ASCD Inservice: Does the Common Core Exclude Personal Meaning Making?
Ah, I wondered when this would come up (again).
First off, I would like to enter a resounding “duh!” into the do you have your students make personal connections to the text question.
Of course.
Who doesn’t?
But, let’s be honest—those are the easiest bloody things to do in a classroom. You can get kids to respond with text-to-self connections while sleeping. Kids do not need my help to do that. They don’t need your help to do that. They don’t need a breeze to do that.
We are human.
That’s just what we do.
However.
Making meaningful connections to a text can only come when you understand the text. That’s all the Common Core is getting at.
Navel-gazing at a text can be done on your free time—on anyone’s free time. Actually getting in there and examining content, context, and complexity—those are the times you need a guide, an instructor, a (gasp) sage on the stage who can weave a story around a difficult text and make you want to read more.
Don’t lie.
We’ve all had those teachers in our past.
The good ones.
The inspirational ones.
If we’ve been lucky, we’ve been that teacher a couple of times in the past.
More and more data is telling us that direct instruction (horrors) is the only teaching method that works more often than it fails. This is not to say we ditch group work or that changing things up during the week is bad, but it does mean that we have to be good modelers of how to go deep into a complex text—and we have to know how to show that intellectual examination IS a personal, text-to-self connection.
Why does Shakespeare’s poetry still resonate? Listen to ChopBard and it won’t take your students long to realize that it’s because the precision, creativity, and beauty in the language is so multi-layered—and relevant to their lives—that it’s fun to pull it apart and find out what makes it tick (think Sylar on Heroes if you need a vaguely creepy icon for the exercise).
Start with sonnet 130, wait till they pick up on what he’s really saying (and they will), help them with the bits of archaic language—your work is done.
A student once asked why we only read “depressing” books in my American lit class—we were working on The Great Gatsby at the time. A girl turned around and said, “because you can understand the funny ones on your own! We need her to understand the hard stuff.”
I couldn’t have said it better.
Hey there, Ms O-
Not sure where you are heading with this in terms of your support or denigration of CCSS—or CCLS as the NYCDOE has lovingly renamed them…..BUT, if you watch any of David Coleman’s “lessons” about how to teach literature, you will see that the teacher is not allowed to “help anyone understand the hard stuff.” As Coleman has clearly stated: teachers should NOT give background information about a text—so you know like provide context or say info about the setting. So in one of lessons, Coleman states that Letter from a Birmingham Jail should be taught without historical context—the text should stand alone. Now, there’s a part of me that LOVES this ides in the sense that I would enjoy having students apply the brilliant arguments in that text to contemporary situations. However, before they can really engage at that level, they need to understand a period of time and the people involved. They also need to study the rhetorical moves that are made, so someone would need to teach that.
So here’s what I think: I don’t think that Coleman, CCSS or Arne Duncan give a damn about making meaning or text to self connections. Reading is a means to an end which is why the emphasis is on informational text and NOT literature. The end is the score on the test. Teachers in one of our schools in NYC told me that they were instructed not to teach any work of fiction for the entire semester—-nonfiction only. This goes along with kids writing only expository pieces—no room or time for—dare I even say it—creative writing. From what I can see, these soul crushing directives and mandates are taking over the classrooms of NYC, so thus are directed at the very students who need and must be allowed the time and space to make connections and explore narrative. I am told by many elementary teachers that they simply do not have time to “teach what the kids love to read” because they are too busy aligning to CCLS. Funny, in the suburban schools my kids attend, the teachers have never heard of CCSS. Finally, I agree that making meaning is human, so let’s be sure we continue to encourage our students to be human by giving them the time, space and encouragement to love a story, play, poem, or brilliant piece of rhetoric.
Glad to see that this posts under “General Ranting.”
-Jane
Heh.
It’s funny, because when I wrote the post I had you in mind and the brilliant work that you did with NYC 9th graders using Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
I have no idea how NY has politicized the bloody things—I can tell from your post that they’ve done a lovely job of it, though—but the Common Core are a whole lot clearer than some of the other (MUCH lousier) standards you and I saw implemented all over the county, regardless the bone-headed implementation.
The one thing I’ve read elsewhere, but nowhere in the NY texts I went and dug around in after reading this, is that the emphasis on nonfiction was to take the burden off of the ELA teacher and force science, math, and history teachers to accept that they were content teachers who also had to teach how to read texts within their disciplines.
I saw no evidence of that in the NYS materials I found.
Which is sad.
Because I seem to recall having those conversations with you and other ELA teachers. That until reading and writing across the curriculum was really and truly the way of the world, then we wouldn’t see any needed improvement in student performance.
And I cannot think of any other teacher who I’ve ever seen in my life who was better than you at taking students from potential navel-gazizng and into a serious and deep study and appreciation of a text for the text’s sake, and then on to the larger implications of how the text related out beyond the student and into the world. It would be a shocking loss to children everywhere if teachers like you were stopped from learning that way.
Then again, a lot of what I read online sounds like the every-day lousy implementation run by bureaucrats who didn’t understand what they were talking about in the first place. Lord knows, we’ve seen plenty of that in our day.
Big le sigh.