Tag Archives: politics

Read Me, Seymour: A Brief Discussion on Literature and Learning in the US

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Literature is leaving public schools.

The subtext in that sentence carries the markers of an inflammatory statement, doesn’t it? Under the Common Core State Standards—an initiative out of the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) developed to provide a consistent educational framework for students, with college and career-readiness in mind—70% of what high school students read in the classroom must be nonfiction, by 2014.

Think about what you read in high school: Boo Radley, and Yossarian, and Gatsby. If you had a really cool teacher, maybe you got some Joyce and Greene, or Vonnegut and Hemingway. You trudged through The Odyssey, and afterward, Shakespeare felt like a walk in the park. You thumbed through the pages of Wright and Morrison with grim determination, and you shook your head at the prose-bound antics of Wilde and Twain.

These are my memories of high school English in the public school system, and I’m not gonna lie—many classics are dry. Your lit teacher? He’s got a reading list for his students that probably bores him sometimes, too. But it’s a list filled with a wide variety of reading options that must now be compressed into 30% of his 9-month curriculum.

Why is this happening? The NGA Center and CCSSO claim that students entering college and the workforce are unprepared to handle the studies, reports, and primary documents often utilized in higher education and in the real world. So, by senior year, students in the 45 states and three territories that have adopted the Common Core will be reading “mostly informational text, instead of fictional literature.”

And in case you were thinking, “Yes. Excellent. Now I can read Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln for class credit!”… Well, okay, maybe. But it’s suggested that you read FedViews by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco or Executive Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management from the US General Services Administration, instead.

Extreme examples? Sure. But those are examples featured on the recommended Grade 11 list of informational texts. And while cross-curriculum instruction in reading material is the apparent, understated goal in this (e.g., science teachers will assign scientific-themed reading in addition to teaching from the textbook and doing lab work), a majority of reading and literary learning happens in the English classroom. In order to meet that stated 70% nonfiction goal, it’s the English teachers who are having to slice-and-dice their lesson plans, more often than not.

I’m trying to picture my teen years shaped by fact instead of fiction. I’m wondering if I would have been better prepared for college—would I be a researcher finishing up her PhD in socioeconomic theory now, instead of working in educational publishing by day and writing romances by night, with only bare-bones undergrad coursework behind her?

I’ll be honest: High school English didn’t teach me to read any better than I already read—my standardized test scores (silly things) in reading were set in 99th-percentile stone thanks to my parents’ commitment to reading and summers spent at the local library. But it did increase my vocabulary, alter my stunted upper-middle-class worldview, and force me to discover a sea of words beyond the tattered paperback covers of my favorite genre-fiction reads. High school English is when I fell in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald and George Orwell and John Steinbeck. It’s when I built the foundation for understanding authorial voice and critical literary theory, concepts that would later be expounded upon in college classes. High school English is where I learned to enjoy verse and memoirs and philosophical treatises.

So…yes. Perhaps. Perhaps if I had been reading FedViews and Executive Order 13423 (or the like), I wouldn’t be chasing down the dream of being a fiction writer. Perhaps the dream itself would be different.

The NGA Center and CCSSO are addressing the statistically proven trend that our country’s students are backsliding in reading comprehension. The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), “the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America’s students know and can do in various subject areas,” recently released the vocabulary scores for students grades 4 and 8, showing 2009 and 2011 results from the NAEP-administered reading-comprehension assessments through the National Center for Education Statistics. The notable bit of information to take away is that the number of top-scoring students declined between 2009 and 2011, indicating that vocabulary knowledge is faltering.

Is this due to the implementation of the Common Core? Potentially. Students learn facts through informational texts—textbooks have been designed with that in mind. Reading comprehension, however, has not traditionally been pinpointed as born of repeated exposure to informational text, but as a skill set developed from mining literature (specifically fiction) for literary elements and objective and subjective themes. Pulling information from a report in a scientific journal is much different than pulling information on the Dust Bowl from The Grapes of Wrath.

