I feel like Rip Van Winkle.
Although there is distinct proof that I have not been asleep or even out of the Teaching Profession for 20 years or more, I feel a stranger in a strange land!
I am a Para now, and "ea", a helper, truly an old but not retired teacher who is not afraid or prideful to learn from others pink-cheeked and fresh into the pedagogy. But as the second or third time a teacher pretty much hands out an small copied piece of a poem, short story, or non-fiction piece to either English 9 or American Literature class offering maybe one sentence and a list of rather foreign words to week five kids to annotate the passage, I feel the cognitive dissonance the "what the heck?" feeling of some who are doing almost a dry run at eeking out an understanding of text that is so very foreign to them.
Where have I been these past years? I have no long-grown old man beard but when the teacher puts up the goals as "close" reading I kept thinking she meant...you take a word out and you have to find the missing word. That my friends is called "cloze" reading! oops. And then my instinct is that CLOSE means well, close and careful reading. Which I guess it does. And I am hornswaggled to wonder did I learn this from my curriculum and reading skills classes or does tossing a 'ditto' out there and having kids highlight and annotate the hell out of it now constitute preparing for Common Core literature and PARCC testing? yeah. Maybe it does.
Because I do know for a fact that portions of our government testing ask kids to for example, read a primary source about a great female pilot, watch and navigate through a YouTube like video about this historical figure, and then read prose or a poem also about her and then create an outline, answer knowledge level questions, then glue together a high level thinking supposition about basically some woman 90% of teens barely even know about!?
This is on the sample ninth grade PARCC test. About Amelia Earhart. It is just that when I taught Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea in 1994, I spent four weeks, the first one and a half at least talking about The Man, the author. The rumors and the connection to author's and their works. It "hooked" ninth and tenth graders! But now apparently CLOSE reading which I guess according to the internet / Wikipedia says has been around since 1979, says "no, just DIVE in..." Without prior knowledge, background, set up?! Yeah. So here is some dialogue from a Hemingway short story with no idea what it is about, who he is, or even the location. (Spain). Lost much? I hear Yoda saying that backwards questioning he often used in the Star Wars saga!
My point being...There are believe it or not tons of allusions to Hemingway and other literature in the cartoon Family Guy! So why not remind kids that the past will come up again? I am thinking now that maybe even most of society (except those in the Catskills) will know what I mean when I talk about Rip Van Winkle and the long winters' nap? Is it really an allegory?
Diane
Although there is distinct proof that I have not been asleep or even out of the Teaching Profession for 20 years or more, I feel a stranger in a strange land!
I am a Para now, and "ea", a helper, truly an old but not retired teacher who is not afraid or prideful to learn from others pink-cheeked and fresh into the pedagogy. But as the second or third time a teacher pretty much hands out an small copied piece of a poem, short story, or non-fiction piece to either English 9 or American Literature class offering maybe one sentence and a list of rather foreign words to week five kids to annotate the passage, I feel the cognitive dissonance the "what the heck?" feeling of some who are doing almost a dry run at eeking out an understanding of text that is so very foreign to them.
Where have I been these past years? I have no long-grown old man beard but when the teacher puts up the goals as "close" reading I kept thinking she meant...you take a word out and you have to find the missing word. That my friends is called "cloze" reading! oops. And then my instinct is that CLOSE means well, close and careful reading. Which I guess it does. And I am hornswaggled to wonder did I learn this from my curriculum and reading skills classes or does tossing a 'ditto' out there and having kids highlight and annotate the hell out of it now constitute preparing for Common Core literature and PARCC testing? yeah. Maybe it does.
Because I do know for a fact that portions of our government testing ask kids to for example, read a primary source about a great female pilot, watch and navigate through a YouTube like video about this historical figure, and then read prose or a poem also about her and then create an outline, answer knowledge level questions, then glue together a high level thinking supposition about basically some woman 90% of teens barely even know about!?
This is on the sample ninth grade PARCC test. About Amelia Earhart. It is just that when I taught Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea in 1994, I spent four weeks, the first one and a half at least talking about The Man, the author. The rumors and the connection to author's and their works. It "hooked" ninth and tenth graders! But now apparently CLOSE reading which I guess according to the internet / Wikipedia says has been around since 1979, says "no, just DIVE in..." Without prior knowledge, background, set up?! Yeah. So here is some dialogue from a Hemingway short story with no idea what it is about, who he is, or even the location. (Spain). Lost much? I hear Yoda saying that backwards questioning he often used in the Star Wars saga!
My point being...There are believe it or not tons of allusions to Hemingway and other literature in the cartoon Family Guy! So why not remind kids that the past will come up again? I am thinking now that maybe even most of society (except those in the Catskills) will know what I mean when I talk about Rip Van Winkle and the long winters' nap? Is it really an allegory?
Diane
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