Ambiguity and Grace (#SOL15, Day 11)

Birds in Tree in Winter (M.A. Reilly, Ringwood, NJ, 2015)

I. 

I've been thinking about the problematic use of close reading as the de facto method for interpreting texts in grades K-12 and how the PARCC and other high stakes tests are designed to discern how well children closely attend to the minutia and substance of a text--as if each was worthy of our attention--as if each remained stable. We situate these results as prized namings of children's talents and needs as if truth might be gotten from a 3-day test.  

Could we be more foolish?

I was thinking about the problem with close reading and how we measure it this morning while rereading William Carlos William's "January Morning"--a poem that reminds me how being curious is its own reward. After more than two decades of reading this poem, I still cannot quite understand it and think, perhaps, that I'm the better for such lacking.  

There's little room for lacking at school these days.

The poem is divided into 15 sections and Williams provides a series of quick and quirky visual snapshots of the comings and goings that his speaker sees as he makes his way through Weehawken, NJ on a January morning. It is a mad celebration of the ordinary as different noticings are mentioned briefly and then abandoned. Oh, our good doctor, our fine poet surveys that world with certain exuberance and I find I cannot help but carry his sense of whimsy and joy into this feel good morning of my own. 

This is what it means to embody a work.

II.

Williams was a young man at the time of this writing (1917) and I wonder if at the end of the poem, the old woman he addresses is his mother. Or perhaps, the old woman is more muse than mother. Maybe mother and muse are one.  Let's take a look.

XV.

All this --

                was for you, old woman.

I wanted to write a poem 

that you would understand.

For what good is it to me

if you can't understand it?

                But you got to try hard --

But --

Well, you know how

the young girls run giggling

on Park Avenue after dark

when they ought to be home in bed?

Well,

that's the way it is with me somehow.

I take a deep breath at the end and wonder more about the way it is somehow and what exactly does Williams mean by that?  Some mornings I think I can gather that ambiguity and hold it in my hand like cool water that is a balm.

Let it settle there. Soothe me.

                 Only to feel it slip 
                                                     free, again and again and again. 

See, it is the instability, the not knowing that I most want to emphasize here. Meaning is never stable. Never. Why, even Williams's speaker is contrary. 


III.

Reading is a full body experience and we ought to broaden how learners come to (re)name the texts they read. It's foolishness to believe in the singularity of close reading in schools as if the New Critics knew the only way to read a text. 

I hope on this March morning that you want more for yourself, more for your child.

What we privilege and fail to privilege at school matters; deserves our attention.  It is the uncertainty of meaning making that we most need to make room for at school. For is it not important for learners to be able to recognize when a more accurate understanding of a text is attainable and when the complexity of a work eclipses that felt need?  

To become easy with ambiguity is to touch grace. 

I'm not sure what Williams intended or if even his intentions can be named. The possibilities are of interest more so than the certainties. 

This is the way it is somehow. We are never standing still.

Passion-Based Research in High School: Is This What It Means to be Career-College Ready?

I.

This is going to be messy.  It also is necessary.


II.

Earlier today I was thinking about the students who reside in states, like I do, where the PARCC assessment will be given in a few weeks. I was thinking about those children and teenagers who will be taking their assessments using machines they have never used prior to the test.

I tweeted this and the folks at PARCC responded:

The question wasn't about what they recommended, but rather it was about whether they had researched the reliability of test data when students take an assessment that requires them to interact with text on machines they have not used before.  I'm wondering if the absence of an answer means they don't know. Shouldn't they?

So, I was wondering how valid will these test results be when received next September from PARCC testing?  I was wondering what instructional, personnel, and system-wide decisions will be made based on these test results.  What will be missed/misused?  Who will be fired? Retained?  Which truths will be lies? Which lies will make for better truths?  How can we know anything about academic progress given such uncertainty?  

Why are we paying billions for this?

Give the public a bunch of numbers, add the passage of some time, and slippery half-truths become gospel.  We have seen this repeatedly. We have drunk deeply from that goblet.

Surely there are better ways to know how young people are progressing on agreed upon set of outcomes. Cue the science (or insert another discipline/maker) fair.

III.

Dev's Computer He Built for Science Fair

This past week my son completed research he presented at his high school's science fair. He built a computer, outfitted it with an energy efficient power supply unit and compared the efficiency savings generated by his top end power supply unit with mid-range and inexpensive units.  He found that if desktop computers in US households (based on 2009 figures) running only on average for 2 hours a day were kitted out with the power supply unit he used with his computer, even though the initial costs would be more than the less expensive models, the savings alone in the first year would near half one billion dollars in comparison with the least expensive power supply units. Of course those savings would increase with more usage. Further this energy efficiency would also positively impact our globe environmentally.

This is what he found:

Explanation of the Testing Results

For the last month he worked on his project and I watched as his interest in his hypothesis intensified and noticed he was working on different aspects of this project late into several evenings.  I know what it is like to catch fire with an idea and want to follow it.

Catching fire and following an idea is more about being career and college ready than answering multiple choice and open-ended questions on a test--regardless of the test's quality. The complexity inherent in designing and testing a hunch trumps the closed and largely predictable world of high stakes school tests.  I was pleased to see my son generate and follow a question to a conclusion.  I know this is an important thinking disposition.

