The Big Idea, or Focus, Cross-Referenced to Basic Rules of Item Writing

What comes before preparation is intention, which we previously discussed here. Still, the concept of the Big Idea bears further exploration.

Let's consider how we might approach this grade 4 standard from the CCSS, RL.4.2:

Determine a theme of a story, drama, or poem from details in the text; summarize the text.

This standard is passage-dependent; students read a story, poem, or play (or excerpts of the same) and then answer questions about what they read.

This standard requires two distinct subskills: determining a theme and summarizing text. 

Either may be assessed with multiple-choice, constructed-response, or technology-enhanced items, although I note that in an ideal world, we wouldn't use multiple-choice for summarizing, but would instead ask students to create the summary. Again in that ideal world, it's best if we provide the student with opportunities to demonstrate mastery of a particular skill by allowing the student to perform the skill; however, we often operate under constraints that exclude the ideal. That's okay.

After we've read all of our ancillary support materials and have thoroughly acquainted ourselves with the story, poem, or play (for less experienced item writers and for all item writers without a strong background in literary analysis, I suggest making an outline of and annotating the passage in order to avoid the trap of writing superficial and repetitive items), we determine the theme(s). There may be more than one. Out of fairness, choose the strongest theme that is most clearly supported and most thoroughly developed in the passage. The theme may be stated explicitly or may be implied by the characters' words and actions.

Here is our passage, "A Boy's Song" by James Hogg.

    Where the pools are bright and deep,
    Where the gray trout lies asleep,
    Up the river and o'er the lea,
    That's the way for Billy and me.

    Where the blackbird sings the latest,
    Where the hawthorn blooms the sweetest,
    Where the nestlings chirp and flee,
    That's the way for Billy and me.

    Where the mowers mow the cleanest,
    Where the hay lies thick and greenest,
    There to trace the homeward bee,
    That's the way for Billy and me.

    Where the hazel bank is steepest,
    Where the shadow falls the deepest,
    Where the clustering nuts fall free.
    That's the way for Billy and me.

    Why the boys should drive away,
    Little sweet maidens from the play,
    Or love to banter and fight so well,
    That's the thing I never could tell.

    But this I know, I love to play,
    Through the meadow, among the hay;
    Up the water and o'er the lea,
    That's the way for Billy and me.

We would probably use call-out boxes to define some of the vocabulary--"lea" and "nestling" stand out as words likely to interfere with student understanding.

If we're writing a multiple-choice item, the stem will look like this:

What is a theme of the poem?

Or we might identify the poem only by its title ("What is a main theme of 'A Boy's Song'?") if we plan to write another item about genre characteristics ("How does the reader know 'A Boy's Song' is a poem?").

Often at the lower grades, we use "theme" and "main idea" as synonyms; depending on curriculum, grade 4 students may not yet be familiar with the specific terms for narrative elements, and we don't want to erect unnecessary obstacles for those students, so we might write a stem that looks like this:

What is a main idea of the story?

I prefer "a" rather than "the" in order to allow for variety in literary interpretation; we'd follow the client's preference on this. In this case, a clear theme is the joy of spending time in nature. Now we have a stem and the correct response:

What is a theme of the poem?
A the joy of spending time in nature
B [TK]
C [TK]
D [TK]

Next we'd write three distractors (wrong answers). Each distractor should have a rationale--that is, each should embody a specific mistake or breakdown in comprehension or literary analysis that might hinder a student en route to determining the theme. The rule in item writing is that, given the evidence in the text, distractors must be "plausible but not possible." The distractors should be clearly wrong to the student who is able to "determine a theme...from details in the text."

Many clients require item writers to provide rationales or justifications for the wrong answer; I support this wholeheartedly as valuable practice for inexperienced item writers. Experienced item writers have rationales in their minds already, so it's just a matter of typing them.

When we write the distractors, we must stay focused on our Big Idea. In order to do that, we'd consider the breakdowns that occur when students attempt to identify a theme. In order to do that, we'd think about the process of making meaning from text. We read the poem and step back and come up with the overarching meaning: the joy of spending time in nature. Then we think about how a student might falter in putting the pieces of the poem together to see that big picture. A student might get stuck on a detail of the poem, and mistake that for a theme. A student might confuse theme and subject. A student might focus too narrowly.

Next up: constructing plausible but not possible distractors.

What I'm reading: The Reivers by Faulkner and Imaginings of Sand by Andre Brinks.

Where Ask Is Have

That meaningful conversation about the Common Core Standards I was asking for?

