General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Common Core teaches Gettysburg Address with no context or background. Unbelievable. [View all]Igel
(35,320 posts)1. It says "at the outset." It doesn't say "never."
This is a constructivist approach to the text. The kids build knowledge, they're not told what it means. If it's good writing, it's good writing even without the context.
It's an engage. "Here, let's see what you make of this." It's a way of raising questions. It draws attention to matters of style. It also requires that the kids develop inferencing skills that they sorely lack in many cases.
These are important considerations outside of English. Q.v. inf.
But if the kids never ask the text questions then they never really engage with it at more than a superficial level.
2. This is for an ELA class. Not a history class.
In my literature program close reading was an important skill. We'd approach the text cold. We'd know the author, and that might say something about the time it was written in. But we'd parse each word and syntagm looking for implications and inferences. Once adept at it, you develop a good sense as to when you don't know something. It's not infallible, but it was the second stage of close reading: You have your questions, you're ready to either be told the background to make sense out of everything or you're ready to head to the library to look up what you're missing. Think of it as building a kind of structure with gaps.
Third stage would be having the stuff filled in that we couldn't figure out, with the inevitable questions: Do you really need all this information to form an aesthetic judgment? What cues to your ignorance did you overlook?
3. Back to inferencing. At-risk and low-SES kids suck when it comes to reading non-fiction in their other classes. They've become adept at reading "relevant" literature and responding emotionally, taking sides that they support impressionistically, having their feeling valued as "authentic" and "relevant." This requires nothing more than getting the gist and then tracking down details to show you're right. This is a truly horrible approach to reading, and it shows in every other class that the kids take and in the quality of political and social discourse in this country for pretty much anybody under 40.
Then they get to texts that require not making the text fit their views but forcing themselves to understand in detail the argumentation and logic, to derive not only facts but the assumed facts, in history, in science, in math. They read a page in a dumbed down science textbook 3 or 4 times and still can't say what the main point is unless it's in a text box, boldfaced, and labelled as the "main point." Even then they can't show that they understand what that text-boxed text means, how to apply it, or even how the text arrives at it.
There's a real push to include non-fiction in ELA because of this "minor" problem. It hamstrings them when they get to college. It hamstrings them when they even try to read newspapers. It's not just that they're in a hurry to check a box and say they've gotten through the assignment, can they please have their good grade so they can go to more important trivia about who's talking to whom or the latest song by somebody that won't matter in 3 years. They really can't read, if we define "read" as more than "decoding" or even "finding validation."