This is what passion-based research looks like. This is worth our tax dollars.

IV.

My son's project was awarded first place at the fair.  He was proud of his work, as were we.  You need to know that prior to this year, my son has not done well at school since 3rd grade. His name is not one you would have found on any honor roll.  This is a boy who calculated how many miscues to make on the Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) when he was 9 so that he could stop being tested and go back to reading.

Agency, known constraints, and deep interest aided the development of his project and his adult life. I recall a few months ago when he told me that he does not see his future as defined by a specific career.  He wants to solve problems.

On most assessments doing well, like scoring high or winning first place, often signals an end.  What is perhaps most significant is the aftermath of this project. The judges who evaluated the projects were external to the school.  The science teachers also engaged with each student during the fair and evaluated the work, including the presentation through dialogue.

But feedback did not end with the judges or the teachers. Because the fair was open to the public and students were present to discuss their thinking, newer ways to think about the project were possible. Some of the people (parents, teachers, fellow students) who stopped by my son's display helped him to rethink aspects of his work.  For example, he had not factored the energy use of servers into his calculations.  He also had used figures from 2009 for the total number of desktop computers in the United States as those were the only ones he could locate.  He realizes now that each of these weakened his findings.

He told us tonight that he would be interested in repeating his study, including a larger range of devices, such as servers, laptops, and  handheld devices. He is curious as to what the savings might actually be and how these savings might environmentally, economically, and politically impact our earth.

Towards the end of the evening, a statistician who stopped by his project told him that they pay a department do to the work he had done.  Sounds a bit like being career ready, yes?

V.

Imagine now if the billions in tax dollars we systematically feed to companies to provide test development, scoring, and the plethora of test prepping materials, as well as the personnel dedicated to test preparation were shifted to the development and critique of student-determined projects. Imagine how different learning and assessing might be. Yes, it would be messy--as it would make us rethink how time is valued and used at school, the shifting and unstable divisions between being at school and not at school, what types of learning supports are necessary and for whom, and how tacit ways of knowing could be valued and perhaps coded.

Such a shift, from assessing with tests to learning through projects, will be messy.  Undoubtedly though, such a shift is well beyond necessary.

Writing Ordinary-Ordinary: Conferring with 4th Graders as They Write Slice of Life Stories

I was reminded today how helping writers to not to rush past their ideas represents important and challenging work. In the fourth grade class in Newark, NJ that I have been co-teaching, I showed students a slice of life story I wrote a month ago (Learning to Lie) and we discussed some of the writing techniques they saw in the piece that we have also been trying out in our notebooks. We also discussed how the slice of life story is highly focused and in may ways celebrates the ordinariness in our lives. I decided to teach this lesson as I noticed that many of the children were trying to tell such epic stories that the work was largely overwhelming. I thought a slice of life story might offer us the opportunity
to tell a more manageable story and to dig beneath the surface of our own ordinary lives.

The ordinary is, of course, fascinating. In an interview republished in 2004 by the New York Times, Andy Warhol explained to art critic David Bourdin that he was attempting to read what was not there in Warhol's work. The painter said:

I just happen to like ordinary things. When I paint them, I don't try to make them extraordinary. I just try to paint them ordinary-ordinary.

I had hoped that students might begin to dabble with the depth that comes by mining the ordinary. I had hoped that they might tell stories that were ordinary-ordinary. The students remarked that they noticed that in the story I had written, I wasn't heroic and in fact I had done something that was wrong.  They caught on to how telling such a story might well engage a reader.

So after our discussion,  I next invited the students to think about their own potential slice of life stories and when they had one in mind to partner and tell that story like juicy gossip. The partner's job was to ask questions like we had done before during another writing lesson. After this sharing,  all but two children were able to settle in and begin to write their stories.  The two girls who needed more assistance met with me on the carpet in the back of the classroom with their notebooks in hand.

"Why don't you take a look at your life map and see if there's a potential slice of life story you want to tell?" I began.
The girls opened their notebooks, looked at their maps, and after a few minutes, one said, "I could write about flying to Arizona."
"Flying to Arizona?"
"Yeah."
"I'm curious. Why were you flying there?" I asked.
"My dad was there."
"How come?"
"He was in prison there."
"In prison?"
"Yeah. He was coming back from California and the bus stopped and he didn't have the right identification and he didn't have the right papers and stuff and he was arrested and sent to prison," she explained quickly.
"Oh wow. That must have been such a shock."
"Yeah. It was really hard for my mom. It was a Friday morning. She got a phone call. We were watching movies."
"Where were you?"
"Snuggled in my mom's bed. We were watching movies. She doesn't like to watch scary movies at night so we were watching them in the morning. She got the phone call and then just sat and cried."  
We were both quiet for a minute or so and then she added, "It was the first time I saw my mom cry. I was 8."
"Oh my. Your story makes me feel as if I could be in the room alongside you two."
She nods her head.
"I wonder if your opening line might not be what you just said, The first time I saw my mom cry, I was 8. That's such a powerful opening."
"I know more about how my mom felt cause I was with her."
"I bet that will help when you tell the story."
"Yeah, I think so."
"I'm not sure if you know this yet, but where do you see this slice of life story ending?"
"I'm not sure." Again we're both quiet. "Maybe getting on the plane? Or when my mom got the ticket?" she offered.
"Sounds like either could be a good place to leave your reader. Do you have enough now to get started?"
She indicated yes and quickly moved to an empty table and began writing. 

