AP English Language/American Literature:
In my junior English class, a course in which we analyze rhetoric and in which we've begun the year by discussing Tim O'Brien's definitions of fact and fiction -- "happening-truth" and "story-truth" -- I asked my class to read "The Names" by Billy Collins and a Huffington Post article on September 11 First Responders. Here are both texts:
For homework, I asked the students to answer, in a wiki post, the following question:
Read "The Names," a poem about Sept. 11 by Billy Collins and then read the _HuffPost_ article about Sept. 11 first responders. Which text had a greater effect on you and why? Was that effect emotional or cerebral? Explain your answer in a paragraph, citing specific proof from the text(s).
The assignment enabled me to broaden students' knowledge about September 11, expose them to poetry, and test them on skills I want them to develop, such as the ability to analyze their own response to what they're reading and to use proper textual proof in their arguments.
The 9/11 Memorial
AP Art History
In AP Art History, we are about to begin studying the art of the ancient Near East, and so on September 11, I used the day to discuss the way war is depicted in the ancient world -- how it is glorified by leaders who use battles to show themselves as powerful men who have the favor of the gods and a ruthless ability to destroy enemies. I then took the students through the following slideshow, which was compiled by my art history students last year:
The slideshow culminates with Maya Ying Lin's Vietnam Memorial and the 9/11 Memorial, so students are able to see that the emphasis in war has shifted from the celebration of a leader's exploits to the mourning of the loss of the common soldier or civilian. This shift represents a radical change in view about what and who is important in battle.
The lesson on the 9/11 Memorial also allows me to introduce the concept of the use of water and landscape elements in the design of an architectural environment. For example, the deep abyss into which the water in the 9/11 Memorial falls reminds the viewer of the awful way the victims perished, but the water also represents rebirth and renewal. The trees surrounding the waterfalls are additional symbols of rebirth and renewal: they are all deciduous and so shed and grow leaves in the fall and spring. The landscape designer used, as well, trees from Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania, in order to include all victims of the day in the New York memorial. The slideshow linked above has more information about this moving tribute to the victims of September 11.
Yehuda Amichai is a famous Israeli poet (1924-2000) who embraced the instability of the postmodern movement. His poems reveal the self-awareness and dearth of simple answers that the postmodern movement is often known for. During a unit on postmodernism during which my students discussed White Noise and became acquainted with works from the postmodern era, I thought it would be interesting for them to see how a secular Israeli contributed to postmodernism. Following the poems, though, is an excerpt -- with a link to the full text -- of a speech on messianism by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. Rabbi Sacks addresses what it means to be a religious person in a postmodern world and the role that Judaism has played in filling the chasms left by any philosophies which are nihilistic.
Famous Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai
The Diameter of the Bomb
Yehuda Amichai
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters and the diameter of its effective range – about seven meters. And in it four dead and eleven wounded. And around them in a greater circle of pain and time are scattered two hospitals and one cemetery. But the young woman who was buried where she came from over a hundred kilometres away enlarges the circle greatly. And the lone man who weeps over her death in a far corner of a distant country includes the whole world in the circle. And I won’t speak at all about the crying of orphans that reaches to the seat of God and from there onward, making the circle without end and without God.
(Translated from the Hebrew by Yehuda Amichai and Ted Hughes.)
