Archives For Common Core Informational texts

Yale Rep’s WILLPOWER! Empowers Educators

January 26, 2014 — Leave a comment

 “for we are the only love-gods...”( Much Ado about Nothing: 2.1.386)

Every generation has them, the “love gods”, the cultural icons who capture our minds and our hearts.  They are musicians, actors, playwrights, authors, or poets.  They are artists with a stamp so firm on a culture that the mere mention of their names can call forth an image; artists, for example, like Shakespeare or maybe The Beatles. They are artists whose images need no text to explain who they are, like Shakespeare or maybe The Beatles.

These paperAnd because these artists have messages that transcend time there are educators who are committed to teaching their students how best to discover an artist’s message through a study of an artist’s craft. There are even educators so committed that they would spend an entire Saturday, (January 24, 2014) learning new strategies to help their students understand and respond to the messages of cultural icons. These are educators who spent the day at the Yale Repertory Willpower!Workshop centered on the upcoming production of These! Paper! Bullets!.

These! Paper! Bullets! is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s comedy play Much Ado about Nothing, with the setting transported to London in the turbulent 1960s. The play’s adaptation is by Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award nominated writer Rolin Jones, and the promotional synopsis states:

Meet the Quartos. Ben, Claude, Balth, and Pedro. Their fans worship them. Scotland Yard fears them. And their former drummer will stop at nothing to destroy them. Can these fab four from Liverpool find true love in London and cut an album in seven nights? These Paper Bullets! is a rocking and rolling version of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing with a serious backbeat.

Many of the teachers attending this Saturday’s workshop will be bringing their classes in early April to the daytime productions of These! Paper! Bullets!, a series of performances offered through the WILLPOWER! program. This program is the brainchild of James Bundy, dean of the School of Drama and  artistic director of the Yale Rep. According to a 2013 Yale News article “‘WILL POWER!’ gives city students a ‘visceral’ introduction to theater,” Bundy’s concerns about having students see live theatre was the motivation for beginning the program 10 years ago since, “studies show that people who attend the theater before the age of 18 are much more likely to attend later in life.”  

The WILLPOWER! Workshop for educators is coordinated by Ruth M. Feldman, the Yale School of Drama’s director of education and accessibility services, and is usually offered several weeks before a production in order to improve classroom instruction and prepare student audiences for the play they will see.

Feldman’s jam-packed line up this particular Saturday included a preview of sets and costumes with the production’s director Jackson Gay. The costumes brought “aahs” from the audience who obviously appreciated the retro-look of white go-go boots on Twiggy-eque models. There were also musical snippets from the production’s musical collaborator, Green Day lead singer and guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong.  Listening to clips of these original songs that echoed the sounds of the 60s, composed in tribute to the Fab Four, had all the heads in the room bopping up and down.
“Is there going to be a CD soundtrack?” one enthused teacher asked.

After the question/answer session with the director, Feldman packed off the teachers for a visit to the Yale University Art Gallery, a short brisk walk across the street, to participate in a thematically linked presentation on “adaptations” organized by Museum Educator Elizabeth Manekin and Elizabeth Williams, the John Walsh Fellow at the Yale University Art Gallery.  Teachers were briefed on the Pop Art movement as they studied a series of nine panels of Andy Warhol’s Mao (a screenprint of one similar is available on Amazon). The discussion asked teachers to consider how a cultural icon is adapted for new audiences. Next, teachers gathered around Manet’s Reclining Young Woman in Spanish Costume and continued the discussion on adaptations before heading to the workroom to make collages that were adaptations on Manet’s other reclining female, Olympia.

Andy Warhol Mao 93, 1972 Screenprint sold by RUDOLF BUDJA GALERIE. $200,000.00 + Free Shipping

Andy Warhol
Mao 93, 1972
Screenprint on AMAZON through RUDOLF BUDJA GALERIE.
$200,000.00 + Free Shipping!

Édouard Manet, French, 1832–1883 Reclining Young Woman in Spanish Costume

Édouard Manet, 
Reclining Young Woman in Spanish Costume -Yale University Art Gallery

Returning to Yale Rep, teachers also had the opportunity to try reading and writing strategies aligned with the Common Core using informational texts, short commentaries about social media and cultural icons. Rachel Sexton, an educational specialist at ACES, engaged teachers by having them participate in a reading strategy that asks students to organize an article that had been cut-up. “Don’t look for matching cuts like a puzzle,” she warned, knowing how some students might look for a short-cut. The next strategy involved reading that text and other short commentaries in order to write a personal response incorporating three ideas they found significant. Dutifully, teachers took pencils in hand. The sounds of scribbling were slow at first but became steadier, and Sexton had to interrupt teachers as her session time was drawing to a close,  I overheard teachers:

  • “This is a great way to introduce a topic”
  • “I cannot believe how much I am getting out of this exercise…”
  • “I know how my students have trouble getting started with writing; this [strategy] solves that problem!”