Throughout most of this time, the other student listened and when I asked her if she had an idea for a story, she said, "Last year in third grade I had an attitude."
"An attitude? How so?"
"I was just like, nothing mattered. Mr. W. had to call home and he talked with my mom a lot."
"How'd that go?"
"I got a lot of punishments."
"That must have not been too good. What was causing the attitude? Did you ever figure that out?"
"Yeah. I wasn't seeing my dad. I didn't have time with him."
"That sounds like that would hurt."
"Yeah, when I finally told my mom she called him and she said he was coming on Friday to get me." We're quiet for a moment and she added, "It got better when I could see him again."
"It?"
"My attitude."
"Hmm. How do you see your story beginning?"
"Maybe describing what I was like in class."
"How would that sound? What might that first sentence be like?"
"I don't know. Like last year, I had too much attitude in third grade."
"Sounds like a good start. Why don't you begin with that?"
She nods her head indicating yes.
"Do you think you can get started writing now?"
"Yeah."

Mining the ordinary requires us to not rush past details, but rather, to take our time and best ensure that the words we place on paper or screen match our emerging understanding of what we are trying to say. This is hard work and best learned when choice, agency, large blocks of time, and trial and error are present and permissible.  Writing well is rarely learned when writing time at school is dedicated largely to practicing writing responses to open-ended test items on high states tests like PARCC.  I mention this as I see evidence that some district leadership assumes practicing test items is akin to good writing instruction.  It is not.  It never has been.

This is What Education Reform Looks Like

I. Choice

The other day a 9-year old boy reminded why we do not need to provide children with a steady diet of writing prompts we create/pass out in lieu of teaching them how to generate potential topics of interest. The boy generated this point on his life map:

from a boy's life map.

The child selected to write about his remembrance of learning that his mom had breast cancer.  This is a text he is struggling to write. As I worked with him that first day he got teary-eyed, went for a drink of water and returned.  I told him that his work was brave writing and that he should know that he could quit it at will.

If it hurts too much to write this, you can step back from it as you need.
He sighed.

My comment to the child was challenged because 'allowing' a student to not complete the topic does not engender grit. Implied in the statement, I suspect, is a belief grit is somehow more important than kindness, agency, and wisdom.

Let me say here, I'm not sure I even know what grit means as it is so overly (mis)used.  I do understand, even appreciate, the necessity (at times) of persevering and goal setting. I've read Duckworth, know there's a Ted Talk, and well before either of these, I too had read Aristotle. So the idea of grit isn't lost on me. Nonetheless, children ought to maintain the right to choose which costs they bear while persevering and which costs may just be too dear. Is this not an essential life skill? Is this not the bedrock of a democracy?

Before I began this work a colleague at the school told me that an 'expert' from central office was skeptical of the co-teaching work I would be doing. Apparently, writing about the fear you lived with at 7 when you learn your mom might die isn't part of the Common Core.  I kid you not.

I'm told the expert said that there's no need to teach anything other than what is in the CCSS (as she understands it). Teach them to write responses to literature like the people in Vermont do (the only approved model of writing it seems). In her schema there's no need for notebooks, seed ideas, choice, topic creation, art making, technology use (not for testing), or unsanctioned genres. There's no need for expression.  Give the children a prompt a day and a formula they can memorize in order to answer "correctly'.

Correct.
Be correct.

Folks, this is what education reform really looks like, especially in places where the children are economically poor, and the schools toil under central office and/or state control. 

Fortunately for this class, their teacher, assistant principal and principal are brave. Kids need brave adults given the education reform foisted upon them and their communities.

Reservoir in January (M.A. Reilly, 2015)

II. Absence

Choice.

Agency.

The absence of choice for children, teachers, and some administrators, in lieu of others knowing best, may well be what plagues U.S. pubic education the most.




III. Only an Expert

Many of the teachers I work with are routinely subjected to 'unannounced' central office 'expert' visits.  These are often 'education experts' who have never actually taught with the constraints of the curriculum products that school districts procure and insist be used--often as written with no alterations. It doesn't matter if the products make sense or not.  It doesn't matter who the students are, or who the teacher is.

Schools are part of an epic world where the present has no influence for there is faith in products, not in learners or teachers. Physical reality is shunned, not valued.  For the work at hand is not to teach children, but rather to enact 'correctly' the products exactly as they have been rendered by other people who are neither present, nor have they ever even visited. This is what our tax dollars are purchasing.

If these situations weren't so serious one might see a similar absurdity to those old Monty Python skits that began with the high-pitched voice of Cardinal Ximénez (Michael Palin) yelling, "Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition."  But, alas, humor is not the outcome sought by such educational inquisitions. Rather, the goal to these visits is mostly about enacting correctness.  Cardinal Ximénez has nothing on the new ed experts.

IV. This is the New Teaching

Teaching is not a transaction made among people who learn as they create meaning.  Education reform insists upon a preferred and correct way to teach. For example, no lesson seems to be able to be conducted without stated learning targets that all students must repeat.  I can do this... I can do that...  Don't worry if children cannot actually decode the texts used each day from the program. Just "chunk it" and magically they will comprehend. The level of error is so high.