Here it is, by Freddy Hiebert, of TextProject and the University of California at Santa Cruz, in her blog Frankly Freddy:

Acquiring knowledge is the raison d’etre of the Common Core. In the digital-global world, the “haves” are the ones who have knowledge and know how to acquire more knowledge. When you know something, you can build on this knowledge and in this way knowledge grows. Knowledge begets knowledge. The “have nots” are the ones who depend on others to filter their knowledge through talk radio, television shows, and conversation. (Hiebert, 2012)

The problem with the latter is obvious, for the boredom factor if nothing else: all those recycled opinions with no facts to back them up. The more you learn, the more you're curious about, the more you want to learn.

And so early access (or obstacles) to knowledge can change a kid's destiny:

In one sense the economic forces that have improved the lives of all minorities in America make the educational disparities more dire. The economy has become and is likely to remain “knowledge- driven”; making a living increasingly requires most individuals, regardless of race or gender, not only to pursue higher education, but to draw fully upon its resources to develop the kind of skills needed to compete and thrive in the job market (Hershberg, 1998; Murnane & Levy, 1997). Individuals unable to attend or finish college are, more than ever, at risk of being left behind (Fullilove & Treisman, 1990). The apparent irreversibility of the knowledge-driven economy underscores the importance of addressing the per- sistent underachievement of underrepresented minority stu- dents at all levels of schooling. (Fried et al, 2001)

At our house, we're constantly looking things up. Last night, we were walking the dog in the canyon. It was a starry night, and so we were talking about the stars, and the names of the constellations, and how these came from myth, and how none of us knew the real story of Cassiopeia. When we got home, we looked it up.

We look up ridiculous things, too. Yesterday morning, we were reading the New York Times online, and saw the great video by Bill Cunningham about shoes, and got interested in Fashion Week in New York, and looked it up.

Another night, the dog and I were walking with my youngest-by-five-minutes daughter, and she was telling me she wasn't good at English and writing.

Me: But you scored in the advanced category of the STAR test. You must know something.

Daughter the Second: I guessed. I don't understand it.

(Not that I believe that a test score is the final determination of what a kid knows or doesn't know; it is, as everyone in the industry agrees, merely a snapshot of student performance at a point in time. But I did think the score was a piece of data that I could use to bolster my argument.)

Then we agreed that for both of us, even if we know something about something, we don't feel like we really get it unless we have a thorough understanding of how it works.

We talked about it more. I told her the 7% story. I asked her if she felt she lacked the capacity to understand English and writing, if her brain worked in some way that prevented her from understanding it. She thought about that for a second, and then said, no, she probably could learn it.

Which brought us to talking about how so much information is available now, and which brings me to a favorite poem by Christopher Smart, "A Song to David":

A Song to David

   Sweet is the dew that falls betimes,
And drops upon the leafy limes;
      Sweet Hermon's fragrant air:
Sweet is the lily's silver bell,
And sweet the wakeful tapers smell
      That watch for early pray'r.

   Sweet the young nurse with love intense,
Which smiles o'er sleeping innocence;
      Sweet when the lost arrive:
Sweet the musician's ardour beats,
While his vague mind's in quest of sweets,
      The choicest flow'rs to hive.

   Sweeter in all the strains of love,
The language of thy turtle dove,
      Pair'd to thy swelling chord;
Sweeter with ev'ry grace endu'd,
The glory of thy gratitude,
      Respir'd unto the Lord.

   Strong is the horse upon his speed;
Strong in pursuit the rapid glede,
      Which makes at once his game:
Strong the tall ostrich on the ground;
Strong thro' the turbulent profound
      Shoots xiphias to his aim.

   Strong is the lion—like a coal
His eye-ball—like a bastion's mole
      His chest against the foes:
Strong, the gier-eagle on his sail,
Strong against tide, th' enormous whale
      Emerges as he goes.

   But stronger still, in earth and air,
And in the sea, the man of pray'r;
      And far beneath the tide;
And in the seat to faith assign'd,
Where ask is have, where seek is find,
Where knock is open wide.

   Beauteous the fleet before the gale;
Beauteous the multitudes in mail,
      Rank'd arms and crested heads:
Beauteous the garden's umbrage mild,
Walk, water, meditated wild,
      And all the bloomy beds.

   Beauteous the moon full on the lawn;
And beauteous, when the veil's withdrawn,
      The virgin to her spouse:
Beauteous the temple deck'd and fill'd,
When to the heav'n of heav'ns they build
      Their heart-directed vows.

   Beauteous, yea beauteous more than these,
The shepherd king upon his knees,
      For his momentous trust;
With wish of infinite conceit,
For man, beast, mute, the small and great,
      And prostrate dust to dust.

