My Article in the Washington Post on January 23, 2014
Below is the text of my article entitled, A Challenge: Teach Eighth Grade Common Core Before Endorsing It, published in the Washington Post on January 23, 2014.
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On January 21, 2014, Valerie Strauss’ Washington Post education blog, The Answer Sheet, ran a supposed “reaction to” education historian Diane Ravitch’s January 11, 2014, speech at the Modern Language Association (MLA) annual meeting in Chicago. This “reaction” was written by former MLA president and career English professor, Gerald Graff.
Graff’s words beg response, which I will offer in this writing.
Allow me to ask readers to indulge my perspective, for I am a seasoned, traditional public school teacher, and I have just spent the last seven hours teaching my approximately 125, mostly-15-year-old students of varied socioeconomic status, homelife stability, intellectual curiosity, life experience, and aptitude how to write.
Thus, I have fresh in my mind both my public school world and my goal to teach students to write.
Now, to Graff’s “reaction.”
First, if one considers Strauss’ introduction of Graff’s article, one expects Graff’s writing to connect to Ravitch’s MLA speech. However, nothing about Graff’s writing is clearly and directly connected to Ravitch’s speech. In fact, Graff could have written this “reaction” without ever having heard or read Ravitch’s speech.
If responding to Ravitch’s speech had been a writing assignment in my class, Graff’s response would have earned an “F” for its complete lack of connection to the topic.
Second, in his “reaction” that really isn’t one, Graff quotes a few lines from Ravitch’s book, Reign of Error. However, he does not explore the book, fully half of which