My opinion was once, “At least kids are reading.” Yet we know, much as with people and minds, that not all words are created equal. And I, for one, find this idea of encouraging reading comprehension in children only insofar is it will benefit them professionally rather appalling. The following quote, taken from the Washington Post‘s article on the controversial subject and said by David Coleman (who studied English literature at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and who led the effort to write the Common Core State Standards with a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), marks all that I find wrong about the motivation behind this 70% mentality:

“Forgive me for saying this so bluntly, the only problem with . . . [that] writing is as you grow up in this world you realize people really don’t give a [expletive] about what you feel or what you think,” Coleman said, according to a recording. “What they instead care about is, can you make an argument with evidence, is there something verifiable behind what you’re saying or what you think or feel that you can demonstrate to me? It is rare in a working environment that someone says, ‘Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday, but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood.’ ”

I read for work, yes. But if the only text I read was work related, my intelligence would suffer as my knowledge base deteriorated and I would be the world’s least interesting conversationalist. Small sacrifices, you might think, but trying to imagine my mind with only 30% of its literary grasp…I would be less. Just…less.

Unfortunately, there’s no call-to-arms action available to us at the moment. The Common Core State Standards are in place in order for schools to receive federal funding, which is an absolutely vital necessity for the public school systems of this nation. But I would ask that y’all think on who you would be if you hadn’t read To Kill a Mockingbird. Or The Great Gatsby. Or Catcher in the Rye. Who would you be if you didn’t know Dickens wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” or that Shakespeare’s Hamlet was responsible for the infamous, “To be, or not to be: that is the question”?

Because that is the question facing today’s high school students: Who will they be without literature? It’s something no reader wants to know.

Iowa, Patriotism & Our National Anthem

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Dear Mr. President,

Twenty minutes before the sun broke the horizon on Saturday night, your limo—and entourage—passed my car on the road into Dubuque, Iowa. It was a surreal moment for me, lasting no more than the space of a breath, and I spent the remainder of my drive home to Iowa City thinking about you, your presidency, and the state of our nation.

Obviously, this isn’t the first time you’ve crossed my mind. The past few months have been rough for Iowans. We’ve been subjected to attack ad after attack ad, vitriolic and factually ambiguous, all while being told how important our votes are as residents of a swing state. It feels like your job is all we’re allowed to think about. And we’re tired, Mr. President.

Our exhaustion cannot possibly compare to yours.

But why was passing your caravan in Dubuque surreal? Because you are the President of the United States. You are the most powerful man in the world, the forty-fourth to hold a job that shapes the layout of history textbooks, lands you on the face of money, and leaves you ultimately responsible for the safety and well-being of over 300 million people. For the past four years, you’ve stood in front of television cameras, reporters’ microphones, and a partisan Congress and run our country.

Passing the President of the United States on a barren Iowa road isn’t something one just randomly does. It certainly never entered my mind that our paths would ever cross, even so peripherally. It shook me.

It probably shouldn’t have shaken me, though. Running our country is far different now than it was in the eras of those history-book presidents, isn’t it? You’re so much more…accessible than your predecessors. You tweet for 21 million-plus followers; you host Q&A sessions on Reddit; you’ve been a guest on comedic news program The Daily Show multiple times. Campaigning has brought you to nearly every corner of my state, and when people say, “I saw Obama in Des Moines the other night,” they say it as if they’d met up for drinks with an old college buddy. We no longer huddle around radios or television sets for a chance to hear you speak, because you speak to us constantly.

You don’t just preside. You very much reside, with us, in this country.

Mr. President, only one word kept coming to mind as I drove down the highway on Saturday night: resilience. I didn’t ponder your politics, party, or platform, though I’ve had ample opportunity. All I could think about is how incredibly resilient you are. Every day, you wake up to do a job people hate you for doing, or hate how you’re doing it, and many of those people are the people you’re working for. You do a job that lays more blame at your feet than it offers praise to your ears, and you do it without pause, without respite. You do it, perfectly aware that you likely will not be thanked for your efforts. That certainly takes more courage than I possess, than a majority of your current constituents possess, and I am in awe of you, sir.

