 |
| Axiom of history: events are knowable and life has order and direction. Axiom of science: events are describable and life has order and direction. Oh look, interpreting both through the lens of mathematics! |
But the 30%-70% fictional-informational text divide seems wrong to me. When I was a student, I remember saying to my English teacher that I wanted to start reading more non-fiction, since that wasn't something I was accustomed to doing. If I had been forced to read such texts, however, I'm certain I would have rebelled against it, much as I rebelled against reading Classics until recently (side note: The Brothers Karamazov is an amazingly good book, and it talks briefly about non-Euclidean geometry!).
I already lament the fact that "mathematics as taught in high school" is often not authentic math. I wonder if the near future will see English teachers lamenting the same for their subject.
Readings prompting this:
Common Core Nonfiction Reading Standards Mark The End Of Literature, English Teachers Say
The Role of Fiction in the High School English Language Arts Classroom
Goodbye, Liberal Arts?
The Common Core’s 70 percent nonfiction standards and the end of reading?
I tell you that I accept God simply. But you must note this: if God exists and if He really did create the world, then, as we all know, He created it according to the geometry of Euclid and the human mind with the conception of only three dimensions in space. Yet there have been and still are geometricians and philosophers... [who] dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may meet somewhere in infinity. I have come to the conclusion that, since I can't understand even that, I can't expect to understand about God. I acknowledge humbly that I have no faculty for settling such questions, I have a Euclidian earthly mind, and how could I solve problems that are not of this world?
The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
The work to establish a national curriculum is admirable, but it's insane that the common core was never piloted prior to being rolled out on a national scale. That's one reason why there's a difference in interpretation about the percentages you quote. Supposedly they are counting informational text across disciplines and not specific to the English class. One thing that is healthy, I think, is the discussion that every teacher is a teacher of reading.
ReplyDeleteLike you, I hope and pray that classics and literature are not lost in our quest for career readiness. They say creativity typically occurs when people who master two or more quite different fields use the framework of one to think afresh about the other. Steve Jobs is a great example. He attended a calligraphy class at Reed College and was first to bundle fonts and typography in a Mac or pc.
We need the liberal arts as much as we need STEM.