The last session was dedicated to the lyricism in Shakespeare’s play offered by Dr. Matthew Suttor, Director of the Laurie Beechman Center for Theatrical Sound Design and Music at the Yale School of Drama. His session was  titled, “Let Music Sound…”, a presentation designed to have teachers “examine and experience the creative process for drawing both lyrics and music from a play’s text. (full disclosure: Sadly, I could not attend this last session because of impending snow.) 

As she has in the past, Feldman organized seven hours of first-rate (FREE) professional development through the WILLPOWER! program that was both practical for classroom application and powerful enough to encourage educators to explore new possibilities for bringing the messages of adaptation in culture. Exploring the elements of These! Paper! Bullets! before the opening of the show helps educators prepare students for the experience of Shakespeare performed live.

In addition, knowing adaptations can be made from works created by a cultural icon some 400 years ago is an concept that students today, with their ability to create mash-ups and Internet memes coupled with their  fascination with today’s cultural icons, should appreciate or even (hopefully) try themselves.

Continue Reading…

In Common Core, Common Core-CCSS, Drama, Education, Professional Development, Shakespeare, Teacher , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Informational Text for Social Studies or English: “The Perils of Indifference” by Elie Wiesel

January 10, 2013 — 2 Comments
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Wikipedia photo -Elie Wiesel

By my calculations, at the mid-point of the school year, many World History classes are studying World War II. Should these classes want to increase their use of an informational text in English or Social Studies curriculum, I suggest Elie Wiesel’s noteworthy speech The Perils of Indifference.

Wiesel delivered this speech to Congress on April 12, 1999. The speech is 1818 words long and connects Wiesel’s experience at the concentration camp at Aushwitcz with the genocides of the late 20th Century using a single powerful word: indifference.

In his speech, Weisel states clearly:

Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment. And this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century’s wide-ranging experiments in good and evil.

Our English Department has used this speech in the past as a complement to Wiesel’s memoir Night which has been a used as a whole class read.  This year, we are giving Night to the Social Studies classes. They will adopt this memoir in order to increase the assigned informational text reading in their discipline mandated by the Literacy Common Core State Standards in History and Social Studies (CCSS). The English Department will still offer supplemental texts  that students can choose to read independently.

When he gave this speech, Wiesel had come before the US Congress to thank the American soldiers and the American people for liberating the camps at the end of World War II. Wiesel had spent nine months in the Buchewald/Aushwitcz complex. His mother and sisters had been separated from him when they first arrived: “Eight short, simple words… Men to the left, women to the right”; these family members were killed in the ovens. He and his father survived starvation, disease, and the deprivation of spirit. His father eventually succumbed, and Wiesel guiltily admits at the end of the memoir that at his father’s death he felt relieved.

Eventually, Wiesel felt compelled to testify against the Nazi regime, and he wrote the memoir Night to bear witness against the genocide which killed his family and six million Jews. His speech was delivered 54 years after he was liberated by American forces.

His gratitude to these American forces is what opens the speech, but after the opening paragraph, Wiesel seriously admonishes America to do more to halt genocides all over the world. By not intervening on behalf of those victims of genocide, he states clearly, we are indifferent to their suffering:

Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative.

My students have always been struck by Wiesel’s juxtaposition of anger and creativity. More than one has agreed pointing to making a “good” creation: an amazing song about an ex-boyfriend or a painting slapped together with passion. They also do not want to be treated indifferently. Yet, Wiesel makes them think beyond themselves:

Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor — never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees — not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own.

I remember several years ago, one student in my English 10 class, Rick, was particularly bright, fun, and full of daring. He also had an exceptional understanding of math and statistics. That January, I introduced the memoir Night as I had in previous years by providing a little background information.

“Six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust,” I recited off from my list of facts.

“What?” a startled Rick looked up. “Six million?” He was aghast. “That can’t be right.” He looked around at his classmates. “Six million?” They looked at him blankly. “Come on,” he was looking for some support, “That can’t be right.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Do you know how many six million things are?” He was indignant.

“Six million people,” I responded.