   Precious the bounteous widow's mite;
And precious, for extreme delight,
      The largess from the churl:
Precious the ruby's blushing blaze,
And alba's blest imperial rays,
      And pure cerulean pearl.

   Precious the penitential tear;
And precious is the sigh sincere,
      Acceptable to God:
And precious are the winning flow'rs,
In gladsome Israel's feast of bow'rs,
      Bound on the hallow'd sod.

   More precious that diviner part
Of David, ev'n the Lord's own heart,
      Great, beautiful, and new:
In all things where it was intent,
In all extremes, in each event,
      Proof—answ'ring true to true.

   Glorious the sun in mid career;
Glorious th' assembled fires appear;
      Glorious the comet's train:
Glorious the trumpet and alarm;
Glorious th' almighty stretch'd-out arm;
      Glorious th' enraptur'd main:

   Glorious the northern lights a-stream;
Glorious the song, when God's the theme;
      Glorious the thunder's roar:
Glorious hosanna from the den;
Glorious the catholic amen;
      Glorious the martyr's gore:

   Glorious—more glorious is the crown
Of Him that brought salvation down
      By meekness, call'd thy Son;
Thou that stupendous truth believ'd,
And now the matchless deed's achiev'd,
      Determin'd, dar'd, and done.

Are there any lines in literature more beautiful, more full of hope than these:
    But stronger still, in earth and air,
And in the sea, the man of pray'r;
      And far beneath the tide;
And in the seat to faith assign'd,
Where ask is have, where seek is find,
Where knock is open wide.

References
Aronson, J., Fried, C. and Good, C. (2001). Reducing the effects of negative stereotype threat on African American college students by shaping theories of intelligence. Journal of Experimental Psychology.
Hiebert, Elfrieda. (2012). It's not just informational text that shapes knowledge acquisition; the critical role of narrative text in the Common Core State Standards. Text Project.
Smart, Christopher. A song to David. Poetry Foundation.

If It's Broke

At Children's Book Insider, Laura Backes offers common problems in stories for children, which are common problems in all narrative writing (thin plot, bad plot, flat characters, and bland, obnoxious, or otherwise unappealing voice), and concludes with a reminder about the importance of a solid command of mechanics:

When submitting to an editor, grammatical errors can distract from an otherwise strong book. When self-publishing, they're the kiss of death. If you know you have problems with punctuation, spelling, subject/verb agreement, formatting dialogue, etc., hire a good copy editor to clean up your manuscript. There are people out there who live to fix these problems. Use them.

If these be the common problems, what are the solutions? Backes says exactly what I say to writers who ask me how to improve their writing: Read. Read a lot.

Find writers you like and read everything they wrote. If you skipped out on the great books in high school and college, consider taking another crack at them: Great Expectations, Pride and Prejudice, Anna Karenina--there are lists all over the place if you need ideas on what to read:

• 100 Novels everyone should read here.
• Information Is Beautiful on the books everyone must read here.

The reason people like them is that they are great stories beautifully written. A lot of them. I couldn't stand Herzog, but it always ends up on someone's list. In matters of taste there is no argument.

By the way, if anyone is ever looking for an editor, I know a few whom I highly recommend, whose work is so good and evidence of such knowledge and skill that I am dazzled. It may surprise you that one might be dazzled by the skillful wielding of grammar and punctuation, but thorough competence always does dazzle.

Words for the day:

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

Samuel Johnson hadn't seen the Occupational Outlook Handbook when he said that.

Thinking

The train is rolling into the station on our big passage writing project. As my co-conspirator partner-in-crime colleague cautions, it's too soon to uncork the champagne. There is still work to do, of course, in the immortal words of the Isley Brothers.

We have two other projects we're working on, too, so one train arrives for the disembarkation while another arrives and the passengers load up. And yet, we foresee a time when we'll have completed what we're doing now. Then what? We're thinking. We're big on thinking. In order to think, I always need to go looking for raw material to chip and chop. In that search, I found some items of interest:


SchoolTube: School videos. Who knew.
National Novel Writing Month: Coming up. Sharpen your pencils. And your wits.
First Book: Providing books to children in need.
National Writing Project: Writing prompts, resources, articles about writing and teaching writing.
Best Ever Teen Novels: Vote. Though how anyone could vote for anything else with To Kill a Mockingbird on the list is beyond me.


That's all I got. I'm going back in.

Simplify.

We all use shorthand communication. As much as I like to talk, there are times when I don't want to explain every single little detail of every single little thought process (in the immortal words of Voltaire, the secret of being a bore is to tell everything), and instead rely on the person I'm talking with to envision the shape of the glacier that lies beneath the surface.


When I went to that workshop on writing picture books for children, a writer was musing about how to refine language for a lower grade level. She said she needed to "dumb it down."


