The Common Core Standards do not require reading complete long works of literature. Even by the time we arrive at the 11th and 12th grade set of standards for reading literature, the standards only refer to "stories, dramas, and poems."
There are, throughout the standards, references to Shakespeare and "foundational works" or literature. But the standards do not suggest that students should, at some point in their academic career, read an entire book. Appendix A provides highly technical explanations of how to consider text complexity and quality, but somehow avoids discussing the value of reading an entire novel. Appendix B provides "exemplars," of reading selections, but the exemplars from novels are all short passages.
This interest in passages and excerpts dovetails nicely with the standardized testing now associated with the Common Core Standards (or whatever name your state has given to them). The PARCC, the SBA, and other big standardized tests cannot, by their nature, ask students to read and reflect on entire complex works of literature. Instead, we find short poems, short articles, and passages excerpted from longer works.
Both the standards and the tests are focused on "skills," with the idea that the business of reading a play or a story or any piece of text is not for the value of that text, but for the reading skills that one acquires and practices in the reading. The standards suggest that students should have some knowledge about some texts, but that's not the focus (and it won't be on the test).
All of this has had an effect on how teachers teach literature. One of the more subtle effects of test-centered teaching is the rise of the excerpt. We don't need to read all of Hamlet or Grapes of Wrath or Huckleberry Finn; we just need to read some select excerpts from them. Just tear a couple of pages out of the text and throw the rest of the book away. There are, in fact, businesses like the website CommonLit, a website that offers an entire library of short stories, poems, and excerpts from novels, along with lessons, testing materials that tie to plenty of pretty data charts and analytics. If you have any doubts about what motivates teachers to use a service like this (and many, many do), consider one satisfied customer's statement about the need that CommonLit met:
We’ve been asked to combine short fiction and nonfiction texts with our curriculum and align them to questions that match our state test for years.
This is test prep. And one thing that test prep doesn't need is long chunks of reading. Test passages will tend to be about one page long, and so the year's work in reading becomes focused on reacting to short passages (primarily through responding to multiple choice questions). Excerpts are consumed cut free from their context in the larger work, and they are read and consumed quickly; there can be no time to read the whole work, reflect on it, even discuss it with other interested readers. Read the few paragraphs, answer the questions, move on to the next passage.
It is increasingly possible for students to graduate from high school without ever having read an entire novel, an entire play. Their knowledge of the body of literature is Cliff's Notes deep, and they may never develop the mental muscles to work their way through a long, meaty piece of literature. Their experience of literature has been fractured and shrunk into pieces small enough to fit on a screen. Their experience of what "reading" is has been shrunk as well, leaving them with the idea that reading is about ploughing through a short, disjointed piece of a piece of writing in order to correctly guess the answers about it that someone else believes are correct (based on the assumption that there is only one correct reading of each passage).
It is increasingly possible for students to graduate from high school without ever having read an entire novel, an entire play. Their knowledge of the body of literature is Cliff's Notes deep, and they may never develop the mental muscles to work their way through a long, meaty piece of literature. Their experience of literature has been fractured and shrunk into pieces small enough to fit on a screen. Their experience of what "reading" is has been shrunk as well, leaving them with the idea that reading is about ploughing through a short, disjointed piece of a piece of writing in order to correctly guess the answers about it that someone else believes are correct (based on the assumption that there is only one correct reading of each passage).
After years and years of this, there is no evidence that any of this creates better readers. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that it does add to the number of students who learn to hate reading in school. Have there always been teachers who made literature into a painful chore? Sure. But the modern education reforms have only made the problems worse.
There are plenty of schools that resist this trend and that continue to teach entire works of literature in a deep and reflective way. Not all teachers are given that choice by their administrators. The broader solution to this issue (as it is the solution to many current issues in education) is to do away with test-driven schooling. Make the tests no-stakes tests, or simply do away with them, and stop using them to drive curricular changes that are poor educational practices.
And this problem extends well beyond the absence of longer literary texts. It's becoming part of my job teaching first-year college students to convince them that 20 page scholarly journal articles aren't outrageous exercises in self-indulgence. I don't blame them for thinking it because (as you're pointing out) testing culture instructs them not to think it's worth anything to engage ideas or processes at length.
