More concerns about the humanities

I attended a district training today in which we wrote curriculum for the new Texas standards.  I knew from the revised district curriculum we received at the beginning of the year that nonfiction and informational texts were in full force like they never were before.    I figured they wanted us to add more nonfiction because they wanted t boost TAKS scores for the nonfiction piece on TAKS.

However, today in the training, my colleague asked the curriculum specialist about where literature fits in the curriculum..  His response was basically that it doesn’t.  There’s no room for whole class novels.  You can teach excerpts of novels, or students can study novels in lit circles, but there is no place for whole class novels.  One of his responses was that the word “novel” was nowhere to be found in the new TEKS.   In addition, SSR was missing.  He mentioned if you do SSR then make sure you do metacognitive strategies with it (we already do this when we ask the students to write reader responses using reading strategies).

My biggest concern is where is the literature for the love of reading?  Where is reading for pleasure?  How do we create life-long readers when they are only reading instructional texts and nonfiction texts?  What about the story?  Is there no place for the love of reading to learn about life, people, human nature, to make us more human.  I have concerns– students will be prepared for the workplace, but at what cost?  What kind of people are we creating for the future?  How do students learn about the world?  What does this mean for the future of reading, writing, books, and the story?  What will happen to our readers who have the imagination to think out of the box, to our future Stephen Kings or Amy Tans?

This scares me.  I may not be in education forever; many of the changes directly impact everything I love abut the profession, therefore, the changes will be an impetus for me leaving.  However, it scares me more for  my kids.  My kids will be going to school in a culture that values the dollar and career more than humanity.   They are our future.  And what does that future look like for them?  It’s sad.

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