“People, yes. People, six million is a lot of people….” Rick was clearly operating with a different level of understanding from his more placid classmates. He understood six million as quantity; he did understand what six million things would look like if stacked up. Other students stirred in their seats.  “No way….six million,” he repeated growing more agitated. “How? How did anyone let this happen?” he asked; he was half-rising out of his seat. “Did we know?”

“Yes,” I remember saying. I do remember explaining that, yes, America did know that Hitler had concentration camps, and that more documentation collected after the war indicated that many of our military and political leaders knew about these camps. That is one of the points from Wiesel’s speech.

I pointed out to the class that the Holocaust was only one example of genocide; that there were others. In fact, that there was recently a genocide in Darfur. Rick sat down; he was overwhelmed. He was capable of understanding numerically the devastation of the Holocaust, and he was clearly upset. “Why do we let this happen?” he asked. I remember his voice was so sad, so full of disbelief.

In The Perils of Indifference, Wiesel asks

Does it mean that we have learned from the past? Does it mean that society has changed? Has the human being become less indifferent and more human? Have we really learned from our experiences? Are we less insensitive to the plight of victims of ethnic cleansing and other forms of injustices in places near and far?

Wiesel’s rhetorical questions echo Rick’s “Did we know?” In trying to respond, Wiesel makes the reader uncomfortable the way Rick was uncomfortable. Creating this kind of emotional impact on a reader is the reason Wiesel’s speech should be taught.

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) demand that students read informational texts but does not require specific texts. Wiesel’s The Perils of Indifference contains the information and rhetorical devices that meet the text complexity criteria of the CCSS. More specifically, Wiesel’s message is necessary if we want our students to confront the conflicts in this new 21st Century. Our students must be prepared to question why “deportation, the terrorization of children and their parents be allowed anywhere in the world?“

Our humanity should demand nothing less.

In 10th Grade, Common Core, Common Core-CCSS, Curriculum, Education, People in Conflict, War and Conflict, World Literature , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Informational Texts Purchased at the Expense of Fiction

December 5, 2012 — 2 Comments
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What SHOULD be a tenet of the Common Core State Standards.

The 11th Commandment from Common Core State Standards (CCSS)? Thou Shalt Read Informational Texts.

This edict from on high, from current College Board President and co-architect/promoter of the CCSS David Coleman, has had a seismic shift in curriculum at all grade levels. English/Language Arts Curriculum directors and teachers are jettisoning fiction from their lesson plans in the mistaken belief that they alone are responsible for addressing this new found commandment. For the uninitiated, informational texts in the CCSS replaces the genre previously known as non-fiction and includes many other genres including essays, speeches, and reports.

Columnist Joel Stein exposes the foolishness of this effort in his commentary “How I Replaced Shakespeare” in the 12/10/12 issue of Time Magazine when he discovered that his writing was being analyzed by students. (Note: Diane Ravitch, education activist has the full post on her blog) His response to students who were assigned his articles and who were parsing them for literary devices or thesis?

“Transfer high schools immediately! To one that teaches Shakespeare and Homer instead of the insightful commentary of a first-rate, unconventionally handsome modern wit! Also, don’t do drugs!”

Stein readily admits that students should have some exposure to different genres and explains that he learns how to write in different genres by looking at examples. Similarly English/Language Arts curriculum require students to write in various genres as well through models as well; for example, students are taught with models as to how to write in the genres of essay, business or friendly letter, book review, and poetry.

However, Stein refutes one of Coleman’s most quoted talking points. Coleman said, “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.’” Stein’s response? “I agree with this, but only because no one has ever asked me for a market analysis.”

Stein points out that fiction provides the models that makes writers better. “No nonfiction writer can teach you how to use language like William Faulkner or James Joyce can,” he continues. Stein also mentions how the themes in fiction, and he mentions Shakespeare specifically, prepare students for real life choices. Othello, he notes, can help students make better choices about choices in working partnerships.

Instead, the shared blame for students not knowing how to write well or be able to read non-fiction lies with other disciplines such as history and science, a charge echoed by Gene Wilhoit, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers who, along the National Governors Association, created the Common Core. Stein quotes Wilhoit saying, “History class assignments tend to be short textbook summaries, not primary sources.” Indeed the CCSS anticipated that reading across the disciplines is the most effective way to increase student understanding, so the CCSS made clear that a student’s diet of reading should be 70% informational texts and 30% fiction. Unfortunately, the explanation as to how this percentage would play out in the average student’s school day was relegated to two footnotes. On page 5 of the CCSS English Language Arts (down load) is the footnote that illuminates the 11th commandment of how Thou Shalt Read Informational Texts:

1
The percentages on the table reflect the sum of student reading, not just reading in ELA settings. Teachers of senior English classes, for example, are not required to devote 70
percent of reading to informational texts. Rather, 70 percent of student reading across the grade should be informational.
2
As with reading, the percentages in the table reflect the sum of student writing, not just writing in ELA settings.

