Learning from Lyrics – Johnathan Chase
Common Core’s emphasis on deep analysis of text and discrete literacy skills is misguided and will not ensure the college and career readiness of all students.
These standards do not properly prepare our students for the real world literacy challenges of lifelong learning and employment.
As I previously commented here, the standards demand students think critically as they stay connected and dive into text, while most employers desire workers who think creatively while connecting with people as they dive into their work.
Proficient close readers will spend days determining “how the text works” while productive employees will achieve much more in just a few hours of putting their imagination to work.
Training students to close read is a time consuming process that crowds out other learning activities and leads to a narrowing of the curriculum.
Today many schools are eliminating vigorous extracurricular experiences that help students discover and develop the diverse ways they are “smart”, so they can devote more time to preparing students for rigorous standardized reading and math tests so the state can measure and compare how “smart” they are.
I also previously commented that when it comes to success in college and careers, the ability to independently master complex informational text is far less important than students having learned how to maximize their talents and master themselves.
Higher learning standards should expect students to apply useful literacy skills in more challenging, purposeful, and novel ways, instead of applying impractical close reading skills in rigorous, tedious, and test-based ways.
Our students and our nation would be better served by learning standards that cultivate broadly applicable and transferable literacy skills, rather than focusing on a very narrow and specialized set of reading skills that the lead writer and “chief architect” of the Common Core is so enamored with…
“David Coleman stood at a podium reciting poetry. After reading Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” a classic example of the villanelle form, Coleman wanted to know why green is the only color mentioned in the poem, why Thomas uses the grammatically incorrect go gentle instead of go gently, and how the poet’s expression of grief is different from Elizabeth Bishop’s in her own villanelle, “One Art.”
“Kids don’t wonder about these things,” Coleman told his audience, a collection of 300 public-school English teachers and administrators. “It is you as teachers who have this obligation” to ask students “to read like a detective and write like an investigative reporter.”
Dana Goldstein, “The Schoolmaster” The Atlantic 9/19/12
The Common Core emphasizes the use of authentic informational text such as newspaper articles, government reports, text books, technical guides/manuals and journal articles, even though close reading strategies are more appropriate for the intense analysis and criticism of select literary works.
Proponents of the deep analysis associated with close reading readily admit that not all text is “rich and worthy” of close reading. In fact, much of the complex informational text that students must read and understand in college or the workplace requires reading comprehension skills and NOT close reading.
“…A first reading is about figuring out what a text says. It is purely an issue of reading comprehension. Thus, if someone is reading a story, he/should be able to retell the plot; if someone is reading a science chapter, he/she should be able to answer questions about the key ideas and details of the text…
However, close reading requires that one go further than this. A second reading would, thus, focus on figuring out how this text worked. How did the author organize it? What literary devices were used and how effective were they?…
Thus, close reading is an intensive analysis of a text in order to come to terms with what it says, how it says it, and what it means. In one sense I agree with those who say that close reading is about more than comprehension or about something different than comprehension…”
Shanahan on Literacy: “What is Close Reading?” 6/18/12
Education reformers have been promoting and “selling” the Common Core as new and improved learning standards that will prepare all students for college and careers in the 21st century, when close reading, the cornerstone of the ELA Standards, is a 20th century approach to learning and reading instruction.
“Now, it appears, Coleman wishes to impose his own high academic standards on students from kindergarten to high school. Moreover, he has a very deliberate approach to learning, and to reading in particular. He embraces what in the 1940′s and 1950′s was called New Criticism, a movement in U.S. universities that emphasized sticking tenaciously to the text of whatever one is reading.
In other words, all discussion in a classroom about a particular text needs to be based on the text itself (or, alternatively, needs to be compared to another text). New Criticism cautions the reader not to go beyond the text to consider, for example, the biography of the author, the social or historical period in which he/she was writing, or, for that matter, even one’s own personal feelings, attitudes, and experiences in relation to the text.
As Coleman famously stated at an April, 2011 presentation for educators sponsored by the New York State Department of Education: “no one gives a shit what you feel or what you think [about the text you are reading].” He doesn’t want students to take what they are reading and connect it to their own lives, or describe how they feel about what they’re reading”
Thomas Armstrong, “Architect of New National Curriculum: Power in The Hands of One” 9/28/12
The CCSS close reading strategy demands that all students independently “dive into” and master complex informational text and teachers are discouraged from answering student questions or introducing and reviewing prior knowledge with them.
by MindMake via MindMake Blog
IMAGE: 