Temporary Poem of My Time
Yehuda Amichai
Hebrew writing and Arabic writing go from east to west, Latin writing, from west to east. Languages are like cats: You must not stroke their hair the wrong way. The clouds come from the sea, the hot wind from the desert, The trees bend in the wind, And stones fly from all four winds, Into all four winds. They throw stones, Throw this land, one at the other, But the land always falls back to the land. They throw the land, want to get rid of it. Its stones, its soil, but you can't get rid of it. They throw stones, throw stones at me In 1936, 1938, 1948, 1988, Semites throw at Semites and anti-Semites at anti-Semites, Evil men throw and just men throw, Sinners throw and tempters throw, Geologists throw and theologists throw, Archaelogists throw and archhooligans throw, Kidneys throw stones and gall bladders throw, Head stones and forehead stones and the heart of a stone, Stones shaped like a screaming mouth And stones fitting your eyes Like a pair of glasses, The past throws stones at the future, And all of them fall on the present. Weeping stones and laughing gravel stones, Even God in the Bible threw stones, Even the Urim and Tumim were thrown And got stuck in the beastplate of justice, And Herod threw stones and what came out was a Temple. Oh, the poem of stone sadness Oh, the poem thrown on the stones Oh, the poem of thrown stones. Is there in this land A stone that was never thrown And never built and never overturned And never uncovered and never discovered And never screamed from a wall and never discarded by the builders And never closed on top of a grave and never lay under lovers And never turned into a cornerstone? Please do not throw any more stones, You are moving the land, The holy, whole, open land, You are moving it to the sea And the sea doesn't want it The sea says, not in me. Please throw little stones, Throw snail fossils, throw gravel, Justice or injustice from the quarries of Migdal Tsedek, Throw soft stones, throw sweet clods, Throw limestone, throw clay, Throw sand of the seashore, Throw dust of the desert, throw rust, Throw soil, throw wind, Throw air, throw nothing Until your hands are weary And the war is weary And even peace will be weary and will be.
The following poem offers a more redemptive moment, if man will only seize the opportunity to bring it about. The poem makes an interesting comparison with Rabbi Sacks' speech on messianism:
Tourists
Yehuda Amichai Visits of condolence is all we get from them. They squat at the Holocaust Memorial, They put on grave faces at the Wailing Wall And they laugh behind heavy curtains In their hotels. They have their pictures taken Together with our famous dead At Rachel’s Tomb and Herzl’s Tomb And on the top of Ammunition Hill. They weep over our sweet boys And lust over our tough girls And hang up their underwear To dry quickly In cool, blue bathrooms.
Once I sat on the steps by a gate at David’s Tower, I placed my two heavy baskets at my side. A group of tourists was standing around their guide and I became their target marker. “You see that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there’s an arch from the Roman period. Just right of his head.” “But he’s moving, he’s moving!” I said to myself: redemption will come only if their guide tells them, “You see that arch from the Roman period? It’s not important: but next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who’s bought fruit and vegetables for his family.”
Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks From Faith Lectures: The Messianic Idea Today
“The other thing is that when we say ‘not yet’ but will we still say, im kol zeh echakeh lo bechol yom sheyavo – af al pi ken – we still await him daily – is the refusal to accept the second alternative which is the world we inhabit today which is the world of Postmodernism in which there are no ultimate meanings. Postmodernism is the rejection of the redemption narrative. “Postmodernism”, says Jean-Paul Lyotard, means the distrust of meta-narratives.” “Postmodernism,” says George Steiner in his latest book “Grammars of Creation”, “is the eclipse of the Messianic.” And we say: No. We do not say the ultimate meaning is the world we live in today where meanings are essentially private, whether they be therapeutic, Buddhist, New Age or any other alternative. We say that the meanings of our world are not private: they are shared. They are something we call the common good.”
Thanks to my student Penina Warburg for locating this article for our class.
How do we respond as Jews to the lack of clear narrative in the postmodern meta-narrative?
Part I. Philosophy
Now look, let me remind you of just a few of the differences I charted between the language of philosophy and the language of Judaism. Just to quickly sum it up. I have said that:
* Philosophy is about impersonal truth. Judaism is about personal truth.
* Philosophy is about detached observation. Judaism is about engaged participation.
* Philosophy is about a single ideal picture of the world. Judaism is about the irreducible multiplicity of perspectives.
* Philosophy searches for truths that are universal. Judaism articulates truths that are particular.
* Philosophy is about the discovery of harmony. Judaism is about cognitive dissonance.
