Tag Archives: literature

Hot Takes

books, Education, reading, Religion, thinking out loud, , ,

I am working on a longer post about my recent road trip read, Robert E. Lee and Me by Ty Seidule. But, I didn’t want to miss a few quick items that might be of interest.

    While there is some question as to whether the examples in Alanis Morissette’s song, Ironic?, are actually ironic, there is no question that the Superintendent of Public Instruction in Oklahoma has provided a classic example. The first act of his new Department of Religious Freedom and Patriotism is to force schools to show his prayer video to every student, teacher and parent. Most schools have refused and the Oklahoma Attorney General has said he overstepped his bounds. (His one concession was that he only encouraged, rather than required, the students to pray with him.) I hope the teachers tasked with teaching irony as part of the Oklahoma standards take note.

    Search, by Michelle Huneven, uses the story of one Unitarian Universalist congregation’s search for a minister as an exploration of the relationship between community and organization. Since the narrator is a food writer by day, the novel is full of wonderful descriptions of meals and includes recipes at the end. The book is funny, poignant and authentic, based on my own experience with the UUs, and, I should say, with other community focused organizations. Decision making becomes more challenging when it has to be made by people who supposedly share certain values and have equal say over the process and outcome. Huneven also explores the changing landscape of churches as they struggle to connect with younger people while maintaining the shared history and culture.

    Astrologers have been excited about today’s big move: Pluto, planet of death, destruction and transformation, moved from Capricorn, where it has been for 16 years, into Aquarius where it has not been for 200 years and where it will stay until 2043. Big changes are coming according to People magazine. We have to look at the abyss before we can rebuild the world. My astrologer of choice is Chani Nicholas, in case you were wondering. This, by the way, has nothing to do with the Age of Aquarius. But I’m including the song anyway for your enjoyment.

    More On Making Learning Relevant

    learning, reading, testing, ,

    Sometime after I posted the last entry on the relevance of Algebra, I was paging through a book catalog and it seemed like each page had at least one book that focused on how and why literature mattered. Here are just a few of the titles:

    I haven’t ordered any of them. I’ve already read Moby Dick and W.H. Auden and spent a lot of time teaching children Shakespeare. At some point I realized I was trying to turn them into English majors, when what I really wanted to do was help them learn to love reading the way I did. If, eventually, they found Melville and Auden and the Bard, so much the better. But to force it upon them meant it only led to the inevitable question of why they needed to read it in the first place.

    It is an interesting side note that the authors of these books are writers who were probably English majors at some point in their lives so perhaps the lesson here is that, if you plan to become a writer, then reading literature is part of the career path.

    And then there’s this blog entry from Edutopia just published today: Why Do We Need To Learn This? Allen Mendler offers strategies for answering the question that might diffuse the immediate situation but never gets to the heart of the answer which is that someone, somewhere decided that “this” was important for everyone to know and, as Mendler does point out, it is going to be on a high-stakes test:

    Upon hearing the “When will I ever use this?” refrain, a high school teacher I work with tells her students, “I’m not sure because I don’t know what you want to be in your life. But if you give me a list of everything you plan to do and accomplish, I’ll do my best to let you know when we cover something that I think you might use.” When kids say, “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” her response is, “Exactly. You might need it next week, next year or never. But it is going to be on Friday’s test, not because I want to make you miserable, but because at the end of the year, it is going to be on the state test, and if you want to pass, you need to know it.”

    So, you have to know it because I’m going to test it and later someone else is going to test it? I think this is probably the worst answer to the question but the most relevant in our high-stakes world and that just makes me sad.