Education reform in the United states is a closed set of materials that are issued to schools for use every day.
There is no room for interpretation.
There is no room for thinking.
There is no room for positive deviance.

This is a colony.
And we are footing the bill.

I wish this was hyperbole, but I have seen this played out repeatedly and we are the worse for it.

There is No Complex Text Without a Reader: Parsing the Common Core & Mass Testing

 I. Down the Rabbit Hole - What Is Complex Text?

In the Common Core's  40-page Appendix A, the word complex appears 153 times, the word complexity appears 109 times, and the phrase, complex text, appears 16 times. The idea of text being complex is a central tenet to the Standards and I argue here is foundational for the logic that says mass testing of every public school child in the nation every year is appropriate, doable, equitable, and necessary.  The CCSS authors assert that during the last 50 years the texts used in K-12 schooling are in decline with regard to 'complexity' and that it is necessary to read 'complex text' in order to become college and career ready. The subtext to this might well be: "Truly those managing schools cannot be trusted to get this right. Look what they've been doing for the last 50 years." They contend all of this without clearly defining the central phrase, complex text.  If it's so critical then why don't they define it clearly? Here's what they do say.

So, what exactly does the phrase, complex text, mean? What are the CCSS authors ascribing? They begin Appendix A by writing:

One of the key requirements of the Common Core State Standards for Reading is that all students must be able to comprehend texts of steadily increasing complexity as they progress through school. By the time they complete the core, students must be able to read and comprehend independently and proficiently the kinds of complex texts commonly found in college and careers... In brief, while reading demands in college, workforce training programs, and life in general have held steady or increased over the last half century, K–12 texts have actually declined in sophistication, and relatively little attention has been paid to students’ ability to read complex texts independently (p. 3).

Ok. So the writers conflate a few terms without actually defining the phrase and it is important to note that comprehending texts of steadily increasing complexity is not the same thing as complex texts.  The first references a reader--someone is comprehending while the latter does not. Saying that complex texts are like the ones adults read at college or in their careers is ambiguous.  For example, undergraduates studying with me read the opening chapter to Bakhtin's Art and Answerability. Certainly not common reading material for K-12--nor should it be.  Next is the reference to sophisticated texts.  Should we assume that these are the same thing as complex texts?  What is meant by sophisticated and by whose standard?  Why such obfuscation?

So without establishing a clear explanation of what is meant by the phrase, complex text, the focus shifts to citing a 2006 report from ACT, Inc. (Reading Between the Lines: What the ACT Reveals About College Readiness in Reading). ACT, Inc. is a nonprofit organization that generates revenue by selling tests and testing programs to students, schools, states and companies.

In the report, the authors write: 

Texts used in the ACT Reading Test reflect three degrees of complexity: uncomplicated, more challenging, and complex (p.14).

Act modifies the word complexity by stating that the texts used in their test can be arranged along a continuum.  They add (see chart below from page 14) and then follow up with an explanation:

As shown in Table 1, the three types of texts represent a continuum of increasing complexity with respect to the following six aspects (which can be abbreviated to “RSVP”):

• Relationships (interactions among ideas or characters)

• Richness (amount and sophistication of information conveyed through data or literary devices)

• Structure (how the text is organized and how it progresses)

• Style (author’s tone and use of language)

• Vocabulary (author’s word choice)

• Purpose (author’s intent in writing the text) (p. 15)

So how is the presentation of text analysis from ACT, Inc. different than labeling texts complex by CCSS? ACT references specific, known texts  for a specific audience: high school seniors taking the assessment. From a known field of selected test passages they sorted these into three different categories based on their RSVP method and named those categories: Uncomplicated, More Challenging, and Complex. This represents a method and establishes a context in which that method will be used. Further, there is an implied reader: the high school senior taking the test. They could and did make a case to say: Within the testing passages, these differences among the texts based on our six aspects (RSVP) could be applied and one could argue that these are examples of complex text can be seen. They also provide detailed annotation of two passages to illustrate their schema. The CCSS authors adapted the ACT work by removing the context (specific testing passages for high school seniors) and applied the result to K-12 education. 

Next the CCSS authors reference a quote from Marilyn Adams (2009) and offer it  as an explanation for what complex text (from this text). They write:

"As Adams (2009) puts it, 'There may one day be modes and methods of information delivery that are as efficient and powerful as text, but for now there is no contest. To grow, our students must read lots, and more specifically they must read lots of ‘complex’ texts—texts that offer them new language, new knowledge, and new modes of thought' (p. 182)" (p. 4).

Adams makes the connection between the reader and the text insomuch as the word, new signals a reader and a context.  Again, the idea of complexity is connected to human activity. In contrast, the CCSS authors tend to situate complex text as autonomous--something one could point to that is independent of reader or context.  Brian Street (2000) explains that the autonomous model of literacy "disguises the cultural and ideological assumptions that underpin it and that can then be presented as though they are neutral and universal"( p. 7). 