In the project I'm working on now, several writers have used that phrase about revising a text to be suitable for a lower grade level. (Not at all to single out any one writer in particular; I've heard it so many times now from so many different writers that I couldn't even say which said it when.)


These writers are thoughtful people. They're probably using shorthand. They probably mean to say "revise the language and syntax so that it works for the grade level."


Still, I can't help but react to that phrase. Writers can't afford to think that way about our audience. Habits of thinking create habits of being. And then we are what we repeatedly do (in the immortal words of Aristotle). This is really part of a bigger belief. How we use language affects (and may reflect) how we think. Edward Sapir suggested that our very view of the world is shaped by our language.


It comes back to intention. When writing for art or self-expression, a writer has the freedom to demand whatever he or she likes from the reader, and then the reader has the freedom to participate or not. Writing as a job--according to given specifications--doesn't allow for that.


In our case, we've got a captive audience (as discussed previously). And in the work of writing stories, poems, articles, and other types of text for reading tests, we're writing for a specific purpose. Of primary importance is integrity to the purpose: In a paper for Apex Learning on interpreting Lexile readabilities, Dr. Elfrieda Hiebert said that "the goal of writing and publishing texts for schools is to provide the most comprehensible text possible." If the integrity of the text can't be maintained simultaneously, then a new text is required. Because the integrity of the text is essential. But we have to have both, and the former can never be sacrificed to the latter.


What is developmentally appropriate changes rapidly and drastically from a child's first turn of a page through the journey to adult reading: picture books, chapter books, novels, textbooks, classics, technical manuals, employee handbooks, fifty-page volumes of health insurance gibberish. We wouldn't ask a 3rd grader to lift a suitcase weighing 50 pounds, and we shouldn't present a 3rd grader (4th grader, 5th grader, 6th grader) with text that is far beyond his or her knowledge and abilities. It's a bad practice that sets kids up for failure, and one that ultimately defeats our purpose.


This is one of the reasons writers who write for children should spend time with children of the same age as their target audience. Children are a lot smarter than we often think they are. They just haven't been reading as long as we have, so they aren't able to do the heavy lifting we're capable of. It's not to say they won't be able to do it one day. Certainly they will. But in order to get there, they have to start where they are. It's our job to meet them there.


If we must use shorthand for how we do that, I think I'd prefer "simplify."

The Ritual of Reading

I've been slow to embrace e-books. My first exposure came late: it was the textbooks I received as pdfs when, in 2009, I enrolled in prerequisite classes for sommelier certification. (I can't say I greeted the innovation with enthusiasm. Nor did the other students, all of whom printed out the whole dang thing to put in a 3-ring binder. There's something ludicrous about the sight of cloth-covered tables bearing wine glasses, spit buckets, and 3-ring binders.)

For someone who doesn't read e-books much, I sure do have a bunch of them. I blame the free section at Amazon's Kindle store.

My disinclination to read e-books isn't based in Luddite ideology; I love the concept. Whatever brings good is good, to my way of thinking. E-books make it easy for people to acquire and carry books. That I could carry my entire stock on an iPad is a great and wonderful thing.

I don't, though. Instead, I have stacks. Because, like probably everyone who loves to read, I have too many books for my bookshelves. How appetite often exceeds capacity, eh.

I like books. I like to look at the covers. I like pages, and I like how books are printed in different type. And even though the weight of books can become a burden, I like that weight.

And there's a ritual in reading an actual book.

Last night (or very early this morning), the dog and I made our rounds of the house. We checked on the sleeping girls and the sleeping lovebird, and we made sure the windows were locked and drapes drawn. During the rounds, I picked up a book I'd been meaning to start. We turned off all the lights except the lamp by my bed, and then the dog curled up at the foot of the bed and I got under the covers. It was dark, and the moon was high and bright, and the lamplight golden, and I read a few pages, then turned off the light and went to sleep.

More on this topic of How We Will Read here. Some really wonderful interviews.

File Under: Use with Caution, Cross-Referenced to: There's No Such Thing as Free

I understand why literature that is in the public domain finds favor in the eyes of assessment and curriculum publishing companies:

1. It's free! Who doesn't like free stuff? Besides, even when the content itself is free, the company still has to sink a lot of money into it. Passage selection, data entry, researching copyright to make sure it is in the public domain, proofreading, formatting, reviewing, preparing for external review, graphic design, QA. The process is more costly than the passage itself. 

2. The quality of the material is presumably not up for debate. Who's going to have the temerity to say that he or she doesn't think kids should read a poem by Emily Dickinson or Wordsworth? 

