An Arizona High-School Teacher Embraces the Common Core

In this article in Education Week, veteran English teacher Lyn Cannaday confesses that her classes once hid “a tale of two cities.” Her honors students got a rich selection of fiction and poetry as they prepared for the AP literature test. She says this included “dramatic readings, exaggerated play-acting, role-playing, and a level of hyperactivity generally considered unattractive in a woman in her 40s.” Meanwhile, her non-honors students read very few complete works of fiction or non-fiction and focused mostly on simple grammar and memorizing literary terms. “It was awful,” she says. “[M]uch of the joy of my early years of teaching eventually vanished under the weight of district-mandated standards that, honestly, did not matter in the real world.” 

The Common Core State Standards have changed all that. “I now have balance,” says Cannaday. “I feel like my students have joined the real world. They are engaged and making connections across genres that I never thought would be possible.” Her honors students are reading All Quiet on the Western Front along with pieces on morality and ethics by Pema Chodron, Thomas Jefferson, and Machiavelli, bringing the moral dilemmas into sharp focus and developing a deeper understanding of All Quiet. And her non-honors students are reading Taliban propaganda and the Declaration of Independence and considering how words engender power and people use words both legitimately and illegitimately. “When one of my intermediate students announced that Jefferson was a bit of ‘a badass for flipping off a king’ with ‘an in-your-face kind of’ writing style like the Declaration of Independence,” she says, “I admonished him for swearing, but I did an internal jig of delight because that is a student who understands this English language that I adore.” 

In another unit, Cannaday has students reading Frankenstein, Death of a Salesman, and The Color of Water in conjunction with nonfiction texts on psychology and ethics. “This has allowed them to explore the real world,” she says, “including, for the first time, through their own research. I have heard many critics lament that the common core is taking fiction out of the classroom. My curriculum is living proof that this is not true… In fact, in my intermediate class, fiction is moving back into the room, pushing out drill-and-kill exercises that may have taught students to memorize, but did little to make them better readers, writers, or consumers of the English language.” 

“A Happy Tale from a Common-Core Classroom” by Lyn Cannaday in Education Week, Feb. 27, 2013 (Vol. 32, #22, p. 22-23), www.edweek.org

From the Marshall Memo #475