* Philosophy is about the truths that we see. Judaism is about the truths that we hear.
* Philosophy is about truths thought. Judaism is about truths lived.
* Philosophy sees knowledge as cognition. Judaism sees knowledge as relationship.
* It follows that if philosophy is about the conquest of ignorance, Judaism is about the redemption of solitude.
You know, one could go on and on about those differences but it seems to me that those are just a few – and probably enough – to show you that there really is something fundamentally different about the way Judaism relates to the world and the way Plato and Descartes and their followers did, and that it is too little understood and far too little studied.
Part II. Cyclical time vs. linear time
Now the important thing about cyclical time is that it has a philosophy to it. Namely, that beneath all these changes that we see in nature and even in the human life cycle from birth to youth to maturity to decline and death and the new birth – all of those record changes beneath which there is an underlying order. Things actually don’t change. The cast of characters changes but cyclical time is time that endlessly repeats itself. And that is the philosophy behind the world of myth. It is the philosophy behind the world of philosophy. And it is the philosophy behind the world of science. Myth, science, are both different ways of discovering an unchanging order beneath the apparent chaos.
[C]yclical time [is] a world of eternal recurrences and that is the world that never changes and, to a certain extent, halachah, Jewish law, certainly as it relates to ben adam lemakom – to our relationship to God – Jewish law, in that sense, does not change. To ask a question of whether something is kosher or treif is, I think, more or less guaranteed to be fairly similar whether you ask the question in 2001, 1001 or 3001. I think so. Although the person who taught me for smichah always used to say, ‘Whatever it is, eat it today because tomorrow it will be treif’! That is cyclical time. And in that we claim no originality. We borrowed that from other time. That is cyclical time.
Anyway, this particular time I am going to call – because most people call it that and I am going to do so by way of shorthand – this time is called ‘linear time’. And the Torah has a marvellous way of fixing the moment when linear time begins. When God says to Abraham, Lech lecha me’artzecha mimoledetecha mibeis avicha el ha’aretz asher erecka – Leave your land, your birthplace and your father’s house and go to the land which I will show you, that is the birth of a concept of time as a journey. Time as a way of travelling towards a destination. Time as a narrative that has a beginning, middle and an end. That is a revolutionary concept of time born in Judaism and a very important one indeed.
That, I think, is actually at least a little fragment of the truth because God was telling Abraham to leave behind all the things that determine our future. That seem to suggest that we have no choice in what we become, that are deterministic. And He is saying to Abraham: Leave that world and embark on a journey of radical freedom.
Now, the question is: Why? What was it about Judaism that allowed Jews to come up with or to hear or to respond to this radically new concept of time according to which the future does not endlessly recapitulate the past? And the answer, I think, is simple. Here it is. Until Judaism, God had been seen in nature. With Judaism, for the first time, God is seen as above, or beyond, nature. If God is above nature, then God is not bound by nature. In other words, God is free. In other words, what is interesting about God and important about Him, is His choice, His will, His creativity. God chooses – asher bochar bonu micol ho’amim etc. etc. – God wills. Veyomer elokim yehi – God said, “Let there be”. God creates. Bereishit barah. Those are the key things about Judaism and you cannot find them in the universe of myth because choice, creativity and will are aspects of a Being that is somehow above nature, not determined by natural laws.
It therefore follows that if human beings are betzelem elokim – they share the image and the nature of God – then we too, for the first time, were able to see ourselves as beings with the capacity to choose, to will and to create. And that remains the single most striking – and I think most controversial, even to this day – of Judaism’s assertions.