When the CCSS were announced, the misreadings of this the English/Language Arts standards began immediately. The footnote was largely ignored. Instead, the movement to jam informational texts into English classes began. Literature was dumped in order to meet the set ratio in English classes alone rather than a move to increase the reading of informational texts in all other disciplines.Stein recounts how Wilhoit highlights the reaction of the small, vocal group who objected. “It (CCSS) upset people who love literature. That happens to be a lot of high school teachers,” Wilhoit said.

In How I Replaced Shakespeare, Stein adds his voice to the small vocal group who love literature.  He is a former writer for the Los Angeles Times and now is a regular contributor to Time. He is a good writer who recognizes that all students would be far better served to read great literature (Shakespeare,Faulkner, Joyce)  rather than his column of “informational texts.” The loss of literature at every grade level in an attempt to serve ratios-50% fiction/50% informational text in elementary and 30% fiction/70% in high school- is too great a price to be paid to meet the goals of the yet unproven Common Core.

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Informational Texts: Speeches Delivered with Love from Bruce and Steve

March 31, 2012 — 2 Comments

For teachers who are looking for guidance on how to teach informational texts at the high school level, there is a model lesson on Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address at the EngageNY website. The text of the speech delivered by Lincoln on November 19, 1863, is short enough to fit on two pages or two bronze plaques on a memorial on the battles grounds in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. With 272 artfully crafted words Lincoln reframed the objectives of the Civil War while restating the principles of the equality of man. The opening six words are iconic, the closing asyndeton, “and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” is inspiring. The choice of the Gettysburg Address is laudable and non-controversial as a selection as an informational text. However, this speech is nearing its 150th birthday, and while an understanding of this speech helps students understand who we were as a nation, there are more contemporary speeches that address who we are as a nation today. What other speeches can we offer our students to review for content and style?

I can think of two speeches that have impressed me this school year. One such speech is a commencement address to college students, the other an address of how the power of rock and roll “commenced” and what that meant to an artist. The first speech is formal, running a little under 15 minutes in length, and delivered by Steve Jobs on June 12, 2005, at Stanford University. The second speech is a full 50 minutes delivered on March 15, 2012, by Bruce Springsteen as the keynote address at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas.

While Jobs engineered his speech into three separate and distinct parts (“Connecting the dots”, “Love and loss”, “Death”), the “Bruce’s” rollicking retelling of his life as a musician is part-explanatory, part-stream of consciousness, and wholly poetic. While Jobs formally and frankly narrated his stories of failure and ultimate redemption in the computer industry, Springsteen peppered his observations with epithets and musical interludes. Both speeches should get a “look-see” by teachers looking to engage students with meaningful informational texts.

Steve Jobs’s commencement address received a great deal of attention after his passing in October 2011. Stanford University has a page on its website that has both the text of the speech and a video of Jobs reading the speech , standing at the podium with his black graduation robe swirling in the breeze. He opened with the story of his adoption and his bold admission that he had dropped out of college because he “didn’t see the point” –this before a crowd of parents and new graduates who had just completed four or more years at one of the country’s more expensive universities!

Shortly after this startling confession, Jobs deftly described how he followed the “dots”, crediting a calligraphy class at Reed College with being the inspiration in developing his sense of sleek design. These “dots” led him to the computer industry when “Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20” and that “in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees.” He professed his failure, the subsequent firing from the company he had founded, as entirely necessary. “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
In contrast to Jobs’s formal delivery, the video of Springsteen’s speech (video with text link on the NPR website) shows him blinking at the cameras wondering why he is up so early (it was noon) gripping the podium and addressing other musicians saying, “Every decent musician in town is asleep, or they will be before I’m done with this thing, I guarantee you. I’ve got a bit of a mess up here.” Several minutes (and epithets and expletives) later, Springsteen states his thesis:

“So I’m gonna talk a little bit today about how I’ve put what I’ve done together, in the hopes that someone slugging away in one of the clubs tonight may find some small piece of it valuable. And this being Woody Guthrie’s 100th birthday, and the centerpiece of this year’s South by Southwest Conference, I’m also gonna talk a little about my musical development, and where it intersected with Woody’s, and why.”

