Common Core CPR - What About the Adolescents who Struggle... or Just Don't Care

I love this book!   It not only offers suggestions for engaging students who lack interest or motivation, it clarifies information about the common core that just about everything else I've read has ignored.   Two of the sentences from the standards that the book's authors identify as important are "The standards leave room for teachers, curriculum developers, and states to determine how these goals should be reached and what additional topics should be addressed," and "Teachers are thus free to provide students with whatever tools and knowledge their professional judgment and experience identify as most helpful in meeting the goals set out in the Standards."    These sentences remove the pressure to teach books recommended in  the appendix of the Common Core for a specific grade level.  If data shows that students in a class are reading well below grade level, I have the freedom to select books that stretch their abilities, rather than being compelled to use books that I know are far beyond their abilities.

This book also recommends choice for students, not just for teachers.  I have found in the past that my struggling students will read if I provide them with a choice of materials and assignments.  This year I am mandated to teach 5 texts to my sophomore students, which removes almost all choice for me and for my students.  To me, this is the ideal way to make students hate reading.  We collect data to evaluate the reading level and interests of students, then force-feed them books for which they have no interest and few of the prerequisite skills.  When students do not know the meanings of simple words like factual, affectionate, hasten, disruptive, or query, expecting them to read Julius Caesar is an effort in futility.  When reading a four page, high interest story in the text book is a accomplishment for them because it was so very long, five acts of Shakespeare must hold the same degree of intimidation to them that War and Peace would have for me.  While this book agrees that our goals must be to move students as close to the standards for their grade as possible, it provides strategies for moving them closer, not insisting that they magically perform at that level just because they are now in grade x. 

I'm sure I'll have more updates on this book over the next few days.  It's just too good to put down, even with a sinus infection.  Now there's motivation.....

How Children Succeed...

I finished reading How Children Succeed with a mixture of affirmation and disappointment.  The affirmation stems from my long-held beliefs that so much of what we deal with stems from the child's home and early childhood and that children need boundaries, structure, and rules.  Paul Tough also writes about the positive impact of failure, when failure is something that people learn from.  Too often, children are not challenged to the point of failing -- while I don't believe that the bar should be raised so high that success is impossible (or seems impossible), sometimes a student may need to fail in order to discover what works for him or her in order to achieve success. 

The disappointment stems from the lack of concrete suggestions for success at the high school level.  Even more so, statistics show that making a difference for the children living at the deepest levels of poverty is so much harder than it is for those living at the higher end of the poverty scale.   One of the major impacts on the likelihood of success is the presence of stress in a child's life.   In addition, a close, nurturing relationship with a parent-figure can offset some of the impact of this stress.  Stresses like loosing a home, witnessing violence, experiencing violence have a incredible negative impact that lasts into adulthood; experiencing these stresses with the absence of a nurturing presence magnifies the impact.  Measures of stress experienced in childhood outweigh the things we normally look at like the results of IQ tests.

This book gave me new insights, but didn't necessarily give me any new tools for the classroom as a whole.  However, it did show me that making a sincere connection to individual students is invaluable.  I will never be happy with my inability to impact every student who crosses my path, but I am encouraged to keep making as much of a difference as I can.

English Journal and How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character

For the first two days of winter break, I couldn't focus for long enough to even read an article in Reader's Digest.  Now, after almost a week, I am catching up on the last three issues of English Journal and am a third of the way through How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character by Paul Tough.  At the start of a break, I would usually be reading fiction, but for some reason am thoroughly engrossed in these non-fiction texts. 

How Children Succeed has been both interesting and discouraging up to this point.  I do like that it goes beyond the poverty issue and looks at causes for low academic success across socio-economic lines.  Those of us who teach have seen successful young people who grew up in poverty and unmotivated students who appear to have everything they need in life.  I think this book explains some of the causes for that.  What I am waiting for is solutions.  This is where I would prefer a printed book rather than my Kindle -- I'd be flipping through pages right now trying to find the "good news" to keep me motivated to keep reading the very important and informative research.  I need a glimmer of hope as, once again, so much leads back to those critical first years of life.  How do we overcome that (or help our students overcome that) at the high school level? 

Much of what I read so far in English Journal addresses the pros and cons of Common Core.  When my husband and I compare the stories we read when we were in our early teens to the books that some of our students read, we have to wonder just when students started reading less challenging texts.  Of course, we both love to read, so maybe we are comparing apples to oranges when looking back to our high school days.  I firmly agree that we need to ask our students to read more complex texts, but that goes hand in hand with our students coming to us reading at grade level.  Many of my students are unable to follow a story line that includes flashbacks or multiple narrators, even in a movie.   On a recent test, students (sophomores) asked me to define "factual" and "affectionate."  As I read through articles and books, I keep trying to reconcile the advice of a good friend to "meet the students where they are" and the mandate to teach complex texts "appropriate" to each grade level.  I will keep reading and gleaning ideas for scaffolding and engaging students.  I have been surprised at the effectiveness of some new methods I've used this year.  Some were far outside my comfort zone, but students both learned from those "wacky" ideas and reported that they found the method(s) helpful -- even when they found them as odd as I did! 

At some point, I will have to stop reading material of my choice and read the plays that I will teach my IB seniors this semester.  I've read one in the past two months, one back in the 1970s, and the other two not at all.  I'll be happy when next year rolls around and I have materials and experience with all of the curriculum for the classes I'm teaching.  I will be prepared for my classes this year before I teach, but it will be another six months of working almost every weekend.  But, for at least the next couple of days, I will read whatever my whim leads me to and not feel guilty for taking a break from lesson planning!