Anyway, every attempt to reduce human behaviour to science or to pseudo-science is a failure to understand the nature of human freedom, of human agency, of human responsibility. A failure to understand that what makes us human is that we have will, we have choice, we have creativity. Every single attempt – socio-biological, genetic etc., and they are published by the hundred every single year – represents the failure to distinguish between a cause and an intention. Between phenomena whose causes lie in the past: those are scientific phenomena – and human behaviour, which is oriented towards the future. A future which only exists because I can imagine it and because I can imagine it I can choose to bring it about. That is in principle not subject to scientific causal analysis. And that is the root of human freedom. Because human beings are free – therefore we are not condemned to eternal recurrence. We can act differently today from the way we did yesterday – in small ways individually, in very big ways collectively. Because we can change ourselves, we can change the world.
And in that capacity, to change the world, cyclical time is transcended by linear time which says that because I can change, the world can change, and therefore I can move from where I am now to where I would like to be ultimately. That is where linear time is born. That is where hope is born and that is the incredible concept, the Jewish drama of redemption.
Now, I just want to give you a ‘for instance’ of the difference that makes, and here it is. If I were to ask you: What is the greatest contribution of the Greeks to literature? What genre? – what would you say. Tragedy? Yes. Exactly. That is the unsurpassed achievement of Sophocles, Aeschylus and the rest. Tragedy. Now tragedy belongs to cyclical time. It takes a very specific view of the world, which is that the world is fated more or less to remain the same. That is called moyra. That is called fate. And every belief that we have that we can somehow resist fate is what the Greeks called hubris and is punished by nemesis. All our dreams of changing the world are destined to be shipwrecked on the hard rocks of reality.
What is the Hebrew word for tragedy? There isn’t one, actually. Gevalt! You know how many words are missing from the Hebrew language? I’m sorry – again, I’m a little bit jetlagged. I’ve just come back from doing a big public dialogue with the Israeli writer Amos Oz and that was under the Chair of Judaism and Civility. And the fascinating thing is that when they came to translate that to Hebrew – [laughter] – they discovered there is no Jewish word for civility. There actually isn’t! They were in trouble! They came up with two alternatives: one was derech eretz; one was ezrachut. One means respect; one means citizenship. But there is no Jewish word for ‘civility’. But I should have known that.
Anyway, what is the Hebrew word for tragedy? Exactly! Tragedia! They couldn’t find a word for it. There is no Jewish word for tragedy because Judaism is the principled rejection of tragedy in the name of hope. And I find this extraordinary, that despite the many tragedies of Jewish history, there is no word. There are words for catastrophe. There’s a word like asson. There’s a word like churban. We have even borrowed a word from sacrificial stuff and use the word shoah. But not one of those words means what the Greek tragedy is about, namely bad things that happen because of the innate structure of reality which is fundamentally blind and deaf to human hopes and aspirations. There cannot be a Jewish tragedy. You can’t write it. It doesn’t translate.
In other words, at the heart of linear time is:
1. Human free will – because we can change ourselves, we can change the world.
2. The very structure of reality. Reality is not blind. It is not indifferent to us. It is that at the very heart of it there is a Presence, a Being, a Thou – Who cares, Who wants us to be here, Who assures us that our aspirations are not destined to fail.
3. And because of those critical tragedy-destroying concepts that we speak of ten days in the year, between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, the concepts of teshuvah and kapparah. I say I am sorry about the past and I am forgiven for the past. And teshuvah and kapparah between them help to ensure that no past determines our future. If we are sorry for the past and we are forgiven for the past, we have a new slate and we can begin again. No world in which teshuvah and kapparah exists has room for the concept of fate or tragedy.
So, as a result, the most striking thing Judaism ever taught the world was a concept of time which gave rise to the possibility of hope – and thereby gave the West an alternative to Greek culture, namely to tragedy. An alternative to tragedy as the meta-narrative of the human condition. And you will understand that what makes linear time different from cyclical time is that linear time is about history, whereas cyclical time is about nature. Cyclical time, I said, belongs to ish hahalachah, to the halachic mind. Linear time belongs to the ish nevuah, to the prophetic mind. And it signals that there can be real change in the course of human affairs, not superficial change but deep substantive and structural change.
And that, of course, constitutes the third great belief of Judaism: creation, revelation. This is the belief in redemption.