Autonomous text is situated as being ideologically-whole--something ready to be used alongside the logic of mass testing.  So if complex text exists independent of context, and being able to read such texts as measured by tests produced by PARCC, Smarter Balance, ACT, ETS, or Pearson (who know what complex text is because they say so) then validation of ELA performance becomes limited to those who sanction what's complex text and not.   The test measures the algorithm not the reader. The writers state:

Being able to read complex text independently and proficiently is essential for high achievement in college and the workplace and important in numerous life tasks (p.4).

How can we know if students can read complex text independently and proficiently?  That is left unanswered directly.  However, there's a logic here that says if schools could not select the right texts during the last 50 years--years in which the text selection got worse and worse, than can educators now be trusted to do so? Can we risk this?  How can we know children and young adults are proficient readers if this is left to local hands?  Enter mass testing at national levels. In a parent handout from NY State (EngageNY) they explain to parents when asked if the CCSS will mean more test by responding:

No. The Common Core State Standards do not mean more tests. But there will be different, and better, tests. 

If local educators cannot be trusted to select the right texts that are complex enough, can they be trusted to measure learner's reading? And so it is not surprising that alongside the CCSS, PARCC, and Smarter Balance is the rhetoric that supports the use of Automated Essay Scoring (AES) --a fancy phrase for machine-scored writing.  This too takes the measurement out of  imperfect human hands. (Note NCTE's objection here.)  Alongside the publishing of the CCSS, a joint paper by ETS, Pearson, and College Board heralding the use of AES was published.  The authors state:

One possible mechanism for scoring the CR items is with human graders. However, years of research and practical experience with human graders reveal a number of challenges. There is a substantial and expensive logistical effort in supporting human scoring through recruiting, training, monitoring, and paying human graders. The process also takes considerable time to accomplish and can make it difficult to report scores quickly. Finally, even under the best conditions, there can be limits to the objectivity and consistency of human scores, despite using multiple human graders for each response.  

Human scoring is not the only option for scoring CR items. Recent advances in artificial intelligence and computing technology, paired with research over several decades, have yielded a number of systems in which computers assign scores to CR items. Both the availability and acceptance of automated scoring systems have grown substantially in recent years, with year-over-year expansion of operational use in both high- and low-stakes assessments. 

Last, the CCSS writers situate static print as primary and privileged. They write:

"In particular, if students cannot read complex expository text to gain information, they will likely turn to text-free or text-light sources, such as video, podcasts, and tweets. These sources, while not without value, cannot capture the nuance, subtlety, depth, or breadth of ideas developed through complex text" (p. 4).

The underlying (and I would contend faulty) assumptions here are legion, but beyond the limited scope of the word, text, and the act of reading, it does offer us an understanding that the CCSS authors understand worthy-for-students-to-read-text as being static print. Further, we can see again the CCSS authors situate such worthy text as autonomous--ideologically-whole. 

I  want to contend that there are no complex texts without readers.  It is the relationships between reader and text that allows for definition of simple and complex to be applied.  In the world of text, sans reader, we'll find simple (one way through) and complicated literary works, such a hypertexts, as they offer a reader multiple pathways through.  Complexity occurs in the transactions made by a reader and a text.  

Let's delve a bit.


II. An Interlude. A Quick Experiment (for you)

Take a minute to look through these screen shots taken while I was reading Michael Joyce's Twelve Blue.  I chronicled my first opening reading moves in this hypertext novel below.

I read the word, BEGIN, and I felt a lot like Alice. I recalled a book I scribbled in as a young child and thought for a few seconds about the marks I made with crayon and then I clicked, BEGIN and tumbled into this next screen. 

I was captivated by the visual graph and then read the William Gass quote which had me thinking about what I've read by Gass. With a little help from a google search of Gass, I recall the story, "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" and get sidetracked by a review of the book from 1968 in the NY Times. I read the review recalling the title story too. I'm not sure I read anything else. I check to see if there's a pdf of the text available and find mostly reviews and study guides. Amazon has the book and an ebook of it will be available October 7 of this year. Do I want to wait that long? Is this a book I want to hold and turn physical pages?  Hmm. I'll wait on this. Back to the story.

I'm scan the page and I'm feeling impulsive, thinking about the randomness of meaning and how things gather around lint and go with number 2, a favorite number, I think. I click on 2.

I'm immediately seduced by the opening words and pay scant attention to anything else. 

Each river flows two ways for at least an instant, whether a gasp at the source, the spring half lapsing before going on, or a watery wavering at the uncertain edge which joins her to sister or the sea. Nonetheless the long sigh of the estuary is something different, the Hudson easing swollen and recumbent upward halfway to Albany, plumping in her banks like the bluish flesh of an oyster, pregnant with pearl sheen even when no stone forms. 

Huh?  I love what I don't immediately grasp. I read on and finally latch on to a subject--a she, feeling like I'm no longer in that river moving two ways without aim.  A subject. I reread the paragraph.

Instead she gazes on the samples with a neutral eye, labwise and detached as a river in December. In the microscope there is no difference between the birth of an infant savior or the death of a crone at year's end. Life is a river that flows both ways, it doesn't do to get caught up in the threads the water weaves. So the men taught who tutored her in these alchemies. Even so she sees dreams in algae, lotus blossoms in saline solution, a sister in the oyster.

