New standards, old content-lite teaching










About Joanne


  1. says:

    Hey, hey we were winning the war. Okay, Antietam, Shiloh, but before that the South was winning the major engagements.

    • @Candi,

      I suppose it only shows the biased view that I’m coming from, but since the battles were fought primarily in the South, it guess I see it as a defensive war where they were holding the Union at bay, but not able to project offensive power or defeat the naval blockade.

      But the power of having solid background knowledge is the ability to engage in a meaningful discussion about topics like this. Instead of offering superficial responses, as our children so often do.

  2. About now, E.D. Hirsch must be banging his head against the wall. These examples about the lack of background knowledge could be examples from his books.

  3. Non-fiction is NOT more important than fiction. Only someone completely devoid of teaching experience, i.e. those with CC curriculum to sell, would believe so.

  4. Non-fiction is not more important than fiction but it is equally important. In both cases, of course, unless the material is of high quality and relevant to the academic purpose, it is useless.

  5. <<<<Non-fiction is NOT more important than fiction.

    That's not the point. Broad background knowledge is essential to broad reading comprehension ability. We misconceive reading comprehension as a "skill" and a transferable skill that we can apply to any text. It's really not. You need to know a bit about the subject, and sometimes a lot about a subject, to make meaning. It doesn't take a lot of gaps and ambiguities for comprehension to break down. Thus, if an elementary school is not putting coherent subject matter (not merely random, skills-driven nonfiction) at the heart of literacy instruction, they're not teaching reading.

    Let's not start a war between fiction and nonfiction. They are not in opposition to each other. They are two sides of the same reading coin.