Are the Concepts in
the Common Core New?
By Jill Jenkins
I
collect old text books, a fitting hobby for a retired teacher. Over the forty years of my career I have
quite a collection and some I inherited from my grandmother and my great
grandmother. When you really look at
what selections were in these old books it is surprising. My great grandmother’s Fifth Reader from
the late 1800’s, contains rigorous selections of both fiction and nonfiction in
a variety of genres. There are short stories by Nathaniel
Hawthorne, an epic
poem by Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, poetry by W. B. Yeats, essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson,
and presidential speeches and one of William Shakespeare’s
plays. After each selection there
are study questions that ask the reader to find details from the selection to
support a positon. The variety of different
genres, the difficulty of each selection and the strategies in the new Core
Curriculum are not all that different from this text, except this is a fifth
grade text and the selections and the learning goals appear to correspond with
the current ninth grade curriculum.
Why are
teachers claiming the new Core Curriculum requires students to read more
difficult literary selections and the rigor is overwhelming to their students? The English Language Arts Curriculum had
deteriorated over the decades. When I
began teaching forty years ago, the curriculum in Language Arts, or as we used
to call it, English, was very similar in difficulty to the new Core
Curriculum. Then adolescent literature
was born. Students loved these
action-packed pieces of Pablum that can be digested in one or two
sittings. Why not! I loved Mad
Magazine and Archie Comic books
when I was a child and my parents allowed me to read all I wanted. I just couldn’t write a book report on them
and get credit at school. That was still
no problem. I just hoofed it to the
local library, checked out a real book and read it as well. When teachers learned they no longer had to
fight students to get them to read, they put away William Shakespeare and
Charles Dickens and handed the students S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. At first these adolescent literature books
were used for grades fifth through eighth and the students still got to read
the classics in high school. The
standards continued to deteriorate and soon students in seventh grade were
reading fourth and fifth grade books and students in high school were reading S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. Finally students were actually writing book reports
and getting credit for comic books, now called Graphic Novels. What a wonderful place, America is! This is beginning to remind me of Ray
Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. At this rate, soon students won’t be required
to read at all. Just watch the movie.
Suddenly
reality set in when the United States discovered it was scoring lower on
standard examinations that our friends in Europe. Now, some people are ready to throw away
textbooks and novels and settle for a series of on-line reading selections with
short quizzes and essay questions. Hold
on there, grasshopper. That may not be what we need. Bill Gates, not really Bill himself, but the Bill Gates Foundation collected a
group of outstanding educators ( I know this because one of my good friends
worked with them) to develop units that incorporate all of the learning goals
of the new Core Curriculum while still teaching real pieces of literature. Mind you Bill Gates and his team did not
write the learning goals. That was a
group of educators and their governors.
The wonderful thing is they even added some ideas from the affective
domain or what we used to call Character Education. This is like a blast from the past, theme
based units synthesizing writing skills and reading skills and using genuine
literary selections like To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare.
Speaking
only as an old English (Language Arts) teacher, before you criticize the Common
Core, compare it to the Readers, textbooks, our grandparents used and the
curriculum that was taught forty years ago.
The Language Arts Curriculum is not that different. I suggest you look at the Gates Foundations’
Units as well, because they combine the curriculum with character education
especially in the 9th and 10th grade. To those who want to toss out the great pieces
of literature and depend solely on computer generated activities to teach
skills, I leave you with a quote from
William Butler Yeats, "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the
lighting of a fire."