Input, Please?

Louisiana will fully implement the Common Core State Standards next school year.  As a core class teacher (English II and IV) I've been doing a lot of reading, both pro and con, about the new Common Core standards.

Whether I like them or not, it's my job to fully implement them to the best of my ability.  Therefore, I'm asking for input here.

Look over the recommended novels list below for tenth graders and tell me your initial reaction and please offer any feedback or input if you've got an opinion about any of these works recommended for tenth grade readers:

English II

·         The House of Spirits- Allende

·         The Underdogs-Azuela

·         The Book of Lamentations- Castellanos

·         Like Water for Chocolate- Fuentes

·         One Hundred Years of Solitude- Marquez

·         The Seagull- Chekhov

·         The Inspector-General- Gogol

·         “Master Harold” and the Boys- Fugard

·         The Imposter- Usigli

·         Death and the King’s Horseman- Soyinka

·         King Baabu- Soyinka

·         The Lion and the Jewel- Soyinka

·         Family- Pa Jin

·         Midnight’s Children- Rushdie

·         In Custody- Desai

·         Nectar in a Sieve- Markandaya

·         The God of Small Things- Roy

·         The Sound of Waves- Mishima

·         After Dark- Murakami

·         My Name is Red- Pamuk

·         Things Fall Apart- Achebe

·         The Joys of Motherhood- Emecheta

·         Cry, The Beloved Country- Paton

·         Waiting for Barbarians or Life and Times of Michael K- Coetzee

·         The Thief and the Dogs- Mahfouz

·         So Long a Letter- Ba

·         Martha Quest- Lessing

·         Beirut Blues- al-Shaykh

·         The River Between- Thiong’o

·         The Death of Ivan Ilyich- Tolstoy

·         One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich- Solzhenitsyn

·         A Dead Man’s Memoir- Bulgakov

I'm withholding my comments for now.



Further Reading on Common Core:

Sarah Palin Was a Prophet About Obama's Education Takeover
The Road to a National Curriculum
How Well are American Students Learning?
National Curriculum Plan May Face Challenge
Conservatives Oppose National Standards
School Standards Pushback
Common Core Standards
Obama Team Hijacks Schools' Core Standards
National Cost of Aligning States and Localities to Common Core Standards
"Are You Serious?"  Yep, They Are
Michelle Malkin:  Rotten to the Core Part III
Michelle Malkin:  Rotten to the Core Part I
Michelle Malkin:  Rotten to the Core Part II
Michelle Malkin:  Rotten to the Core Part IV
Louisiana Educator:  Why Common Core Will Be a Disaster...

Wednesday Thoughts

Light blogging today: my classes are working in the library on research papers.

Imagine my shock when I discovered (yesterday!) that the new MLA guidelines have changed almost everything about documentation for research papers! No more underlining! No more URLs! And now you must indicate the medium of your reference - print, electronic, etc.

This will send my set-in-his-ways Senior English teacher into apoplexy.

Ah well. That aside, I'm also kind of tied up on a new project and learning a new medium. More on that later.

I do have a couple of quick read links for you this morning. Over at Commentary Magazine Sam Sacks has reviewed Stephen King's Under the Dome, and well, Stephen King's writing in general. I haven't read the latest novel yet but it's holding my desk down (it's a huge book) waiting on me to get to it.

I'm of mixed feelings about Stephen King. I've been reading him for over thirty years and I've seen his work evolve and go up and down. I use some passages from his On Writing in my creative writing class. Say what you will about his ability, the man has been successful.

As long as you're over at Commentary, check out Jennifer Rubin's response to the newest Obama envoy to the Muslim world here. The original Fox Story to which she refers is here. I suspect this fellow will be the next man in Glenn Beck's radar. But Rubin raises a valid point: why do we need an envoy to the Muslim world, anyway? Do we have one for the Jewish world? The Hindu world? The Christian world?

There's a developing thread on the story at Memeorandum you can keep an eye on and see who else weighs in.

With that, I'm off to teach tenth graders how to do research and to properly document sources in the ever changing world of the Modern Language Association.

I'll check back in on you good folks later.

Gimme a "V"

Thank you Slate Magazine. As an English teacher I have been wondering about this word:

"Where does the expression to vet come from?

It's a figurative contraction of veterinarian. The fancy word for animal doctor originated in the mid-17th century. The colloquial abbreviation dates to the 1860s; the verb form of the word, meaning "to treat an animal," came a few decades later—according to the Oxford English Dictionary the earliest known usage is 1891—and was applied primarily in a horse-racing context. ("He vetted the stallion before the race," "you should vet that horse before he races," etc.) By the early 1900s, vet had begun to be used as a synonym for evaluate, especially in the context of searching for flaws.

Through the early decades of the 20th century, vet was primarily a Britishism. It became fairly popular in the United Kingdom during the 1930s, especially to indicate the examination of candidates for military positions, as well as the inspection of manuscripts or public speeches prior to delivery. In his 1936 biography of G.K. Chesteron, William Richard Twitterton wrote: "[N]aturally each article of mine was vetted for libel with a microscope." Over the next couple of decades, it gained traction across the Atlantic. Time magazine appears to have used the word vetting for the first time in 1945... The word first appears out of quotes in that magazine in 1959

William Safire first tackled vetting for his "On Language" column in 1980. In response to a reader's complaint that Newsweek used the word twice in two weeks, Safire noted that "some dictionaries have it" and that "the Britishism is in vogue use in America today." He dedicated a second column to vetting in 1993, which is right around when the New York Times started using the expression with great frequency—in reference to Bill Clinton appointees, among other topics."

(Image credit: havenworks.com)