – these are the interlopers in our bed, the other women in my married life, and I cannot compete with their charms. The love my husband professes for me exists in the shadow of the love he has for his work, the pieces he fashions from the great slabs of rock which appear with regularity at the top of our rural driveway. They are his constant, devoted companions and they feed his passion in a way that no person can ever do. I don’t begrudge him the objects of his obsession, but I do get twinges over the easy partnership he has with his material, so unlike my own relationship with words. A writer can learn a lot from a stone carver, and I’ve been watching him a long time.
Our accounts differ as to when we got together, which is another story from the wholly empirical slept together. That was three years after we graduated from college, or about seven years after first laying eyes on him in Geology 201. He was a big, muscular man with a kind face that was often obscured behind facial hair, the kind that betrayed an unconscious lack of grooming, like a shipwreck survivor, rather than stylistic affect. I was enrolled in Rocks for Jocks to fulfill a science requirement and compensate for my left-brain shortcomings. I assumed he was taking the course for the same reasons. He was a rugby player, the center of the scrum, the place where brawny gentlemen dig their feet into the grass and push heavy objects – other giants – with their shoulders. It was more fun than football, which he had played in high school, and the guys were smarter. After hours, he could be seen running around campus drunk and mostly nude with his teammates – nudity, apparently, gives the sport its British old-boy bona fides – singing bar songs. He did not appear to be capable of splitting atoms, like other people in our class apparently were doing elsewhere on campus, such as the Engineering buildings that seemed as closed and remote as prisons. He was known as a nice guy and I liked him enough, but I never imagined myself his wife.
I had no idea that he spent his free time making pottery in the entrails of the fine arts building. He was soon to be a sculptor, with stone as his medium. It was what he wanted to be since he was nine years old, when he traveled to Italy and saw Michelangelo’s Slaves and a marble carving at the Bargello in Rome of two men fighting. He was struck that such a powerful story could be stuffed into a chunk of stone. Rocks, therefore, were already his obsession because they were in his DNA. His paternal grandmother was born among the artisans of Massa di Carrara in the breast of great marble mountains. His other side was Scottish brute force, descended from the Orkneys, with its coastline battered for eternity by the harsh Atlantic. Earth science, along with art history, was starting to lay a direct intellectual pipeline to the passion that has fueled him through every day of his adult life, a majority of which has now been spent with me.
His life revolves around shipments of stone. It comes from quarries or mountains in northern New York, Minnesota, Turkey or Italy via trucks or container, sometimes in the hundreds of tons. It usually arrives to our property later than scheduled, in an eighteen-wheel rig driven by a trucker who’s been lost for hours since the end of his mandatory, ten-hour union break that morning. The stone (and the driver) is met by my husband with hot coffee and great arm waving, a one-man crew on a supply ship greeting ocean-borne sailors. Then the process begins of loading them onto forklifts in multiple trips to his outdoor studio below. There, they get stroked, admired, stacked up, and finally queued up for the final journey thorough his imagination into sculpture.
I know the lingo now – roughbacks, cores, endcuts – and he inspects these raw chunks of the planet much like a butcher scrutinizes his chops and roasts. But I don’t pretend to understand the fire ignited in him possibly at birth that makes him an artist above all else. On a recent winter day, I stood in the warmth of my kitchen and watched his trips up and down the driveway. He was impervious to the cold, ginger with his payload, which he treated as if it were crystal stemware. I saw his mouth moving and eyebrows lift brightly. I asked him what he was saying. A prayer? No, he said. He was singing. Happily, I noticed, just a tune in his head, while snow and wind pounded the windshield of the forklift, which bore a twenty-ton, ice-cold slice of blue granite. The drill marks were visible. Stone freshly and visibly hewn from the earth excites him, as if it connects him to the ages, his Paleozoic lifeline. On these days, his normal state of high contentment turns giddy.