Springsteen’ s “dots” began with Elvis and television:

“Television and Elvis gave us full access to a new language; a new form of communication; a new way of being; a new way of looking; a new way of thinking about sex, about race, about identity, about life; a new way of being an American, a human being and a new way of hearing music. Once Elvis came across the airwaves, once he was heard and seen in action, you could not put the genie back in the bottle. After that moment, there was yesterday, and there was today, and there was a red hot, rockabilly forging of a new tomorrow before your very eyes.”

Inspired by Elvis, the six-year-old Springsteen wrapped his fingers around a guitar neck for the first time, and when they wouldn’t fit, “I just beat on it, and beat on it, and beat on it — in front of the mirror, of course. I still do that. Don’t you? Come on, you gotta check your moves!”

Both of these speeches center on the importance of love and the love of one’s profession. Springsteen’s love of music, and his embrace of all musical genres, is lyrical as evidenced by his professed love for Doo-wop, a passage in the speech which aches for an accompanying melody:

“Doo-wop, the most sensual music ever made, the sound of raw sex, of silk stockings rustling on backseat upholstery, the sound of the snaps of bras popping across the USA, of wonderful lies being whispered into Tabu-perfumed ears, the sound of smeared lipstick, untucked shirts, running mascara, tears on your pillow, secrets whispered in the still of the night, the high school bleachers and the dark at the YMCA canteen. The soundtrack for your incredibly wonderful, limp-your-ass, blue-balled walk back home after the dance. Oh! It hurt so good.”

Jobs’s love of his work at NeXT, at Pixar, at Apple, is less descriptive but equally impassioned, and he challenged the graduates to recognize the importance of loving one’s work:

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

Both speeches also focus on change. In the last portion of his speech, Jobs introduced death; in a moment of cheer and celebration, he bluntly talked about death. He was honest with his beliefs, stating how he did not want to die, and he described how the prognosis of pancreatic cancer drove him to seek surgery. His statement, “and I am fine now” is delivered with such confidence, a poignant moment now that he has passed away. However, Jobs was not trying to be maudlin in discussing his, and our own, imminent fate; he deliberately summed up his feelings about death as “the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.” Jobs is right about death as a change agent, but as he stood before that crowd gathered for Stanford’s graduation in 2005, he was a live example of a change agent in our lives and the lives of our students.

Springsteen introduced the legacy of Woody Guthrie as his change agent. He explained how in his 20s he read Joe Klein’s Woody Guthrie, A Life, noting that, “Woody’s gaze was set on today’s hard times” and that “Woody’s world was a world where fatalism was tempered by a practical idealism. It was a world where speaking truth to power wasn’t futile, whatever its outcome.” Springsteen explained that although he would cover Woody’s infamous This Land is Your Land, he was never “going to be like Woody” because he was too fond of Elvis and the pop simplicity of his Pink Cadillac, that is until he and Pete Seegar stood up in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 2009 to sing (with the crowd) From California/ To the New York island/ From the Redwood Forest /To the Gulf Stream waters /This land was made for you and me:

“On that day Pete and myself, and generations of young and old Americans — all colors, religious beliefs — I realized that sometimes things that come from the outside, they make their way in, to become a part of the beating heart of the nation. On that day, when we sung that song, Americans — young and old, black and white, of all religious and political beliefs — were united, for a brief moment, by Woody’s poetry.”

Both Jobs and Springsteen ended their speeches with a clarion call. From the industrialist,” Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.” From the musician: “Don’t take yourself too seriously, and take yourself as seriously as death itself. Don’t worry. Worry your ass off. Have ironclad confidence, but doubt — it keeps you awake and alert.”

Could these speeches be “informational texts”-the new CCSS term used to cover all manner of writing other than fiction? While these speeches are most certainly not equal to the eloquence of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, do they have a place in the study of contemporary history? Is the speech that details the development of the Mac with its sleek design and easily used graphic interface, as told by its founder, an informational text? Does the speech that chronicles a musician’s experience with the birth of American rock’n roll and the influence of pop culture qualify as an informational text? Could either speech be a springboard into student research? Could either speech be analyzed for rhetorical structures, word choice, and imagery? Do these speeches inspire the reader?

For students in the upper grades of high school, grades 11 and 12, for whom the CCSS suggests 70% of reading should be in the form of informational texts, the answer is a yes, yes, most assuredly yes!

In Common Core, Education , , , , , , , , ,
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