New "Common Core Standards" for reading in education

The Educrats have got to be insane. And those among us who let them rule the asylum are just as crazy.

From

Alexandra Petri of The Washington Post:

Forget “The Great Gatsby.”

New Common Core standards (which affect 46 states and the District of Columbia) will require that, by 2014, 70 percent of high school seniors' reading assignments be nonfiction. Some suggested texts include “FedViews” by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, the EPA's “Recommended Levels of Insulation” and “Invasive Plant Inventory” by California's Invasive Plant Council.

Forget “Catcher in the Rye” (seems to encourage assassins), “The Great Gatsby” (too 1 percenty), “Huckleberry Finn” (anything written before 1970 must be racist) and “To Kill A Mockingbird” (probably a Suzanne Collins rip-off). Bring out the woodchipping manuals!

I like reading. I love reading. I always have. I read recreationally still. . . . And it's all because, as a child, my parents took the time to read me “Recommended Levels of Insulation.” . . . That was always my favorite, although “Invasive Plant Inventory” was a close second. (What phrases in literature or life will ever top the rich resonance of that “The Inventory categorizes plants as High, Moderate, or Limited, reflecting the level of each species’ negative ecological impact in California. Other factors, such as economic impact or difficulty of management, are not included in this assessment.” "And we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" has nothing on it!)

“It is important to note that even Limited species are invasive and should be of concern to land managers,” I frequently tell myself, in moments of crisis. “Although the impact of each plant varies regionally, its rating represents cumulative impacts statewide.” How true that is, even today. Those words have brought me through moments of joy and moments of sorrow. They are graven on my heart. I bound them as a seal on my hand.

My dog-eared, beaten copy of “Recommended Levels of Insulation” still sits on my desk. I even got it autographed. Their delay in making a movie of this classic astounds me. That was where I first learned the magic of literature.

“Insulation level are specified by R-Value. R-Value is a measure of insulation's ability to resist heat traveling through it.” What authority in that sentence! . . .

I remember curling up with [“Recommended Levels of Insulation”] and reading it over and over again. It was this that drove me to pursue writing as a career — the hope one day of crafting a sentence that sang the way “Drill holes in the sheathing and blow insulation into the empty wall cavity before installing the new siding and” sings.

But I doubt I will ever achieve this lambent perfection.

Look, I was an English major, so I may be biased. . . . [But l]ife is full of enough instruction manuals.

The best way to understand what words can do is to see them in their natural habitat, not constrained in the dull straitjackets of legalese and regulationish and manualect. . . . Words in regulations and manuals have been mangled and tortured and bent into unnatural positions, and the later you have to discover such cruelty, the better.

The people behind the core have sought to defend it, saying that this was not meant to supplant literature. This increased emphasis on nonfiction would not be a concern if the core worked the way it was supposed to, with teachers in other disciplines like math and science assigning the hard technical texts that went along with their subjects.

But teachers worry that this will not happen. Principals seem to be having trouble comprehending the requirement themselves. Besides, the other teachers are too busy, well, teaching their subjects to inflict technical manuals on their students too, and they may expect the English department to pick up the slack. And hence the great Purge of Literature . . .

All in all, . . . a great way to make the kids who like reading hate reading.

[But, hey, t]hat’s certainly one way of addressing the reading gap.

Read more here.

By the way: Is Petri overstating the case or misstating what the Educrats are really demanding?

I urge you to read the links in the article itself. The last one, in particular, makes clear: those who wrote the standards "didn't intend" them to be implemented in the manner Petri suggests. But who cares? It's how they are being implemented that matters.

Yes, the standards do require increasing amounts of nonfiction, [said David Coleman, who led the effort to write the standards with a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation]. But that refers to reading across all subjects, he said.

Teachers in social studies, science and math should require more reading, which would allow English teachers to continue to assign literature, he said.

The standards explicitly say that Shakespeare and classic American literature should be taught, Coleman said. “It does really concern me that these facts are not as clear as they should be.”

In practice, the burden of teaching the nonfiction texts is falling to English teachers, said Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University: “You have chemistry teachers, history teachers saying, ‘We’re not going to teach reading and writing, we have to teach our subject matter. That’s what you English teachers do.’ ”

Sheridan Blau, a professor at Teachers College at Columbia University, said teachers across the country have told him that their principals are insisting that English teachers make 70 percent of their readings nonfiction. “The effect of the new standards is to drive literature out of the English classroom,” he said.