When he carves a hefty sculpture (and I differentiate here, because some stretches of time he will devote to smaller, more mobile pieces for indoors or the wall) he positions the stone with the forklift onto the center ring of the clearing where he works. This is the area that is equidistant to all the tools and machines and the big covered space: the wet saw that is plugged into one wall, the compressor that when activated, sounds like an idling 767, and resting on a rusting job box, a vulcan’s wet dream of chisels, hammers, rasps, and pickaxes. With one stroke and then another, he confronts that stone with hunger and lust the way some of us might tear into a rare steak. First he lays into it with a jackhammer affixed with a foot-long rock bit. Chunks, some the size of a toaster, drift to the ground. He is sheathed in a one-piece suit, mustard yellow or Santa Claus red, made of dense gauge cloth. His knee-high boots were once black, but they are so caked with dust and water they appear, from a distance, to be pale white. A respirator covers the area from the bridge of his nose to the chin, and safety glasses obscure the rest of his face. A pair of chopper-issue headphones covers his ears with a thick, padded brace. He is oblivious, a study in concentration. If a UFO touched down unleashing a couple of Hooters waitresses, he would not look up. He does not notice me and if I have an urgent message to convey – from our son or his accountant, for example – I have to throw a pebble and aim carefully for his feet to break the spell.
To me, the workshop is not welcoming. It is a precarious festival of blades, edges, and sharp objects. It is bitter cold most of the year as well and rife with the kind of fine-particle dust that not only will ravage your lungs with silicosis but will smear and smudge and release itself in puffs. It is akin to cake flour, and the handprint that ends up on the thigh of my jeans will stay there until the laundry washes it out. When he uses the wet saw, the dust on the ground turns to clay. When I walk down there, I never wear the right shoes.
I seemed to be unusually present the time he carved a 3 ½ ton pillow to perch astride a wealthy person’s swimming pool. I had to interrupt him a lot because of a family crisis that demanded more of us than we had, and he always seemed ecstatic to see me, as if it was a great joy to be pulled back to this planet of decisions and responsibility. I witnessed the rock hammer give way to a slimmer drill bit, and then to hand tools like the chisel. He intervened often with the wet saw, a brutal conglomeration of steel that shreds the granite while spewing water with a screeching metal-on-metal din that makes my teeth ache. The pieces get smaller and smaller as they land on the ground and begin to form a carpet of refuse, all the bits of stone that are in the way of forming this object.
Within a week or so, he begins to hone away the roughness with a grinder affixed with a diamond blade that spins at 3000 rpms. A pillow about 40 inches long by 28 inches wide has emerged from the stone. I can see the crystals and veins – blue, black, teal, specks of gold that will reflect the sun – and he has fashioned a soft, undulating space where a person can drape herself comfortably on the warm rock. In a day he will fire up the acetylene torch and flame the sculpture to make it smooth like velvet. Or, in some places he will use diamond paper to sand and polish to a high gloss if he’s inclined. This end phase can be painstaking and he insists that it is where and when the ordinary becomes transcendent.
When I can no longer stomach something I’ve been writing, I tell him, “I’m done. There’s no more I can do.”
“You have to hone the edges,” he says.
“I’m done honing,” I whine.
“You have to grind and whittle,” he says. “It’s the most important step in any work of art.”
My husband contends that little separates our creative worlds, mine stationary and his physical. After all, don’t I spend the day banging my head against the corner of the desk, trying to make a sentence, just like he bashes his own thoughts into meaning? Maybe so, but I maintain that the comparison ends there. His artistic life consists of the transference of ideas to the tactile world through the medium of mostly igneous rock. Every cut he makes is deliberate and joyous, an action with a purpose: to tame the stone and the edges into an object that exists already, one that – maybe decades ago – took shape in his head. His tools provide him with a sense of measure, balance, and even logic because they guide him to the sculpture’s inevitability. He’s an artist, who offers an object of beauty for people to love or buy, and he needs to justify the space it will take up in the world.