Now the difference between linear time and cyclical time – and let me just say it in slightly different words – is the difference ultimately between seeing the truth as a system and seeing the truth as a story. It is the difference between the platonic concept of philosophy as revealing timeless truth – and Torah, which is not a book in its prophetic aspect of timeless truth. It is a book about the realisation of truth through time.
Now the closing chapter of that story is of course yamot hameshiach – the Messianic Age. And, of course, what the Messianic Age is and what I am supposed to tell you tonight – I frankly give up on completely because it is one of the most hotly-debated topics in Judaism and you don’t want to know my views about it.
However, what you can say without shadow of doubt is, in answer to the questions ‘Has Moshiach come?’, the Jewish answer is ‘Not yet’. However, in that very ‘not yet’ are two monumental assertions. And this is what I want to say.
1. When we say ‘not yet’, we are saying no to any premature consolation, any willingness to settle for less than our vision of an ideal world. How can we say with Christian that the Messiah has come in a world still riven by violence, conflict, terrorism, inequality and injustice? How could we say, with that other great Jewish Messianic vision, Marxist Communism, that the world is saved by the mere withering of the state. I mean, for heaven’s sake! One is okay, one’s a nightmare. But we have been prepared always to say, ‘Not yet. We will not settle for premature consolations.’
2. The other thing is that when we say ‘not yet’ but will we still say, im kol zeh echakeh lo bechol yom sheyavo – af al pi ken – we still await him daily – is the refusal to accept the second alternative which is the world we inhabit today which is the world of Postmodernism in which there are no ultimate meanings. Postmodernism is the rejection of the redemption narrative. “Postmodernism”, says Jean-Paul Lyotard, means the distrust of meta-narratives.” “Postmodernism,” says George Steiner in his latest book “Grammars of Creation”, “is the eclipse of the Messianic.” And we say: No. We do not say the ultimate meaning is the world we live in today where meanings are essentially private, whether they be therapeutic, Buddhist, New Age or any other alternative. We say that the meanings of our world are not private: they are shared. They are something we call the common good.
And that means that we absolutely reject both those who think that salvation has come or is within reach and those who say there is no such thing. What is at stake in this Messianic narrative? I will tell you. What is at stake in the prophetic consciousness, the ish nevua, the linear imagination, the Jewish meta-narrative of redemption, I have here to differ to a man who put it so much better than I could – the non-Jewish writer Paul Johnson. This is what Paul Johnson says in the beginning of his book on Jewish history – and it is so true and so beautiful and here it is.
“No people has ever insisted more firmly than the Jews that history has a purpose and humanity a destiny. The Jews, therefore, stand right at the centre of the perennial attempt to give human life the dignity of a purpose.”
Tackling a Brave New World
First, a slideshow on Modernist art in order to help students understand how different visual artists responded to the new technologies of the early twentieth century:
Now a reading journal to help students understand the novel as they read it:
Finally, a great interview with Huxley in which he talks extensively about his writing process. The interview could spark students interested in creative writing, though parts about the author's use of a new drug called LSD might not be appropriate for student reading. Perhaps some careful selections of the interview would be appropriate:
These slideshows pertaining to Numbers are two ways to show that purity and holiness are at the center of the Israelite camp. The first slideshow depicts the Sinai desert and the possible routes scholars have suggested for the Israelite trek through the wilderness. It then compares encampments in the ancient world with the one set up by Israel, showing that at the center of Israel's life is the tabernacle, a symbol of and place for God, and that His holiness is the focus of Israelite life. The second slideshow discusses the placement of the Ordeal of the Adulteress in Numbers and then compares how ancient law codes deal with adultery as opposed to how the Torah views it. The major difference revealed is that adultery in the ancient world is viewed as a social sin, while the Torah views it as a tear in the moral/religious fabric of life as well and that is why it puts a priest, not a magistrate, in charge of dealing with an adulteress.
