My Literacy Project and the Common Core Standards

This is an old piece I never got around to finishing.  I just dusted up what I had because I don't mind pointing out that the things the CCSS supposedly focus on are things that are at the heart of my teaching method.  But seriously, this whole edu-industry is bullshit at least as far as actually teaching kids is concerned.  Also, John King is a tool.  In my professional opinion.

            So the looming beast in all of this is the Common Core literacy standards.  Let me be clear, I think the language of the Common Core is another in a long wave of edu-speak quick fix movements.  As a teacher in NYC, I’ve seen a lot of these already.  It’s not a paradigm so much as a product – a diversion of funds and attention toward think tanks and privateering as a response to the a crisis that is hardly ever discussed in anything even remotely resembling useful ways.  It’s a gift to the world of what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capital” in The Shock Doctrine.  It’s a demand for more workshops and seminars to discuss not exactly how one might help students to become better educated, but something more along the lines of how we can understand what these standards want us to do in order to ostensibly educate students in the way we’re being asked to educate them.  It’s a demand, as Diane Ravitch points out, for schools to dump more money into edu-software and computer systems that don’t reduce class sizes or provide individualized learning experiences.  They provide data that can be further analyzed for additional fees.  So I’m not writing about the Common Core because I think it’s actually always good pedagogy.  I’m writing about it because it’s a material reality for educators in the same way that state exams and standardized tests are a material reality for our students.  Finding a way to appease (or fool) the beast while providing our kids with genuine educational opportunities – the original point of this blog anyway – is my focus.  

So with this caveat in mind, the video of Comissioner King and David Coleman chatting with another edu-speak talking head is really interesting and surprisingly - to be honest - a bit exciting.
 

I’m leaving aside my doubts about their claim that the solitary focus on the text “levels the playing field” as if socio-economic influences aren’t impacting the way students interact with texts.  Keep an eye out for my comments coming up on the Common Core as a New New Criticism.

With that said, there are some bullet points that directly relate to my project here and should be emphasized to shore up working room when administrators and school reviewers come around sniffing for proof of Common Core competency. 

1)  We need to correct the trend of giving students simpler materials and “translated” materials so that they can access texts.

That’s kind of the point here.  Students – not teachers – are translating difficult texts so that they can access the texts themselves.  If I want students to read Hegel, the judge’s sentences in the Scottsboro trials, or Dave Zirin’s polemic on race and freespeech for athletes, it’s because I want them to read these texts, not just receive their content. 

            2)  Students need to see access points to difficult texts, allowing them to move up in their ability to deal with more complex vocabulary, syntax, structure, and overall complexity. 

Again, that's kind of the point.  If we assume that students can find basic meaning in a text and then fill in details or just move on, then students can tackle pretty much anything.   

            3)  Students should read and re-read texts to enhance understanding, but also to look at craft and the way that authors lay out their arguments. 

Again, that’s kind of the point.  In my lesson on “Masque of theRed Death,” readers were able to make sense of the text by pushing forward and then revisiting things that didn’t make sense earlier.  When students realized that “sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores” were symptoms, they could go revisit pestilence and conclude that it’s a disease, but – even better – they could recognize all the foreshadowing that Poe laces through the early paragraphs.    

So let's just get the kids reading.  My annotation method works.