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."

Topical Applications

We're (I've been using the editorial "we" freely this past week, not to be confused with the majestic plural, which I also quite like) launching a passage-writing project, which means, among other things, that the coffee cup is never empty and the day is never done.


A new passage project also means a marshaling of the brain cells and assorted Inner Resources for my favorite of all possible types of work: thinking of topics. In the past week I've offered up 35+ topics for reading passages. It's a barrel of monkeys.


I'm working with a few veterans, some intermediates, and some writers so new to assessment they are a bit dazed by the change in the atmosphere. And in working with new writers, I'm answering the kinds of questions new writers would have--which is all to the good. The best of all possible worlds, in the immortal words of Voltaire.






A question that should come up, at least in the writers' minds, is "What makes a good topic?"


The writers on this project are fortunate because rather than simply saying no when we reject a topic, we're explaining our decisions, thus providing a level of training that isn't typically offered in this business. We're also letting them see all of the topics that are approved by the client: even more training, especially for those possessing a willingness to perform a tiny bit of pattern analysis.


So if the writers do wonder about what makes a good topic (and I hope they do), they can look at the list, see everything that's been approved by our client, and then draw conclusions.


Some basic criteria used to evaluate topics include (but not necessarily in this order)

• relevance and/or practical use
• interest level to students at grade level
• content value
• general alignment to academic subject(s), if applicable
• heft--I can't think of another way to say this, but I mean whether the topic is big enough to carry a work of writing in its entirety

There's also the glitter factor. Some topics are just so perfect that you can't believe someone thought that angle up all by his or her own self.


And then there is the most wonderful surprise of all, when you give a writer a topic that is all right, you think, but nothing to throw a party for, and she writes a passage that she must have dipped in glue and rolled in crushed diamonds before she sent it in.


Sometimes the topic itself is secondary to the skill of the writer. A great writer can write about almost anything in an interesting way.

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. 

The Pineapple in the Room

Thanks to Carmen at Anonymous Testing Company, Bob Debris (photographer extraordinaire and collector of all manner of news, from ridiculous to sublime), and a friend who'd prefer to remain anonymous and who works at Great Big Huge Test Publishing Company, I've been apprised of The Pineapple Debacle.

[Thank you, Wikipedia, for the stunning portrait of a pineapple in its native habitat.]


Author Daniel Pinkwater distances himself by saying he took the money for reprint permissions, but his original story had been edited out of all recognition. (In Pinkwater's original story, the pineapple was an eggplant, and the moral made some kind of crazy sense: "Never bet on an eggplant.")


The new moral, though ridiculous on its face, actually circles back to the suspicion of the animals that the pineapple's confidence must have been due to some trick it had up its sleeves: "Pineapples don't have sleeves."


Let me take a detour. I've been reading With Rigor for All, Second Edition: Meeting Common Core Standards for Literature by Carol Jago. (Recommended by my colleague, publisher, and partner-in-crime comrade-for-quality-reform Frank Brockmann.) We've discussed rigor here previously. We all of us--educators, assessment content developers, curriculum experts, writers of children's literature--should read this book.


Carol Jago talks about the need for stories and how genuinely responding to what we read not only enriches our lives but serves a need all we humans have for narrative. What is life, if not a story we live? With the twists and turns and reversals and gifts of the unexpected? Where the mighty are humbled, the lowly are risen up, where we commit follies, but where we find redemption? Where we rejoice with those who rejoice, and mourn with those who mourn?


In stories, we connect to what lay hidden in ourselves; we connect to each other; we connect to every human who has ever lived. In stories, we see ourselves as we are--and as we wish to be. We wrestle with our demons and angels. This is why the study of literature is so important. Our character is molded from the stories we tell ourselves.


And yet, we don't have faith in our children. We don't have faith that they will understand the complicated beautiful mess of being human. We don't have faith they will understand the complex beautiful machinery of language. We fail to offer them stories to which they could genuinely respond. Instead, we offer passages that insult their intelligence. 


Hence the story about a talking pineapple. Offered with good intentions, you understand (similar good intentions run amok discussed here). The good intentions went something like this: Those poor kids, might as well give them a story that will make them laugh.


And hence my book. Due out in June, God willing and the creek don't rise. Our launch of the first offensive maneuver in the campaign for quality reform in assessment content development: we'll elevate the quality by recruiting real writers to write for reading tests. Our experiments so far have been promising.


As far as what happened with Pinkwater's passage--quite frankly, I'm mystified. Many of my stories, poems, and articles have been reprinted in high-stakes assessments. None have been edited to that degree. (Once, a company asked if they could change the gender of the main character, as they felt their test was out of balance in that regard.) That is a new one on me. Most authors will not allow that kind of editing. When I myself worked at Great Big Huge Test Publishing Company, from associate editor to development manager, I would not have so edited a passage. But the real problem wasn't the editing; it was the selection of the passage itself. Absurdity, though fun to read, is better for classroom instruction than for assessment.


Because humor is relative. As is driven home to me when I realize that the person who laughs most at my jokes is me. (Or I, if you be a stickler for grammar.)


UPDATE: I just thought of a possible reason for the sleeveless pineapple. The test blueprint may have included a standard targeting the use of idiom, and so the editor decided the easiest solution was to edit the passage to add the "up its sleeve" idiom.


As for the transformation from eggplant to pineapple, I remain mystified. Maybe someone on one of the review committees hated eggplant. Sounds like a joke, but I'm not kidding. Once I was in a passage review meeting at which the client picked up a story, looked at it, wrinkled her nose, and threw it on the floor. "I hate cats," she said.




UPDATE THE SECOND: Removed a link and anonymized an identity.

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.