My words live in a swarm of chaos and I have no idea how I’ll lay them down until the deed is done. My need is for concentration while I untangle the knots and wrangle the pieces into a linear thought. When I manage to do this, a couple times a day if I’m really lucky, I’m buoyed by a sense of reward that makes the tortuous act seem close to pleasure.
Sometimes, the differences between our artistic lives are highlighted by circumstances, usually his, which shift more than mine. At the end of the truck delivery day, for example, I’ve written six hundred words and he’s removed 120 tons of granite from seven trucks, and carted it to his stone yard. We uncork a bottle of wine, and I ask him how he’s doing.
“Lotto baby,” he says. “This is the most secure I can feel. I have a couple of hundred tons of stone and I know pretty much what it’s going to look like. Once I have the material, the physical act of making the piece is almost insignificant.”
“That can’t be true,” I say.
“All I need is time,” he says. “The pieces are already in my head.”
It can be hard for me to share in his joy, and not to envy him and the confidence he has in what he calls the “slow language” of stone, as opposed to the fast one of words, the one I live and breathe, the one where I disappoint myself, regularly. That is my world, the purgatory of high expectation and low output. I tend to measure my work in what I haven’t yet done, and in what remains unwritten. For him, productivity is quantifiable, in the dust and shards that fall away.
“If I never had another idea in my life, I still couldn’t execute half my ideas. I’ll always have a 20-year backlog. That’s the beauty and disadvantage of working in a slow language. But the upside is that nothing ever comes out that isn’t severely scrutinized and edited,” he says.
Even though he insists he’s just a “physical writer,” I respectfully disagree. There’s no “delete” function, no cut and paste, no teeth gnashing over a mistake he can’t change, but instead, must integrate into his plan. My writer’s life is not filled with this or any kind of lucidity. In this sense, sometimes togetherness can feel like solitude.
Many people are in awe of his work, especially when they witness (or know about) the brutal setting where he creates it. He never makes me feel like the philistine that I am when I struggle to understand his sculptures, especially the most conceptually obscure ones – hollow torsos and ten-foot high padded granite cells. Maybe those narratives should be clear to me, but they aren’t. But they are beautiful and I do try to impart enthusiasm as best I can, especially knowing the physical price he pays so willingly. His work involves constant exposure to elements and danger that seems to emanate from another century – like the third, B.C. The drills and wet-saws and compressors that are the tools of his trade could slice off a limb or his head, and he shrugs off the anecdotes of constant near misses. I try not to worry about his forklift capsizing under the groaning weight, or getting a hand or himself flattened during an offload. Nicks, lacerations, abrasions, and stitches are every-day occurrences, but he is careful, at least he says so. I choose not to question him, or even to watch him work. It frightens me to see him engaged in his backbreaking daily activity. I wonder if he has no fear out there precisely because he has no doubts. There’s not a man in the world that can do what he does – I’m pretty convinced of that – but nor would they want to. I know a lot of writers who fake it, myself included half the time, in my motionless little space. Such posing would be impossible for a stone carver, a real one at least. Confidence gives him sure footing, and conviction makes the days and years fly by. This happens as a matter of course – with or without money, with or without commissions or gallery shows, and with or without me panicking about his safety or our family’s next meal.
When we first started dating, I was interested in prepped-out bankers with BMWs, or Europeans with no visible means of support, but fully loaded with beach houses and refrigerators stocked with Dom Perignon. Judging from my past of men with money, he was an unlikely match for me. He wasn’t exactly the wild man he had presented at college, but he had summarily dismissed his fancy pedigree and all manner of creature comforts to go carve marble in Carrara. There, he copied classical statuary for wealthy Texans to put in their Fort Worth rose gardens. He was armed with an honors history degree, rudimentary Italian, and nothing more than a feeling that home would be anywhere there was a hammer and chisel. If he had not been so pure about his mission, his drive might have seemed put-on. But it came to him naturally, whether it was the simple exercise of making a woman’s figure out of giallo di Siena while grappling with its pocks and veins, or the adventure of experimenting with patina, textures, and finish. From the beginning, there was something unforgivable about stone that suited this man, who may have been genetically programmed to conquer it.