3. The writing is generally good to great. (I'm not talking about classics now, but about these unknown texts that I see excerpted from published essays, letters, stories.) Did people just write better 100 years ago? They certainly wrote differently. (More to come on this last.) 

Which all makes it sound like the world of public domain literature is a great big treasure chest of high-quality reading passages perfectly suited for assessment.


However. That treasure chest may be a little wooden Trojan horse wheeling in troubles unforeseen:

1. The world has changed a lot in the last 100-300 years. In terms of how we think about gender, race, social classes, social relationships, government, labor, marriage, families, values, religion, science, technology. International relations. Economics. And that's just a short list off the top of my head. Some of the attitudes and concepts are simply outdated and appear old-fashioned; others appear downright offensive or even cruel and oppressive. Not to mention the language, which brings us to the following. 

 2. How we use language has also changed. I do like the complicated architecture of the 17th-18th century sentence. I'm charmed by the ease with which Swift, Johnson, et al toss the polysyllabic words as if tossing handfuls of confetti in a parade of wits. But. This seems a matter for classroom instruction, rather than assessment--unless we know for a certainty that there has been thorough classroom instruction with texts of like complexity. 

3. How we use language has also changed. Part II. As attitudes evolve, language evolves. Attitudes and terms once considered acceptable are now considered intolerant and offensive, respectively. 

4. How we use language has also changed. Part III. Words once considered standard are now considered high-faluting and are relegated to the realm of academia or appropriate only in the most formal settings. So the content of a poem may be appropriate for a young child, but the vocabulary renders the poem too difficult to use for any grade lower than 10. We can't present high schoolers with literature written for elementary school children. 

5. Passage length may be a problem. When this happens, editors may excerpt from public domain material. Sometimes this results in text that lacks context or that appears choppy, with ideas that seem disconnected, even if this was not the case in the original text.

Should we teach students so that they are able to read classic literature? Anyone who knows me would respond with something along the lines of "Do the stars shine? Does my dog bark at the mail carrier? Is the sea salty?" Why, that would be a resounding yes.


Should we include classic literature on reading tests? That would be an affirmative, sir, especially if such inclusion is required by the standards to be assessed.


How about including literature of unfamiliar and complex syntax, unfamiliar and difficult vocabulary, and, possibly, questionable quality that may only be considered because it is in the public domain and therefore may be used freely with nary a by your leave? That's a negative.


All the publishing companies do it. I don't mean to pick on anyone in particular. And the Great Pineapple Debacle makes such public domain passage selection all the more attractive to publishing companies who would prefer (naturally, like all of us) to receive more positive attention than negative.


Balance is what we need. And thoughtful consideration of the passage, whether it might be of interest to the audience, whether its literary value outweighs its disadvantages, and whether we can unreservedly justify its use for this purpose. 

Start Where You Are

The first time my second daughter began to read To Kill a Mockingbird, she gave up within ten pages. She was in the fifth grade. The reading was so difficult that she got no pleasure from it. When she read it last year, in the 7th grade, she loved it.

When we started the homeschooling, my first daughter was reading The Great Gatsby and my second daughter was reading Rebecca. (Both were thrilled with their choices, but neither had much interest in the other's.) When they finished, I was thinking about what to suggest next. I wanted them to read the same book so our literature class would be more focused than it had been. I'd told a friend that my first daughter had loved a YA historical novel set at turn of the century, and my friend said why not Edith Wharton.

The plot of The Buccaneers seems perfect for 14-year-olds: a coterie of friends of differing temperaments and sensibilities poised at the brink of making life's big decisions.

But my daughters wanted to start reading right away, and we couldn't find The Buccaneers at any of the local bookstores, neither chain nor independent nor used. Not even our library had a copy. I'd loaned mine out and you know how that goes. We chose The Age of Innocence instead. 

Almost immediately, my second daughter said it was too hard. My first daughter agreed it was hard, but was willing to persevere. For two weeks, my second daughter lagged behind in her reading. Then, realizing her sister had left her in the dust, she buckled down to the task. This was two days ago.

As I was making dinner tonight, she showed me how few pages she had left to read (that would be three). In two days, she'd read more than 180 pages.

Me: What happened?

Second Daughter: I started liking it, and then I liked it so much I couldn't stop.

This happened to me with Moby Dick, though I was a much later bloomer. I'd tried to read it many times, from high school onward, but wasn't able to get past the first chapter (which is very unusual for me, I hate quitting a book, it just feels wrong) until I was nearly 30 and in grad school. Why? I have no idea. Maybe I was immature. Maybe it is simply that I would have loved it if I had persisted.