I’m an Iowan, by choice if not by birth, which means that I’ve been with you “since the beginning.” Your campaigning started here years ago, and as you’ve said, it ends here, tonight. But I didn’t caucus for you. I didn’t know who you were or what you stood for or whether you were best suited for the mantle of power and responsibility worn by a United States president. Your posters bearing the slogans of Change and Hope meant very little until I was in the voting booth, unable to stomach the thought of your Republican opponent in the Oval Office.

No, I didn’t actually see the change or sense the hope until your inauguration. Frost clung to the tree branches outside my living room window that morning, a dreary panorama of white and gray and brown, and I was running a fever and sniffling my way through the tail end of a head cold. I’d woken up up early, tuned into MSNBC’s live coverage, and wrapped myself in a blanket, all while waiting to see what purported change my November vote had wrought. Miserably sick, I had zero expectations for the experience of watching you being sworn in, other than as a way of passing time before I snuck in a nap.

Instead, it was a milestone in my life, one I’ll never forget: For the first time, I realized that you weren’t just a political mouthpiece or a millionaire candidate—you were going to run our country. You were going to end wars or start them, build jobs or take them away, uphold women’s rights or tear them down. You were Change. And you had the possibility of being Hope, as well, and suddenly, with a painful desperation that had me choking back tears, I knew that watching you take office was the same as watching promises come to potential fruition.

I passed another milestone recently: For half my life—thirteen years—I’ve been singing the National Anthem in a (quasi)professional capacity. I started singing for selfish reasons in 7th grade—I wanted to be Discovered. So I sang at local sporting events, and the athletic director would slip me ten bucks when I was done, and I would grin gleefully because I was one step closer to making my Broadway-star dreams a reality. I memorized the lyrics to the point where they required no thought, and the crowds I sang in front of grew bigger, grander. I went to college still thinking I might have a career in the performing arts, but I quickly learned I loved writing more than I loved singing, and something in me shifted. I started singing the National Anthem in front of thousands at Big 10 collegiate events, and it was simply something fun to do. And every time someone approached me afterward, to thank me for singing it “the right way,” I accepted the praise…but I still didn’t really get it. It was just a song. They were just words. Yet sometimes when I sang it well, people cried.

But after passing you on the road on Saturday, it hit me like a sledgehammer to the heart. This song was about the strength of Americans, and this song was about you. And I want you to have four more years. I want you to keep Changing, keep us Hoping. My chest seized in that moment, the same as it had watching your inauguration that cold January morning, and now I know. Now I know why people sing this song and feel so much when they hear it.

Giving you my vote tomorrow doesn’t seem like enough, somehow, but all I have is this latent sense of patriotism whenever I see you on television and the lyrics of the National Anthem branded into my cerebral cortex. So many years of singing the Anthem, and I’ve never felt a thing when I performed. I want to sing this song just once knowing what it stands for, feeling what it means. Finally. After thirteen years of not understanding. Because while I may sometimes struggle with an amorphous allegiance to America, I have never doubted my loyalty to you, since the moment you took office.

Please accept my rendition of our National Anthem as a token of my gratitude for your service to this country and its people.

Whatever happens tomorrow, you have made me proud to call you my Commander in Chief. Thank you for being brave enough to take us on, and for taking on the world for us for four long, tumultuous years. You possessed the strength to lead our nation, not knowing what challenges you might face…therefore, I have the strength to face a potential electoral outcome that worries me.

But I’m selfish. I’d rather you be the strong one, for four more years. Because, President Obama? You’re the bravest person I’ve ever had the privilege of driving past on the road leading out of Dubuque, twenty minutes before a perfect pink-and-gold Iowa sunset.

Hail to the Chief.

My sincerest regards,
Edie Harris