I was in love with him, but I also loved the idea of him. I believed that an artist so skilled at turning crags into forms so lovely they seemed half alive would be soft as a cub with me and would make my flesh feel worshipped. His hands were chewed up but he was gentle, and the allure of how he spent his days imbued him with mystery that even back then, I didn’t bother to fathom. Our backgrounds were similar, but we were turning out as opposites. I worked at jobs I loved but quickly tired of and he studied history and collected ten-ton art books, carved stone, and made art. I went off every day to an office where I carried out that day’s duties while he met the day elated to go to some dingy, unheated studio. I filled up my desk drawers with first chapters of novels I wanted to write, but I abandoned them for the paycheck I thought I needed. But I still thought myself a writer because I stood apart from my surroundings. He, meanwhile, was determined to change the way we look at things. I saw in him the courage I lacked, and so I tagged along, marrying him and his unbendable spirit, hoping some of it might transfer to me.
I left behind the men with health insurance and suits and ties, as well as any semblance of security or what I then called “normal life.” I didn’t acknowledge how ill-suited I was for adventure, nor could I predict how unpredictable my life with the stone carver would remain. I wasn’t sure of my place on the creative continuum, but even before he started his life as a sculptor, he knew his, and it had little to do with anyone’s – especially his – expectations of success. But I learned how to be an artist, even if his encouragement was a tad too simplistic. “You should be writing, honey!” he’d say pretty much every day, as if it were as easy as changing my shade of lipstick. I was fueled by all the stories living inside my head, but unlike my husband, I couldn’t pound them into being with a pile of tools. The courage would have to come from somewhere else. I would have to will them out, and I began to, with his help.
Before we had children, I was second in line, and once they came, I was third. He’s a good husband and he’s a better father, but best of all, he is an artist. I still envy his indisputable belief in the order of things, his clarity about what he is put on earth to do. I am used to the tenderness he has for the stones he carves so masterfully into pillows and chairs and giant megalithic landscapes and female forms and other shapes we call art. We humor him on the highway when he sees a jutting cliff in the distance, jams on the brakes and marvels at the striations or the crevasses – the absurd lure of the granite. Wherever we are, he pulls over to visit a quarry, to swim in it if possible, to feel the rock with all of his body and read its lines. It is, in a way, how I treat books and language, but it seems easier to quantify passion when you can feel it beneath your feet.
Our children see a man who is devoted to his work and keeps hours as rigorous as any corporate lawyer. Whether or not they know it, his excitement fills up the house. He has imparted to them and me the singular beauty of getting up and doing what you love, and never needing to complain about your job. For him, and by example for me, every day (even a dark one) is a great day at the office. In the evening, sometimes long after dark, he walks back to the house covered in dust, with satisfaction brightening his aura. He believes that what he is doing matters.
But I will always be left out of his creative life, removed from the intersection of man and material. This means that I will always be removed from him, even if he genuinely believes that our work is more than just parallel. Aren’t we both just unraveling stories, wherever they manifest themselves? Yes, but mostly, no. So his single-mindedness comes at a cost, even if it has taught me how uncomplicated– how straightforward – an artist’s creative life can actually be. I admire his certitude, and the psychic effortlessness of his pursuit. He masters the material, whereas words tend to rule me until one of those moments of ecstasy, which fades and tries to make way for the next one.
The question I ask many years later, is would I have chosen differently? It’s because of him that I finally quit my last office job, the kind that made me pine for the life I knew I was missing. And I would rather live with a passionate man than a searching one, even if the object of his obsession will never be me.
Image Credit: Charles Lindsay
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.