In exactly the way that they do during the school year, things've gotten away from me. I'm backlogged on great stuff I'd love to put up here. Sample annotations and proof of development in a couple of really exciting case studies . . . thoughts on how to get this to work with novels . . . a bit on the Common Core in its full ridiculousness. But after a harrowing month prepping for a quality review in my school and a jump directly into midyear final exams and scoring state tests, any time I have left isn't exactly spent thinking about the classroom.
One thought though - not sure what I make of it yet. I was prepping a unit for my philosophy class and I was trying to align it to the common core standards so I didn't get stuck going back and doing it later; but I realized the standards are missing something really important. As a preface to what I'm working on with respect to this pseudo-movement, I'll just say that I think the Common Core represents half of everything that's wrong with education, even while I look for ways to make it applicable to genuine learning in my class.
But when I looked for a standard to match with my unit on applying Freudian language and thought to pop culture texts, there was nothing to be found. None of the standards suggest that legitimate reading or writing can be done by bringing a particular critical view to a text. Numerous texts can be used to discuss a topic, but the texts themselves remain dominant. The assumption here is clear: that our students are blank recipients of texts they encounter.
