CCSS a Death Knell for Literature?
by Robert PondiscioFebruary 7th, 2011
Julia Steiny worries that Common Core State Standards “will require students to read considerably less fiction.” The education columnist for the Providence Journal tells of being assigned James Agee’s novel A Death in the Family, by a 9th grade English teacher who wanted to exose her students to difficult experiences including grief. ”In her opinion, now mine,” Steiny writes, ”one of the great virtues of fiction is that it gives us the benefit of someone else’s experience, at the remove of fiction.”
“Fiction keeps seeming to me like such a powerful twofer: literacy skills inextricably combined with stories that broaden our understanding of how and why different people, in different circumstances, make decisions, mistakes, sacrifices. Ah but, silly me. The new Common Core standards