My AP English Literature students read White Noise by Don DeLillo over the summer. The following slideshow of postmodern artworks postmodernism will hopefully spur class discussion on the book, by enabling us to wrap our heads around postmodernism as a genre:
“That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.” -- Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Many public school teachers in America are gearing up for the new school year, scrambling to adhere to the new Common Core English Language Standards, the ones that demand that 50% of texts read in K-5 and 70% of texts read in 6-12 be non-fiction. I can only be grateful that I teach in a private school where I don't have to pay attention to the initiative created not by anyone who has cracked open a Shakespearean play in an English class, but by David Coleman, someone who was a business consultant for McKinsey and Company and who will be earning compensation of $750,000 a year as head of College Board.
I'm sorely grieved for anyone who does have to conform to the new Common Core, and I'm even more concerned about the fate of students who are learning in such a regimen.
I understand where the requirement is coming from: we're living in an age of information, and the idea is that students be able to successfully synthesize that information, to curate content in a sophisticated manner. But the Department of Education seems more and more to me like the Ministry of Magic, trying to get a job done right but blundering it in a most egregious way (and tomorrow's students may not understand that allusion, since it's from a work of fiction).
As much as American students have to be able to read and write, the most important thing they're going to have to do in the future is be creative and innovative. The New York Times reported in a recent article that robots are well on their way to replacing human workers. The article reveals that compared with a Philips Electronics factory on the coast of China, where "hundreds of workers use their hands and specialized tools to assemble electric shavers," a sister factory in Holland has "128 robot arms do the same work with yoga-like flexibility," performing tasks "well beyond the capability of the most dexterous humans" (Markoff). How quickly robots replace humans is a matter of debate, but my response as an educator to such an article is to make sure my students are capable of producing something original and creative, something that cannot be replaced with a machine.
In fact, if you view the following video on Social Innovation, you'll see that the future the present requires people who possess a myriad of cross-disciplinary talents:
A July 2010 article in Newsweek's The Daily Beast chronicles the falling levels of creativity in America's children. The Daily Beast reported that Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William and Mary analyzed almost 300,000 creativity scores of children and adults and found that until 1990 scores for creativity rose; however, since then scores have "inched downward," with the scores of children in the lower grades -- kindergarten through sixth grade -- showing the most serious decline.
Loss of creativity has severe ramifications. As The Daily Beast points out:
A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 "leadership competency" of the future. Yet it's not just about sustaining our nation's economic growth. All around us are matters of national and international importance that are crying out for creative solutions, from saving the Gulf of Mexico to bringing peace to Afghanistan to delivering health care. Such solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others. (Bronson, Merryman)
There's no doubt that non-fiction can foster creativity and awareness of the broader world. But how can anyone argue that fiction can't do the same? Why the hard-line insistence that 70% -- a huge number! -- of works in a grade 6-12 English class be non-fiction? I can guarantee you that fictional genres -- novels, plays, short stories, poems, art -- can also demonstrate how to think about important world issues and how to synthesize information about them. An example:
I teach a twelfth-grade English elective called Hot Topics, an English class that runs very much like a freshman composition course. During the first semester, the class focuses on the hot topic of medical ethics. Students read or watch:
* the novel Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
* a selection of non-fiction articles about America's sterilization program in the 1930's, the Nazis' sterilization and eugenics program, and the ethics of using Nazi medical data obtained through sadistic medical experiments
* the short story "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut
* the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
* the film Gattaca
* the non-fictional work The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
* numerous newspaper and magazine articles about genetic discrimination and the Genetic Discrimination Act of 2008
* selected readings by Michael J. Sandel, a political philosopher at Harvard University who wrote The Case against Perfection
My syllabus, which favors works of fiction, but includes non-fiction as well, makes students aware of the ethical issues facing us as we decode the human genome, experiment with stem cells and DNA, and even try to create synthetic life. As with the new Common Core standards, students learn to analyze, synthesize and curate the information they are given. They also continue their studies of literature, however, by exploring how authors use literary tools to present their views, how the imaginative force is evoked to convey profound truths about the human condition.