These matters sound little, but they are the matters that make up reading. What do we do when the text is just too difficult? How can we tell when the difficulty may be overcome once the reader is engaged, or whether the student needs to develop the muscles for the heavy lifting? If the latter, what's the best way to nudge the student into gaining skills and yet not push so hard that the student becomes discouraged?

I've talked previously about my remedial community college students, how some were surpassed by 4th graders when it came to writing skills. Ditto reading. It was a challenge. 

I tried to go at the problem in different ways. We read a lot in class. I assigned an anthology of short short fiction (Sudden Fiction) which they liked and actually did read. I often brought in copies of articles and essays from newspapers and magazines on topics that I thought they might like: "The Ways We Lie" by Stephanie Ericsson, "On Dumpster Diving" by Lars Eighner, "Starting Over with God" by Douglas Coupland, "Bet with America" by William "Upski" Wimsatt. I brought in stories by great writers who were also my friends: "Close Calls" by Josh Schneyer, "New Pants" by Jervey Tervalon, "Someone's Got Cold Feet" by Kia Penso.

Most of my students worked hard. Much of the reading was neither easy nor natural to them; Carol Jago talks about how we need to talk with students about working at reading and teach them how to persist in the face of polysyllabic words and complex syntax. Nor did we begin with what was most difficult--we started where they were.

And how should this relate to assessment? A friend (who's been in the business long enough and at enough different companies to see trends whisk in and fade away) and I were talking today about rigor and the Common Core Standards and how the standards require what many students simply aren't capable of. Yet. I certainly don't mean never. I just mean their skills need to get stronger. We wonder how states are going to address this problem.

We can't develop sophisticated rigorous tests that all but the top ten percent will fail. We can't develop simple less demanding tests that all but the lowest ten percent will pass. 

And yet we must expect more from our students in order that they develop the skills they'll need as adults, one of those skills simply being that of keeping at it even when it is hard to do.

Turn Up the Heat

A friend and her 4-year-old came to visit last week. While I was making dinner, the fire alarm shrieked. The warning was on account of the scallops with bacon (I was feeling the call of the south).


Our Little Friend: What's that sound?
My First Daughter: It's the fire alarm.
Our Little Friend: What does it mean?
My First Daughter: It means Mom is cooking.
Our Little Friend: We never hear that when my mom is cooking.
My Second Daughter: Maybe she's not cooking hard enough.


As states adopt and begin implementing the Common Core standards, there's bound to be a bit of a shock. In several arenas, but just now I'm thinking of reading passages.

Rigor is what's got all the nerves in a twist at the moment, and I'm all for rigor, but it's not all we should be considering. Rigor out of context--like most anything out of context--is meaningless. One could take it to mean increased readability measure, or higher grade level vocabulary, both of which can be used to unintentionally silly effect that diminishes any credibility a text might have had without such manipulations.

In "Publishers' Criteria for the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts and Literacy, Grades 3-12," David Coleman and Susan Pimentel describe how we--the providers of text in curriculum and assessment--need to be cooking harder in order to produce high-quality texts of sufficient complexity to meet the demands of the standards.

So there needs to be what I think of as content density and richness of ideas. Passages need to show evidence of thought and care, both in terms of the approach to the subject and the craft itself.

We're not just filling pages with print. We're giving students opportunities to learn and think and reflect and make connections and then come up with their own ideas.

UPDATE: Formatting fixes.

Bittersweet

The discovery of a new joy is sometimes accompanied by a sense of regret for what I've lost by not having discovered it sooner. When I began studying with Mr. Mudrick, I knew that I had missed a lot of what had come before.

As little as I knew of anything -- my ignorance was spectacular even for a college sophomore -- even I could see his greatness, his remarkable brilliance, his sheer goodness, his wit (he was such an entertainer!). His genius wasn't just literary; he understood being human more than anyone I've ever known. To see what I mean, read Mudrick Transcribed: Classes and Talks, a book of his lectures carefully recorded by fellow student Lance Kaplan, or Well, Mr. Mudrick Said, a memoir by friend and fellow student Bob Blaisdell.

I knew that I would be the fool of all fools if I didn't take every class he taught until I graduated. But there was always that regret that I missed a year and a half, that five university quarters had passed during which I could have been listened to Mr. Mudrick. It was time I had lost and would never get back.

My first memory of this kind of regret is when I read David Copperfield. I was eight. Seeking refuge from the din and chaos of what passed for daycare in those days, I'd wandered into the den and shut the door behind me. The den was furnished with black vinyl recliners and dark bookcases twice my height. The bookcases were filled with Reader's Digest editions and Book-of-the-Month hardbacks still in glossy book jackets. All were pristine. I doubt whether any of the books had ever been opened.

