Archives For CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.2

Shall I Juxtapose for You a Summer’s Day? Art Prompts for that Summer Vacation Essay

August 3, 2018 — Leave a comment

When students return to school in August, there will be more than one teacher who assigns the worn question, “What I did during my summer vacation.”

While most students do want to share what they did, the results can be mixed; not all summer vacations are alike. Plus, how does a student respond to such a broad topic?

Instead, a teacher could use art as a prompt to get students to write about a vacation. The illustration on the cover for The New Yorker, (August 6 & 8, 2018) by Tom Gauld is the most recent take on one summer’s day.

Tom Gauld’s “On The Beach” cover illustration August 6 & 13, 2018, New Yorker Magazine.

The four panels are stacked to allow the viewers to compare the actions of a crowd of one-dimensional figures. The first has them coming to the beach. The second has the figures lounging on the sand. The third has the figures swimming in the water, and the fourth shows them leaving to return home. The active figures in the first three panels are drawn as more subdued in the last panel, implying that the figures are tired after a day of fun in the sun.

In an interview by Françoise Mouly July 30, 2018, Gauld explains that his inspiration for the cover illustration was a 1940 photograph by Weegee of beachgoers on Coney Island.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Coney Island Beach” by Weegee, gelatin silver print, 20.6 x 25.4 cm (8 1/8 x 10 in.), 1940. Accession Number: 1987.1100.252. © Weegee / International Center of Photography.

The huge crowd, immortalized in one moment, illustrates the popularity of the beach, but there is no comparison photo of the same crowd later in the day.

The use of panels in Gauld’s magazine’s cover could be compared to another magazine cover, specifically the panels in an illustration by Norman Rockwell.  The illustration titled Coming and Going graced the 1947 cover of the Saturday Evening Post. Rockwell also stacked his panels to juxtapose characters traveling to and from Bennington Lake.

Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), Going and Coming, 1947. Oil on canvas, 16″ x 31 1/2″. Cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post, August 30, 1947. Norman Rockwell Art Collection Trust, 1973.

In the illustration, Rockwell’s realistic and fleshy characters are active in the top panel. Two boys hang out of the car in anticipation in the first panel. Those same characters appear exhausted in the second panel inferring a day of physical and energetic activity.

Like Gauld, Rockwell also drew his inspiration from another piece of art. According to a page on the Norman Rockwell Museum website, George W. Wright’s painting of Going to and Returning from the Seashore served as the inspiration for Going and Coming.

Wright’s painting is a side by side comparison of a family on a train preparing for a day of fun by the sea. The alert and smiling children in the first panel are slumped and asleep in the next, with their collection of shells strewn below them. The parents behind them offer glazed stares.

Wright, George. Going to the Seashore and Return from the Seashore. 0126.2265. early 20th century. Tulsa: Gilcrease Museum, https://collections.gilcrease.org/object/01262265 (02/14/2017).

All of these works of art can be used to teach students to note how the details in a text contribute to the theme or central idea. Reading these paintings addresses a critical Common Core Literacy Standard:

 CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.2
Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key supporting details and ideas.

For example, in summarizing the key supporting details, students may call attention to the dogs in both the Gauld and Rockwell illustrations. Both of the dogs are dynamic in the first panels, one at a full trot and the other enthusiastically enjoying the breeze by hanging out of a wood-paneled station wagon:

Gauld: dog coming to the beach

Rockwell: Dog coming to the beach

In contrast, both the dogs appear tired in the final panels, one with four feet on the ground and the other seated.

Going home

Going home

The covers and photo all can be used to generate talk about what is good about a day off in summer or a day spent in fun with family and friends. Students at every grade level can describe how the artist in each piece uses physical details in the “before” and “after” to create an emotional tone. These prompts show students how these details combine to represent one day, a snapshot of a summer vacation.

Instead of a tired written prompt to generate a student response, teachers could use these visual prompts. Student responses to summer vacation responses can be imitated or elaborated in a drawing as well. Such prompts are engaging and can be enjoyed by all students, whether the students can read or not.

With apologies to Shakespeare:

Shall we compare these to a summer’s day?
This art is lively with panels to interpret
The fun that shakes the characters displayed
A summer’s lease captured in these portraits.
In Common Core-CCSS, Education, elementary grades, Reading, Writing , , , , , , , ,
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Common Core Close Reading Confronts Author Erik Larson

March 11, 2015 — 4 Comments

When Erik Larson was interviewed by the NY Times for his latest book Dead Wake about the sinking of the R.M.S. Lusitania, he Screenshot 2015-03-11 23.14.19expressed his purpose for choosing to write in the narrative non-fiction genre:

“It is not necessarily my goal to inform. It is my goal to create a historical experience with my books. My dream, my ideal, is that someone picks up a book of mine, starts reading it, and just lets themselves sink into the past and then read the thing straight through, and emerge at the end feeling as though they’ve lived in another world entirely.”

There is nothing of analysis in his stated purpose for writing, but there is a desire to have a reader engulfed by a narrative that ends in the reader “feeling.”

In contrast, in the first three anchor standards for reading (grades k-12), the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for English Language Arts spell out the expanse between their objectives and Larson’s expression to use narrative non-fiction to connect viscerally with the readers:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.1
Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.2
Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key supporting details and ideas.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.3
Analyze how and why individuals, events, or ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.

The anchor and grade level standards were written purposely to be devoid of any reference to reader’s feeling or connection. These standards were carefully articulated not to be confused with the popular  Reader Response Theory supported by Louise Rosenblatt that focused “on the reader rather than the author or the content and form of the work.”

“Reading closely” in the CCSS has been spun as “close reading”, defined by the The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) as:

Close, analytic reading stresses engaging with a text of sufficient complexity directly and examining meaning thoroughly and methodically, encouraging students to read and reread deliberately. Directing student attention on the text itself empowers students to understand the central ideas and key supporting details. It also enables students to reflect on the meanings of individual words and sentences; the order in which sentences unfold; and the development of ideas over the course of the text, which ultimately leads students to arrive at an understanding of the text as a whole. (2011, p. 7)

Analyzing the definition of close reading (above) through analysis in a WORD SIFT highlights the CCSS emphasis on ideas and meaning for the student:Screenshot 2015-03-11 22.02.36

Missing from this definition? The word “author.”

This word sift analysis illustrates how the “close reading” advocated by the CCSS requires students to read for meaning, with no consideration to the intent of an author.

The NYTimes interview with Larson provided him the opportunity to state that he does not write to a standard; he says nothing about “meaning” and “ideas”. Instead, Larson poetically defined his goal for writing. He writes for the reader to have an experience, and that experience is ” his “dream” or “ideal.”

While the language of the Common Core contrives to eliminate the author’s role in creating texts, those same texts students will be expected to “close read”, Erik Larson reminds us that authors do not write to meet a standard.

Authors write to create feelings in their readers, whether those readers are reading closely or not.

In Common Core, Common Core-CCSS, Education, Reader, Reading, Teacher, Writing , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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