I can't imagine my course without its fictional works, and I don't want to. The students identify with Kathy and Tommy in Never Let Me Go, are outraged by the indifference society evinces towards clones who behave as any human would. In discussions of Never Let Me Go and Gattaca, the class and I analyze the way science fiction imagines technological "what if's" in order to create hellish dystopias that warn us of avarice unchecked by moral sensitivity and humility. Through fiction's use of imaginative settings, circumstances and character and of language that is nuanced, rich in word choice and often highly figurative, students learn about the issues humanity grapples with, and they do so in ways that are often more searing than when they read a non-fiction text. Non-fiction can educate and can even be deeply moving and engaging, but it doesn't offer a magical -- even if it is a sometimes darkly magical -- encounter.
Gattaca's slogan is "There is no gene for the human spirit."
The movie demonstrates that sometimes the facts -- what non-fiction offers --
don't always convey the whole truth.
And this brings me to my last and most important point. Humans seem innately wired to tell stories, to imagine the world in symbolic, non-literal ways.
Dating from about 28,000-10,000 BCE, the Hall of Bulls in the
Lascaux Cave in France shows animals from a twisted perspective.
The animals are depicted from a frontal and a side view.
This "lie" reveals the truth about what features the animals possess
and shows that facts are not always the best way
to understand something.
From the earliest cave paintings, with their representationally true, but not optically true forms, to the Homeric epics, which some say mark the beginning of Western civilization, humans have been depicting their world in ways that are simply not true. Maybe a great warrior such as Achilles lived, but it really doesn't matter if he did. To read the Iliad is to understand that fate is a capricious thing and that finding one's purpose in life does not always yield him every kind of success he can imagine. To read the Iliad is to dip into the realms of human creativity and emerge altered, with an understanding of some abiding universal truths.
I can synthesize information about Greek epics and myth and glean data about the Greek worldview from the Iliad, but that's not really the point of reading it. Something much more important is happening to my consciousness when I encounter a work of art with the kind of power that the Iliad has. And I can't imagine the disservice we do our students when we leave them on the dry sand of facts and data and prevent them from fully diving into the springs that brought forth and continue to give rise to such art.
I don't think everything about the Common Core Standards is evil and wrong, but I think it sacrifices too much that doesn't need to be sacrificed, depriving students of a valuable and, I would add, necessary connection to humanity's creative spirit, a spirit that they not only need for today's world but that artists through history have shown us is a natural and crucial part of what it means to be human.
My earlier assessment of the Department of Education, then, needs a modification: the Department of Ed. is not like the Ministry of Magic, it is more like the Ministry of NoMagic, and if it succeeds in forcing schools to align with Common Core, thereby depriving English class of most of its fictional content, I worry our students are in for a very dry spell.
For more information on the human need to be creative, see the following TED Talk:
For a scathing assessment of non-educator David Coleman's creation of Common Core Standards, click on the following link:
I just saw a Tweet that led me to a blog site with "Lists of Twelve." I'm having a hard time finding the site now, so I'm sorry I can't share it with you, but it's inspired me to create my own List of Twelve:
The Twelve Grammar Mistakes that will Convince Me You Are Not Ready for College/A Job.
Before I get to them, in the interest of fair play, you can follow the link below to a discussion in the New York Times about whether all students even need to be proficient in grammar.
If you agree that they don't, maybe you don't want to read on, but if you think some standardized form of communication is necessary among human beings, you might consider the following:
1) Use of the word irregardless: Problem: This is not a word. You think it's a word that's making you sound smart, but you're wrong. Just the opposite. Regardless is always the word you want to use.