ReplyDeleteThe privileging of non-fiction texts in the Common Core State Standards actually starts in kindergarten classrooms. What is happening in our public schools under the false cry of "rigor" and "raising standards" to ensure that our graduates are "workplace-ready" is the erasure of context and meaning, the erasure of the humanities and elevation of decontextualized content that can be tested on an electronic device. I find it shameful that our school boards, administrators, and teacher's unions have drunk the Kool Aid.
ReplyDeleteWorse yet is that the parents have drunk the Kool Aid. It just boggles my mind when I hear parents talk about their kindergarteners and use the buzz words "college and career ready."
DeleteWhen I first started teaching English in 1960, the only Shakespeare available to me as a new teacher was a bowdlerized(I'm not sure this is spelled right.) version of Romeo and Juliet in some anthology, which left out the juicy parts, especially the dialogue of the nurse. Out of principle, I refused to teach it. My refusal irritated several of my colleagues, but I persisted until I finally got access to the Folgers's version in paperback a couple of years later. I have astounded to read that in some cases three scenes from R&J is all students get. I once made the observation that given this new truncated approach, all one need to teach Hamlet is to have students read the famous soliloquy.(In fact, if I think about it now, that might be all one needs to teach all literature.) I better stop this before I lapse into utter rage about the nonsense about the non-fiction fiction ratio in the Core curriculum.
ReplyDeleteOr maybe this one will make you angrier. Where I live, they kids read the shortened version and then they show them the movie.
DeleteRobin you speak the sad, sickening truth
DeleteTHIS!
ReplyDeleteI resisted, for years teaching 1984 each Fall, with another novel or 2 in the spring. I loved it, and made my students love it, but there was always a lot of complaining about having to read "the whole thing". Now I see that they were being "trained" to not read entire novels, in favor of test-approved excerpts. I'm glad I resisted.
I remember reading full novels in middle school. My English class read Les Miserables and we read the full Romeo and Juliet. I feel this helped to fuel my love of reading. In high school we read Macbeth and The Scarlet Letter. I'm sure I read more but just can't recall now as those were the late 80's. I've been teaching for 19 years and have always included 1-2 novels during the year on top of the adopted basal text. For the past, maybe 14 years, I read nothing but novels with my 4th graders. I also incorporate some units of study that include short stories, but most of standards are covered with novels and my students love it. Many go onto to read other books by the same authors or more in the series. I once had a 5th grade teacher get a little annoyed that my class read the entire novel Esperanza Rising, because "you know there is an excerpt of it in the 5th grade reading book". My response was "so". Students can not with any depth analyze characters or plot with the piece of crap stories that are in the basal readers. Most of them in the 4th grade series are well below a 4th grade reading level. Most of my students are reading in the high 6th-high 8th grade level. To meet their needs I must read novels, and not excerpts but the entire thing.and when we read in class, the students genuinely are not happy when we have to stop reading for the day. I'd say I've done my job if they don't want to put the book away. And to be clear my students always score proficient or advance on the SBAC. I don't really care about the test and opt my own children out of it, but they don't get those high scores from reading excerpts and the basal reading book.
ReplyDeleteI've taught English 9 and English 12 since 2004 and we read novels and longer works in all classes (Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, To Kill a Mockingbird, etc.). I won't ever stop. We also read this article: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201401/reading-fiction-improves-brain-connectivity-and-function . It demonstrates the brain development that happens from reading an entire work. From my own experiences, I see the engagement and discussion increase greatly as we delve deeper into a novel or longer play because students start caring about the characters and, in doing so, start imagining what they might do in a similar situation--empathy. These stupid tests and their random articles and goofy poems can't do that. I've made the argument all along that Dumb "Smart" tests like NWEA or SAT or whatever Satan-Spawned measurement these people concoct do a fantastic job of measuring student boredom rather than any kind of skill that matters. Even if the majority of these tests had some consequence or reward, the high school students (I can only speak from experience about them) would mentally flip the test the bird and choose "C" a lot to finish. Of course, the NWEA test now monitors and punishes such boredom if students click through too fast. It knows!!!
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