Jonah

It's been almost a month since I read Jonah as part of my reading-through-the-Bible-in-a-year program. At the time, the thought hit me: What if . . . ? What if Jonah is not history (as I think I was encouraged to believe as a youngster), but, rather, more like a vision--like the dreams and visions of Daniel . . . or the Apocalypse of John?

I'm not completely sure why the thought hit me.

Partially, I'm sure, it was because I had read Daniel only about a week before, so his dreams and visions were still rather fresh in mind.

Another reason why the thought may have hit me: Throughout my reading of the Old Testament, I have kept being reminded of some of the things Lamoureux said about the ancient Hebrew and ancient near-eastern cosmology. (I still have to finish my series on Lamoureux's book. Let it suffice for me to say: Lamoureux asserts that [many of] the ancient Hebrews and [many of] the people living in the ancient near-east viewed the world very differently than we do today. Thus, for example, when Daniel speaks [Daniel 4:10-11, 20] of a tree that appears in the middle of the earth/land that grows so large that it is able to reach to the sky and be visible to the end of the entire earth/land--"Obviously," says Lamoureux, "there is no 'center' on the surface of a sphere. Only in the context of a two-dimensional circular earth does this verse make sense. . . . But again, the purpose of the Bible is not to disclose science and the shape of the earth. . . . [Rather,] the Holy Spirit descended to Nebuchadnezzar's level and used the geology-of-the-day. . . . Only in the context of a flat earth with ends does this passage make sense. On a spherical planet, it is not possible to see the 'whole' earth from any tree, no matter how tall it might be" [Denis O. Lamoureux, Evolutionary Creation, pp. 116-117].) --I've been "testing" Lamoureux's thesis: Do I believe--and, supposing I do, why do I believe--that someone in the ancient near east (a Jew) would have believed that this, that, or the next passage was really "teaching" or "revealing" a literal cosmology? [For example, did the writer of Psalm 78:23--"Yet He commanded the clouds above/And opened the doors of heaven"--really believe in some kind of literal ("real") "doors" in heaven? Or could he have "simply" been using imagistic language?])

And so, in Jonah, I began thinking:

• Jonah says he fears YHWH the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land (1:9), and yet he is trying to flee from the presence of this God (v. 10). --What kind of worldview must he have had if he could both believe that YHWH is the God of heaven and He created the sea and the dry land . . . and yet Jonah is trying to flee from Him? (???)
   
• What kind of view of nature did the author--and/or Jonah and/or the seamen who tossed him into the sea-- . . . What kind of view of nature must any of these people have had for Jonah to say (1:12), "Pick me up and hurl me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you" and/or for the author to write (1:15), "So they picked up Jonah and hurled him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging"? --Are these expressions indications of possible animistic worldviews in which the sea has a mind or spirit of its own?
   
• God appoints a great fish to swallow Jonah . . . and Jonah remains in the fish's belly for three days and three nights. --Clearly, this should at least raise a question about the physical difficulties of survival associated with living inside a fish--no matter how large it may be--for any extended period of time. (From where was Jonah supposed to get his air?)

But the point at which my mind really shifted was at Jonah 2:10:

And [YHWH] spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.

--Somehow, the image of a great fish being able to vomit a man out so that he lands directly on dry land . . . and so he doesn't have to first swim to the dry land or wash up on the dry land: I got an image in my mind of some late medieval artist's woodcut illustration of the event--where the fish sits upon the water and spits Jonah out. . . . And I got thinking: "Wait! Is this whole book more of a vision or a kind of 'moral tale' than it is a story of literal history?"

And as I read on into chapters 3 and 4, I came to think more and more that the question could--and probably should--be answered in the affirmative: This has more to do with God teaching us about the kinds of attitudes we ought to bear toward others than it does with any kind of literal cosmology.

Why? What evidence--or potential evidence--would lead me in such a direction?

[Let me note that what follows is my thinking. I have not done any research to find what other people have said (though I have done just enough looking online, now, to realize--what probably shouldn't come as a surprise to me, but, due to my background, actually is--that many others have thought the same thing that I am simply "toying" with, here (i.e., that Jonah may not be literal history).]

• "Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days' journey in breadth" (3:3; NOTE: there are reasons for questioning whether the text really means three days' journey in breadth. It is possible it could mean something else--like, perhaps, "it took three days to walk around and see everything in it" [something like that]. But the next verse--which I'm about to quote--seems to speak against such alternatives). And (3:4), "Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's journey."
  
  --???!!! Was there such a large city anywhere in the world at that time? A city that would take three days to traverse? Even today: Is there any such city that would take three days to walk through? --Or should we view this reference to "Nineveh" as more of a vision of some quintessentially huge and wicked city (or civilization)?
   
• Can I imagine any king, anywhere responding as the Book of Jonah suggests the king of Nineveh responded to the kind of message we are told Jonah preached? Some foreigner comes in and says, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!" and the king arises from his throne, removes his robe, covers himself with sackcloth, sits in ashes, and proclaims, "Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything. Let them not feed or drink water, but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and let them call out mightily to God. Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish"?
  
  Sorry! That is really difficult for me to imagine. --It is certainly beyond my imagination as literal, "normal" history (which, of course, means: the only way this could possibly be history and not a vision is if God performed a truly astonishing miracle, perhaps sending a spirit of fear that completely unnerved the Ninevites [including their king]).
  
  

  [I should probably comment: Whether you want to call it a "spirit" or some kind of brain chemical imbalance, I know that only a day or two after I read Jonah, I woke up in the middle of the night--about 3 a.m.--and was fine. But then, suddenly, completely out of the blue, I felt the most awful, dark dread roll over me. Not fear, in the sense of feeling a "presence" "out there" that was coming to get me. Rather, some internal feeling of despair and darkness, a strange fear that maybe I would become so depressed that I would commit suicide. --Totally irrational. Totally without objective basis. But the feeling was there nonetheless. Absolute despair.
  
  Eventually, not wanting to awaken Sarita, I got up and began reading. My mental state lifted somewhat. Finally, at about 4:30 in the morning, I found myself both exhausted and feeling the need to move my bowels. Taking care of that business, suddenly: no more dark thoughts.
  
  I went back to bed, slept soundly for another hour and a half or two, and have been fine ever since.
  
  . . . So why did I go into those details? --Because I can imagine a similar overpowering "spirit" could come upon a political leader . . . or upon a whole nation . . . and they might behave as the Book of Jonah describes the Ninevites as behaving. . . .]

  But that is not "normal" history. Kings of mighty civilizations don't usually nor suddenly begin to quake in their boots because some foreigner comes to town and begins to say that the civilization is about to be overthrown. More usually, they respond defiantly and/or dismissively--as does the pharaoh in the Book of Exodus.
  
  So, as I noted above, though I want to be open to the possibility Jonah is "real"/literal history, I also sense and see evidence for the possibility--maybe even probability--that it is "something else" . . . perhaps, as I suggested above, some kind of "vision" or "apocalyptic."

Having said all that, however, I am up against the problems of the "slippery slope" ("If you're going to reinterpret Jonah--which sounds so much like literal/real history--as something other than literal history, then where do you end? Doesn't that open you to interpreting absolutely any- and everything in the Bible as something other than literal/real history?") and what about Jesus' comments that equate His death and resurrection to Jonah ("For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" [Matthew 12:40] and, "For as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so will the Son of Man be to this generation" [Luke 11:30])?

Yeah. Tough questions. And the main reason I haven't posted till now: These questions bother(ed) me too much to feel comfortable even to mention the thought that had niggled and continues to niggle at my brain.

But that's one of the reasons I like the Sonlighters Club forums and the entire blogosphere: I can raise these kinds of questions among friends (and, I realize, potential enemies!) who can help me work through issues, provide input both pro and con any particular viewpoint. . . .

So what initial replies do I have to these two key questions/critiques concerning the idea that Jonah might be more visionary than literal?

1. Even the most ardent biblical literalists admit that, though "Most often, the biblical authors employed literal statements to communicate their ideas," still, "the biblical writers often used figurative language to communicate truth in a graphic way" (Hank Hanegraaff in his article about biblical hermeneutics titled L-I-G-H-T-S to The Word of God--referenced as a foundational source by one of the world's leading Young-Earth Creationist/literalist organizations, Answers in Genesis).
   
   Still, while Hanegraaff, for example, says that "in most cases, the meaning of such language is clear from the context," obviously, it isn't always clear . . . so we are left to wonder and puzzle these things out under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. There is no purely and wholly mechanical method by which we can determine whether a particular passage is to be taken literally or not.
    
2. As for the problem of Jesus' references back to Jonah, I wonder: Is it necessary for Jonah to be literally historical in order for Jesus' references to bear weight?
   
   [Actually, it was this question, that I have just raised, that has held me back from posting for this past month.]
   
   --I have no good answers nor hints of answers.
   
   Do you?
   
   
This kind of thinking and questioning, frankly, is scary to me. I have never been taught to question--or how, properly, to question Scripture in this way. But, somehow, I think it is important that we learn to do so . . . and how to do so.

It is important so that we can "be prepared with an answer" to those from the "outside" who will raise these questions for us. --I think we, who believe in and desire with all our hearts to follow God and follow His Scriptures: We need to be able to confront these kinds of questions fairly, dispassionately, and without fear.

It is important, too, I think, so that we can interpret Scripture rightly and so we can follow God with all our hearts, with all our souls, with all our minds, and with all our strengths. We ought not to feel we can follow it (and Him) only with our hearts but not with our minds (for example). And/or, we ought not to feel we can follow it (and Him) only half-heartedly and/or "half-mindedly."

--Any ideas or thoughts you'd like to provide?

[Please understand that, if you are reading this on Facebook, it appeared first on my personal blog.]

How we talk with our kids

Due to my relationship with the literature-based, internationally-oriented Sonlight Curriculum homeschool program (I'm co-founder with my wife, and a co-owner), I still spend a significant amount of time "meditating" on what goes on over there.

So I noticed a series of posts on the Sonlighters Club forums about how some parents talk with their kids.

I was once talking with my 6-year-old son in line at a store. I didn't realize the vocabulary we were using, to be honest.

The lady behind us asked if I talk to him all the time like that.

I asked what she meant. I wasn't scolding him or anything like that.

She said, "Does he really understand all those words you are using?"

My son said, "Sure, don't you?"

I was both proud and a little embarassed.

As I thought more about it, I realized that his vocabulary was in large part from the books we read.

And then, in response:

I have to agree! My 5-year-old has the best vocabulary at her age of any of my children. Not that the rest were shabby, but listening to good Sonlight books since she was 9 months old certainly hasn't hurt!

Our families are always laughing at her word choices. She has no idea the words she uses aren't typical 5-year-old vocabulary.

It got me thinking that this was the way we always talked with our kids, too. Never "down" to them. Oh, yes, add explanation when and as necessary. But mostly just talk like you'd talk to any adult . . . even if they are four or five years old.

It sets them up to speak confidently with other adults . . . as I also like to remember. (Thinking of our daughter's swim coach when she was 7 or 8 years old. He turned to Sarita in amazement: "Your daughter walks up to me [though she came only up to his belt buckle], looks me in the eye and talks to me as if she was an adult. Totally respectful and all, but I'm just not used to kids being able to do that!")

Yay homeschooling!
*******
Hey. While I'm on this kick. Let me mention another beautiful story I just read, written by a new homeschooling mom.

Monday, we spent the entire day out in the woods exploring, listening, fastening weed wackers out of sticks, spying a falcon high in the branches, a yellow and black spider, a woolly worm, blazing new trails, and having the most wonderful time together. Then the three children (11, 8, and 4) worked together to build a teepee out of branches found in the woods.

Today we were back in the books and the olders were asking, "Can I read another chapter?" and I finished the book.

They are delighted that they know the countries of "Southwest Asia" and talk about the characters and story lines from the readers and read-alouds like they are friends.

We are in total suspense to find out what happens to Ranofer [a character in one of the books they are reading--JAH]. They are begging me to read on.

I love these moments.

Yep.

And then another mom replied,

Son (5) and I went to the hardware store to buy some treehouse making supplies. My husband and son worked on that this afternoon.

Talk about one excited boy!

Of course, we read half a book and did lots of other things throughout the day.

What rich lives we have!

Oh, yes!

And then a third mom:

Isn't it great?! We took a "day off" last week to build a shed. There is LOTS of math in shed building.

Oh, to be young again and to do it all over!