2) Use of the expression between you and I: Problem: If you're using this expression, you have a problem similar to the first one. Using the word I doesn't always ensure grammatical correctness, though you're probably thinking, "But my teacher is always telling me not to say 'Me and my friends went to the movies' or 'Me and my friends had horrid salmon patties from the cafeteria today.'" True. That's because you should be saying "My friends and I saw The Dark Knight Rises" or "My friends and I trashed the art room during lunch break and are now suspended." You and your friends are the agents in those sentences and I, in the nominative pronoun case, shows the one who is completing the action.
Between, however, is a preposition and the pronoun after it is the object of the preposition, so it needs an objective case pronoun, one that shows someone is receiving the action, not doing it. If you don't understand any of that, just remember: between you and me. You'll get a point or two more on the SAT for knowing that.
3) Use of the expression besides for: Problem: This is not an expression. It's grammatical nonsense. Substitute either: aside from OR besides
Trust me on this.
4) Use of the word anyways: Problem: It's not a word. What you mean is: anyway
Always use anyway. Twirling your hair, batting your eyelashes and saying anyways may get the coolest guy in your class to ask you out, but it's not going to be welcome in the boardrooms of the world.
5) This is one of my personal favorites: Use of the word backround: Problem: You mean background, with a g before the r, because background means the back or the ground, so to speak, of the thing it is you're highlighting or putting in the foreground.
6) Use of the expression one in the same: Problem: Did you ever stop to think about what that means? Because one in the same makes no sense. How about if we change it to one AND the same because that's what the expression is trying to say: that two things are really one and the same. However, a better rule of thumb in writing is not to use trite, or overused, expressions. How about just saying what you want to say in your own, original words?
7) Misuse of loose/lose: Problem: Many people today are mixing up these words. I don't know why. But here's the thing: Loose means not tight. Lose means misplace, be defeated. Lose is not related to loose, so I have no idea why in some of their papers, students are saying Macbeth looses his kingship. No, he doesn't. His "borrowed robes" may be LOOSE, but he LOSES the kingship.
8) Misuse of choose/chose: Problem: Now this set of words is also frequently misused, but at least I understand this mistake more than the one in #7. Chose is the past tense of choose, but is it really so hard to get that straight? You know the stats of every single player on your fantasy football team and the stats of every single player on everyone else's. Can't you just stick this in your head with all that other information?
9) Misuse of everyday and every day: Problem: I don't want you to feel too bad about this mistake, because just about everyone in the world except the people editing the Oxford English Dictionary are making it. I've seen the mistake on everything from billboards to, recently in Boston, a restaurant sign, so you're in good company. But you're not in the company of good grammarians. Yet.
Everyday: ordinary
My everyday clothes aren't appropriate for the cocktail party.
Every day: Each and every day
I check my stocks every day to see how they're doing.
10) You could have predicted this would end up on the list: Misuse of its and it's: Problem: One is a possessive pronoun and one is a contraction. You win the bonus round if you can guess which is which. And you probably can, so why are you still mixing them up? In case you need a reminder:
its: possessive pronoun
The cat licked its fur.
it's: contraction of it is
It's certain that I'll be taken seriously if I know the difference between its and it's.
11) Misuse of where and were: Problem: I'm not quite sure when the adverb got mixed up with the verb, but here are what these two words mean:
where: adverb indicating place
I forgot where I left my glasses.
were: past tense of the verb are, a form of the verb, to be
The grammar mistakes in the essay were many and egregious.
12) Misuse of the words fewer and less and number and amount: Problem: I've grouped these words together, because the rules for using them are the same. Fewer and number are used for countable items, and less and amount are used for non-countable ones. What do I mean? An example:
There are fewer soda bottles than there are water bottles.
There is less soda than there is water.
The number of medals Michael Phelps won during the course of his career is incredible.
The amount of stamina Phelps has is also not to be believed.
I'd say a good place to begin cleaning up your writing this year is with this List of Twelve. And just to show you that many others are also making mistakes with their words, here's a cute article from the Wall Street Journal about student bloopers:
