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.

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.

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.

File Under: All Roads Lead to Rome, Cross-Referenced to Mandatory Reading

The book every K-12 content developer--assessment and curriculum--should read is Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade, which was recommended to me by a colleague and likeminded comrade in quality assessment content development, Carmen, a senior level genius expert at Anonymous Testing Company.


To say that the tests administered yearly at grades 3-8 (inclusive) are high stakes cannot possibly begin to convey what this means for students, teachers, and school administrators and how NCLB has transformed the educational landscape. The flames are licking at their feet every minute of every day.


And even when we who are informed are talking about this, and about how awful it is that teachers must teach to the tests and that the assessments are driving the curricula--it's one thing to talk about it, and it's another thing to experience it.  If you're not a student, teacher, principal, or parent, this book is the closest you can get to the fire.


Like the children in Tested, my daughters' skills and knowledge are assessed so frequently at school (and what is taught is often so narrowly focused--the algebra teacher actually labels each homework assignment with the assessable standard and tells parents that she does this so she will know whether students will answer those questions correctly on the state test) that I'm shocked by how little genuine instruction they actually receive and so I supplement their classroom instruction by offering my own reading, writing, social studies, and science lectures. Which may bore them nigh unto death, who knows, but I refuse to send them out into the world as little ignorami ignoramuses. (For math homework help, we turn to my friend and cohort and math content area genius expert Carrie Frech, who works at a major testing organization).


My daughters came home last week emitting little puffs of indignation over the latest district benchmark assessment. (They swiped it and brought it home to show me.) When I read it, I was horrified. It was a passage-dependent writing prompt. I didn't see a rubric, God knows what horrors hide behind that curtain, but I assume the responses were scored for reading and writing.


The story, a tedious adaptation of a folktale, was poorly written and at the fourth grade level (this, for an eighth grade gifted and talented program; my daughters are currently reading The Great Gatsby and Rebecca for their next book reports, and yet they're being assessed with text suitable for fourth grade?). What was there was was presented at an extremely literal level of understanding. Nothing in the story allowed for any genuine analysis of narrative elements nor interpretation of literary devices, and yet the writing prompt required the students to do just that. I don't know how they could. You can't make a pie out of one apple. The multiple-choice section (developed by a company relatively new to the game for whom I'd done some work a few years ago and by whose lack of understanding of test development at that time had shocked me) was no better. The girls told me that there was one question that was so nonsensical that, districtwide, the teachers' form of protest was simply to give all of their students the answer. Does anyone see any value whatsoever in the use of such an assessment tool?


When I did some work for this company a few years ago, I observed their inexperience with and lack of knowledge about assessment. Maybe things have changed since then, I don't know. What I do know is that this company--the same one that has little assessment background--doesn't perform any field testing of the test content and there is no data whatsoever to indicate that we can make any kind of accurate inferences about what students know and can do based on such poorly constructed assessments. But this company does a good job of selling, and the districts buy the dream fantasy idea that the products will 1) give teachers information about their students that will help them get students ready for the state test and 2) predict how students will perform on the state test. Neither claim is possible, particularly with assessments that violate the most basic quality standards.


All roads lead to Rome; it all comes back to the Quality Manifesto.


(And it must be said that certainly there is room for quality improvements in the classroom as well, and there was room even before NCLB. What passes for instruction in some classrooms horrifies me just as much as any quality train wreck I see in the assessment world. Two teachers at my daughters' school ROUTINELY play audio of the textbooks instead of teaching--this, in science, which I think we can all agree requires hands-on instruction; it's still bad in reading, but not quite so bad). One of these teachers also ROUTINELY spends twenty minutes or so of the fifty minute class period discussing her personal life to the captive audience of eighth-graders--they know all about her kids, her husband, her political views, her hobbies, her extended family, and her domestic habits. So do I. Unless someone is a friend, loved one, or crazy person celebrity, there's probably not much in her life you want to hear about for twenty minutes straight, and yet that is what this teacher subjects her students to instead of teaching them.)


UPDATE: Identified my book-readin' comrade by name. Thanks, Carmen!
UPDATE: Added a link.
UPDATE THE THIRD: Removed a link, anonymized an identity.