Who is she?
Why are these men who have tutored her?
What alchemies? Alchemies are more about magic and yet she sits at a microscope.  There's so much tension here (in the text and in me). I'm loving the uncertainty (well, sometimes). I'm forming tentative theories.  Okay back to reread and I tackle what I don't get:

The violet stain is like no color in nature. Alkali. Kali. Queen. 

I query Alkali. Kali. Queen and I find it is a reference is to the book The Queen's Printers' Aids to the Student of the Holy Bible and I'm piecing together that what she sees (as I now there is a she) is a violet stain on the slide that is unnatural and yet it has been taken from the river. Yes?  Here's what I find in that book on page 51:

This is unrelated but earlier this evening Rob and I mentioned Richard Powers' novel, Gain--a book we each have loved and taught.  And I'm connecting that novel to this screen and wondering about those lifeforms the girl/woman could spy on the slide.  Thinking about chemicals from factories and rivers that carry so much along its currents.

 I press on the hyperlink and am taken to this screen:

Hmm. Okay I can recall photographing shorelines of the Hudson River in summer. Up near Bear Mountain. One afternoon, I'd taken a bumpy road  on my way north to Newburgh, NY and found lots of places to stop and make images. This reminds me of what I recall seeing. I want to enlarge the image and press on it and I get taken to this screen:

I'm falling in. River. Text. Self. The language is so much more than I had imagined I would find.  It's a poem.  I say aloud:  "Yes, everything can be read." (and I say this in the voice I imagine to be like Molly Bloom's. (Think breathy for is this passage nothing less than a full declaration of living?) This is the written poem.  The image, a visual poem. There's cohesion to that I think quickly and I select a colored line to the left of the words and click it loving how the image reminds me of my mother's knitting bag and the loose yarn that collected there and I am anticipating there will be some explanation to what I've read.


*****************************************

III. Meaning Making is Complex, Physical Texts May be Complicated

I stop here for now I want to take a few minutes to parse together what complicated text might be. Joyce's hypertext offers us a concrete example of a complicated text as it is co-made by the reader's decisions, impulses and fancies as s/he reads.  A complicated text has multiple ways through. This is physically evident in the Joyce text. Even though there are multiple ways through the Joyce text, the pathway(s) a reader constructs can be physically traced, but the reading cannot be duplicated.

The meaning a reader composes while reading a physical text is complex.  The physical text is complicated.  These are not minor differences. If you or I were to follow the screens I read, the meaning made would be different from what happened a little while ago.  

Wolfgang Iser (1974) writes that the literary text “activates our own faculties, enabling us to recreate the world it presents. The product of this creative activity is what we might call the virtual dimension of the text, which endows it with its reality... The virtual dimension is not the text itself, nor is it the imagination of the reader: it is the coming together of text and imagination” (p. 279, emphasis mine). 

Complexity refuses to be confined to a traceable path.  It's inherently nomadic. It cannot be tested using paper and pencil or the computer version of paper and pencil. 

Throw Them Out: They Are The Wrong Sort of Map

Watching (2009, M.A. Reilly)

I. Watching

In "The Naturalist" Barry Lopez talks about his habit of visiting the McKenzie River in western Oregon on a daily basis.  Lopez writes:

Almost every day I go down to the river with no intention but to sit and watch. I have been watching the river for thirty years, just the three or four hundred yards of it I can see from the forested bank, a run of clear, quick water about 350 feet wide. If I have learned anything here, it’s that each time I come down, something I don’t know yet will reveal itself.

If it’s a man’s intent to spend thirty years staring at a river’s environs in order to arrive at an explanation of the river, he should find some other way to spend his time. To assert this, that a river can’t be known, does not to my way of thinking denigrate science, any more than saying a brown bear can’t be completely known. The reason this is true is because the river is not a thing, in the way a Saturn V rocket engine is a thing. It is an expression of biological life, in dynamic relation to everything around it—the salmon within, the violet-green swallow swooping its surface, alder twigs floating its current, a mountain lion sipping its bank water, the configurations of basalt that break its flow and give it timbre and tone.

Rereading Lopez always gives me pause: much like the river he references.  There is so much to not know and watching opens us to these possibilities. How different might formal education be if emphasizing not knowing was seen as keenly necessary as knowing. 

II. No Standardized Codification

Complex matters refuse to be understood fully, codified neatly, presented completely. And so the last few months I have tried in earnest to see a positive light in relationship to the new national standards, the tests that accompany them, the curriculum and professional products that are streaming into classrooms and teachers' hands daily, the packaged curriculum and I keep coming back to Lopez who offers us this insight about ways of knowing and although he was not writing about the Common Core and other such documents, the insights nonetheless can be applied:

I would like to tell you how to get there so that you may see all this for yourself. But first a warning: you may already have come across a set of detailed instructions, a map with every bush and stone clearly marked, the meandering courses of dry rivers and other geographical features noted, with dotted lines put down to represent the very faintest of trails. Perhaps there were also warnings printed in tiny red letters along the margin, about the lack of water, the strength of the wind and the swiftness of the rattlesnakes. Your confidence in these finely etched maps is understandable, for at first glance they seem excellent, the best a man is capable of; but your confidence is misplaced. Throw them out. They are the wrong sort of map. They are too thin. They are not the sort of map that can be followed by a man who knows what he is doing. The coyote, even the crow, would regard them with suspicion. (from Desert Notes) 

III. Thinking

It is tempting to hold in one's hand the ready made map and think I hold all I need.  There are many types of map we are seduced by, fall victim to, yes?