I liked the name David Copperfield and I liked how it looked in the gold lettering on the spine. I read all day, sitting on the shiny blue shag carpet. When I began reading, I was sitting in a square of bright sunlight. When the babysitter (herself a Dickensian character, being as wide as she was tall, with her topping of curly orange hair, her pale freckled skin, her face slightly smashed in, as if it had been formed of clay and then the top and bottom ends squished together to push the center inward, and her relentless grimness) opened to door to call me, she scolded me for reading in the dark. 

That night, lying in bed, David Copperfield was all I could think about. Both how much I loved it, and how angry I was that this amazing and wonderful world had existed all this time without my knowledge. Why didn't anyone ever tell me?

This must be the greatest aspiration for a writer: to inspire this feeling in a reader.

(I'd been planning to write about craftsmanship. I'm reading another writing manual, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer by Roy Peter Clark, which had come recommended and is well worth the read, and which in its devotion to and insistence upon writerly craftsmanship made me think of that master craftsman, Anthony Trollope, who began writing every morning at 5:30 at a pace of 250 words per quarter hour. I was introduced to Trollope's novels in college, and it was love at the first turn of the page. And yes, that turn of the page was accompanied by a twinge of regret that I hadn't known of and read Trollope sooner. I made up for it as best I could -- and keep making up for it. He wrote a lot.)


UPDATE: More on regret from the NYT here.

Getting Our House in Order

What is fun about homeschooling is a lot. All those lectures in the car to a captive audience? (Parents, you know what I'm talking about.) I get to make my kids take notes while I'm talking. Heheheheheheheh.


The regime schedule includes vocabulary study, a subject about which I hold strong opinions. For proficient readers, I believe vocabulary study best takes place in context, so one required activity is that the girls keep a notebook in which they write down every unfamiliar word.


Yesterday we were reading together (I was reading "The Law of Genre" by Derrida, don't ask, because anyone who knows me knows how I feel about deconstruction, but more on that in another post; Naomi was finishing Rebecca), and I came across an unfamiliar word ("liminal") and looked up the definition, and in so doing, we talked about what we thought it meant, both from the context and prior knowledge ("subliminal"). (In the same essay, I stumbled upon "invaginate." Diction is so telling, is it not. Talk about subliminal. Although my French is so poor that I'm unable to tell whether the choice of "invaginate" was necessary or creative license on the part of the translator.) And yes, "liminal" meant exactly what we thought.


In addition to keeping a record of unfamiliar words, the girls must find a definition and then write a sentence with each word, a sentence that provides enough context that would allow the reader to determine the meaning of the word.


Which meant that the topic of one of our commuting lectures was context clues, and specifically how context clues provide information about word meaning:

• restatement/definition--In which a synonym or paraphrase is provided:

All compromise is based on give and take, but there can be no give and take on fundamentals. Any compromise on mere fundamentals is a surrender. For it is all give and no take. --Mahatma Gandi [This example also uses contrast, which is described below.]

Restatement and definition cues are sometimes cued by punctuation, such as commas or parentheses:

A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true. -- Socrates 

• example--In which one or more illustrative examples are provided. The use of example may also be cued by punctuation: 

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. -- Charles Darwin

• contrast--In which the opposite is provided:

There exists a kind of laughter which is worthy to be ranked with the higher lyric emotions and is infinitely different from the twitchings of a mean merrymaker.--Nikolai Gogol 

He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things he has not, but rejoices for those which he has. -- Epictetus 

As far as I'm concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue. -- Albert Einstein

• restriction--In which the use of other words in the sentence limits the possible meaning of a word (some like to call this the use of key words, to which I say "tomato, tomahto"):

A high station in life is earned  by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace. -- Tennessee Williams 

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the species that is the most adaptable to change. -- Charles Darwin

Of these basic categories, infinite variety may exist. That is, restriction clues may indicate relationship, such as cause and effect:

As in nature, as in art, so in grace: it is rough treatment that gives souls, as well as stones, their luster. -- Thomas Guthrie

And examples may be given as part of a system of classification:

Raptors, such as hawks, eagles, kites, and falcons, are known to be diurnal.

This is a foundational concept to ELA content development, both in terms of passage and item development. Writers of passages must build in context clues for difficult words, particularly words that are above grade level or words that have specific technical meanings; item writers must be sure to select target vocabulary words for which there are sufficient clues in the text for the reader to determine meanings.