Ready made maps, especially the slickest, are unauthored.

We would be wise to follow Lopez's advice and "throw them out. They are the wrong sort of map."

What Was the Question To Which PARCC Is the Answer?

Waiting on Icarus (2009, M.A. Reilly)

I. The Absence of Complexity

I took a look at the new release of PARCC assessment items the other day and specifically spent some time thinking about the demands these prototypes represent and the contexts in which these demands will occur.  PARCC situates the assessments as "next generation, technology-based assessments"  and makes these claims (here):

Better standards require better tests – and the shifts in the standards call for critical advances in assessment quality. PARCC will develop custom items and tasks aligned to the Common Core State Standards.
In regards to the ELA/Literacy assessments, this means PARCC will include:

• Texts worth reading: The assessments will use authentic texts worthy of study instead of artificially produced or commissioned passages.
• Questions worth answering: Sequences of questions that draw students into deeper encounters with texts will be the norm (as in an excellent classroom), rather than sets of random questions of varying quality.

This made me a bit uneasy, not because I don't want my son to read or engage, but rather because the language here reminded me of the discourse that typified the high school I attended several decades ago--years before the Internet.  At that time information was thought to be scarce and a private school education was supposed to afford its students access to the coveted information (preferably ahead of others) and in doing so gain its clients entry into select colleges (where even scarcer info could be had). Yet even then a belief that there existed an agreed upon collection of 'texts worth reading' was being challenged.  So too was the idea that a deeper encounter could be had devoid of person and context.

Reading the claims from PARCC reminded me of that important Neil Postman question: What was the question to which this was the answer? 

 Hmm.  So take a moment and see what you think.

What was the question to which these next generation prototypes are the answer?
What world is posited?
What beliefs are held sacred?
Whose power is secured by maintaining such a system?
Who wins? Loses? Profits?

II. Take This Test

Go ahead and access and then read the two texts (Ovid's "Daedalus and Icarus" and Anne Sexton's "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph") and the four prototype questions here.  I am not asking you to answer the two essay questions, but do take a look, along with the two multiple choice questions.  Keep in mind that the sample ELA test items have been designed for high school sophomores.

So what did you think?  How did you work?

As I reread the poems on my laptop, I started searching terms in an effort to read against each poem, clarify questions, and pose new questions based on the meanings I made.  I am curious as to what you did when you read the texts. Did you seek external sources as well?  Did you talk to others?  Did you search for works you had written that connected?  There were many references that came up as I queried Daedalus, Icarus, Minos, and Perdix.  Just reading the links allowed me to call forth understandings I have had of the many Icarus texts I've taught/read/view/heard and composed (an example at the top of the post). 

As I worked it was painful to think that my child and yours too will not have access to their connected lives when they take this assessment. They will not be asked to make sense of texts through the dominant tools many use daily.  In fact,  my child will be disadvantaged as he lives in a highly connected world. When he has a question or is trying to frame a question, he often skypes with friends, clients, and colleagues across the world.  Just yesterday he shared a program he wrote and when I asked him how he learned to write script he said that he studied examples online, talked with a few people from one of his development teams who are more advanced programmers, and then gave it a try and revised as needed. None of these options will be afforded to him when he takes the 'next generation' test and this should give us pause.

As I read the prototypes I did not see a web 2.0 world, but rather a continuation of the last century, albeit somewhat slicker (the absence of #2 pencils, dragging, highlighting text, etc.).  But what is fundamentally unchanged is that the student is situated in front of a stand alone computer screen.  While the software maybe networked, the student is not. The isolated test taker is unable to interact at will with anything or anyone else and this is contrary to the very career and college world that CCSS purports to be readying your child and mine.

III. What Does It Mean to Be Ready?

I own a consulting business and I cannot recall a time when I was limited to working without any access to resources and not required to frame the question(s), determine resources, and collaborate within a given and nonetheless emerging context.  Most of my work requires me to interact with others and to make and negotiate meaning collaboratively.  This is not to say that I don't produce texts on my own, but rather that the texts I do produce are (in)formed by the client and the context which is always evolving.  As such, the work is complex.  And so in considering how I actually work,  I do not understand how the results from PARCC measures are going to help me and my child know if he is career and college ready.  At best, PARCC offers complicated tasks, but clearly not complex ones as there is no difficulty in tracing the journey each and every child will take well before anyone begins.

I want to say that PARCC and Smarter Balance assessments are little different, at a philosophical level, than the high stakes tests that we have subjected children to since we were first told that we were a nation at risk (mid 1980s).  Instead of valuing learning that children actually do in the myriad of contexts they work and learn in, we continue to create a separate testing reality that costs taxpayers billions, reduces learning time within schools, and is disconnected from important learning dispositions, strategies, and skills we want to cultivate with (not in) children.  Oddly, understanding and being able to perform a range of performance strategies that include collaboration, creation, critique, analysis, evaluation, and representation--while being responsive to emerging situations--cannot be included in measures where learners are isolated beings. Even though it is 2012, we continue to measure excellence with the belief that information is scarce and knowing is akin to that which you can prove on your own. Sadly, it's an every (hu)man for him/her self world.

IV. When Information as Scarce

Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown (2011) define this type of thinking as mechanistic. They write:

Learning is treated as a series of steps to be mastered, as if students were being taught how to operate a machine or even, in some cases, as if the students themselves were machines being programmed to accomplish tasks. The ultimate endpoint of a mechanistic perspective is efficiency: The goal is to learn as much as you can, as fast as you can. In this teaching-based approach, standardization is a reasonable way to do this, and testing is a reasonable way to measure the result. (Kindle Locations 336-338)

In contrast to this mechanistic view of learning Thomas and Brown offer a view to a new culture of learning, one that is absent from the PARCC prototypes:

learning should be viewed in terms of an environment—combined with the rich resources provided by the digital information network—where the context in which learning happens, the boundaries that define it, and the students, teachers, and information within it all coexist and shape each other in a mutually reinforcing way.  (Kindle Locations 329-332).

Instead of examining actual work that learners do for real purposes, we continue to subscribe to the belief that simulated assessment tasks are apt measures of knowing and doing.


It's the 20th  

     century
                  all over,

   all
            over

         (again).


Work Cited:

Thomas, Douglas; Seely Brown, John (2011-03-12). A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. CreateSpace. Kindle Edition.

An Open Letter to Each Researcher Cited by PARCC in their Support of Close Reading

This is a copy of the email I sent to each researcher cited by PARCC as supporting close reading. I am interested in seeing their replies and will post accordingly with permission.

Dear Professor XXX,

I have been reading the Common Core Standards, PARCCs testing frameworks, as well as the cited research that these two groups list as support for close reading as the "guiding principle of the standards" and central focus of assessment for 60 million children. Frankly I am hoping you can explain how a single way of reading represents the whole of such an embodied act.  I'm a mom with a 12 year old son and the narrowness of this approach (imagine this is it for 13 years) makes more than a bit wary.

This is the paragraph that PARCC provides:

Close Reading of Texts

As noted above, the close reading model is a central guiding principle of the standards and as a result will be a central focus of the PARCC Assessment System. The Model Content Frameworks provide guidance for focusing on the close, sustained reading of complex text. Close reading stresses engaging with a text of sufficient complexity directly and examining its meaning thoroughly and methodically. It emphasizes using texts of grade-level-appropriate complexity and focusing student reading on the particular words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs of the author, encouraging students to read and re-read deliberately. By directing student attention on the text itself, close reading empowers students to reflect on the meanings of individual words, the order in which sentences unfold, and the development of ideas over the course of the text — to ultimately arrive at an understanding of the text as a whole. A significant body of research links the close reading of complex text—regardless if the student is a struggling reader or advanced—to significant gains in reading proficiency, and finds close reading to be a key component of college and career readiness.5

And this is the 'research' (not sure all of this actually is research) cited:

1. Ericcson, K. A., and W. Kintsch. 1993. The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. Psychological Review 100(3):363–406; 
2. Plant, E. A., et al. 2005. Why study time does not predict grade point average across college students: Implications of deliberate practice for academic performance. Contemporary Educational Psychology 30; 
3. Ericcson, K. A., and W. Kintsch. 1999. The Role of Long Term Working Memory in Text Comprehension. Psychologia;  
4. Kintsch, W. 2009. Learning and constructivism. Constructivist Instruction: Success or failure? eds. Tobias and Duffy. New York: Routledge; 
5. Hampton, S., and E. Kintsch. 2009. Supporting Cumulative Knowledge Building Through Reading. In Adolescent Literacy, Field Tested: Effective Solutions for Every Classroom, eds. Parris, Fisher, and Headley. International Reading Association; 
6. Heller, R., and C. Greenleaf. 2007. Literacy Instruction in the Content Areas: Getting to the Core of Middle and High School Improvement. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education; 
7. The Education Trust. 2006. Gaining Traction, Gaining Ground: How Some High Schools Accelerate Learning for Struggling Students; ACT. 2006. Reading Between the Lines. 

Which text that you've written from this cited list would you recommend that I read that might explain why close reading should be the only approach an entire country adopts for all of its public school children? I am thinking about this as quite recently my husband and I were talking about Seamus Heaney's wonderful book, The Spirit Level.  You may have read it. Heaney closes the book with the poem, Postscript.

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

I was telling my husband that the closing lines of the poem stopped my breath and did what I suspect the poet might have wanted, caught my heart off guard and blew it open. My husband said how when he read the poem--read it aloud, he recalled a rather cool morning in Ireland when the two of us, much younger than we are now, were motoring about, newly in love, and had stopped in at a pub for a bit of hot tea. He was recalling how soothing that morning had been.

I'm pretty sure we weren't having a 'close reading' lesson when we read The Spirit Level. In some ways we might have been following cummings' adage about feelings being first. I worry that this 'read like a detective' (David Coleman's phrase, not mine) dictum will harm my child, narrow his understanding of the many reasons we read, and above all else will dim his pleasure of the text.

I am curious as to what you have to say as it is your work that is cited in support of such a single method of reading to be exclusively used for all children beginning at age 8 until they exit the system at 17 or 18. I await your response.

Sincerely,
Mary Ann Reilly