Once this is explained, it probably seems fairly basic. You may already know all of this. But given the lack of training and lack of experience (because believe me, all you have to do in order to have the importance of this concept seared into your soul is to attend one item review committee meeting attended by master teachers with a solid grasp of the underlying principles of vocabulary acquisition) we see nowadays in content developers (already deplored previously), many item writers have no clue idea about context clues. They have no understanding of what real context clues look like, how context clues are created, nor of how readers rely on context clues -- these inexperienced or untrained item writers have no understanding that reading is a systematic process that relies on a variety of extremely complex skills, of which this is one, and even this one is very complex and employs different processes. Which means that the work they do is going to be fundamentally unsound.


When you go to build a house, you first make sure to lay a solid foundation. Make sure that house is built upon a rock.


More on vocabulary another time. I'm also big on word structure and derivatives, as you might have guessed.


P.S. Just for fun: a word frequency analyzer. You can see how language usage changes over time. Another way to while away the minutes.


UPDATE: Fixed a typo.
UDATE THE SECOND: And two others. Goodness gracious.

It's Verbalerity*

I've always loved words. As a child, I whiled away many an hour reading the dictionary. (I know. Ridiculous. Thus I have always been.)


I'm finishing up a vocabulary project now, and one of the pleasures of the work is simply thinking about words and their many meanings and shades of meaning, and why this word works when used in this way when that one doesn't.


Yesterday I stopped in at the Friends of the Library bookstore and picked up a few books: a book of Matthew Arnold's poems, a Norton Anthology of English Literature because I thought it would come in handy with this new venture, The Bluest Eye (I don't know how I missed reading it, especially as I read and very much admired Sula and Beloved), and The Life of Language: The Fascinating Ways Words Are Born, Live, & Die.


The latter is what I'm reading. I confess as early as page 3, I was a bit put off by this:

We enjoy Hollywood's versions of such 19th century novels as Great Expectations and Pride and Prejudice, but would find reading the novels of Dickens and Jane Austen pretty hard going because of their highly formal and convoluted language.

Speak for yourself, pal. Dickens, yes, well, sometimes he do wander a bit in the thickets in his diction. But Jane Austen? A writer known for her economy of language? Not to mention the sheer grace. And to suggest that these two novels--two of my favorite novels, two novels I read at least once a year and have done for lo, these many years because it is such a pleasure--are "pretty hard going"? Can we all agree that this is the swamp of low expectations? What I find hard going is trying to read bad writing. 


Don't let this little sticking point keep you from reading this book, though, if you like words and you be so inclined. It's very interesting and fun to read, and it's fun to think about how all these words came into being, how new words are coming, and how words no longer serviceable will return to some dusty parchment in a library in the sky. Written for Everyman, not for the linguist, the authors are quick to tell you.


*In the immortal words of DL Incognito.

Magic Number

In honor of World Read-Aloud Day, here are 3 lovely poems to read aloud:


April Rain Song by Langston Hughes
Color by Christina Rossetti
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost


Keep reading.

Friday Reading Lists

Busy day ahead, so I just stopped in to offer some read-aloud possibilities.

Here are some poems, selected haphazardly but that I like a lot:

"A Song to David" by Christopher Smart

"Love" by Czeslaw Milosz

"Morning" by Mary Oliver

"On His Blindness" by John Milton

"The World Is Too Much with Us" by William Wordsworth

"Song of the Open Road" by Walt Whitman

"Sea Fever" by John Masefield

"Small Comfort" by Katha Pollitt

"Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver

Or see the list of the 10 most popular poems ever, here.

Here is Billy Collins on how to read a poem aloud.

And then, for the little ones, here are some of my favorite books for reading aloud:

Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! by Mo Willems

Go, Dog, Go! by P.D. Eastman

Goodnight, Gorilla by Peggy Rathmann

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown

Moo Baaa La La La by Sandra Boynton

Mouse Mess by Linnea Riley

One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss

On the Day You Were Born by Debra Frasier

Tuesday by David Wiesner

And I already mentioned 10 Minutes Till Bedtime but it bears repeating.

Some of these have very few words--that's okay, better than okay for the littlest ones. Too many words can be overwhelming for babies and toddlers. It's good for them to just get acquainted with books, see the conventions of page numbers and left-to-right, up-to-down, front-to-back, understand the  format of a cover with a title, know that there is an author and an illustrator, all of that. These are all features that early readers have to learn.

Even if reading to tiny babies, it's useful to get in the habit of introducing the book: "Let's read that amazing classic Goodnight Gorilla by Peggy Rathmann. She also drew all the pictures. Look, there's the gorilla on the cover. What's he doing? Do you want to open the book?"

You can find one of many free lesson plans based on Goodnight Gorilla for preschool or kindergarten here.

Children who start kindergarten having had such reading experiences as part of their daily lives are miles and miles ahead of children who have had little exposure to books and other printed text. 


Happy Friday.