HEY! What's the Main Idea?

This really seems to be the big deal this year. I haven't been to a single function with other English teachers that hasn't eventually brought this complaint forward. Overwhelmingly, students are struggling with separating the main idea from other topics included in the essay, story, etc.

I am not sure why this happens. I've only recently begun trying to formulate a plan of attack for the problem.

The first place I looked is Jim Burke's The English Teacher's Companion. Jim's work has been indispensible before, so I figured I couldn't go wrong. I didn't. There were the usual strategies available for use, but most of the meaning-making strategies felt like class activities. What I was looking for was a strategy I could give them to fall back on when I wasn't there to help them push through a dense text.

I looked next at Kelly Gallagher's Deeper Reading. In the book, Kelly divides reading into a process like writing, complete with multiple drafts. This spark led me back to Jim's work on Tools for Thought. In that collection of strategies, the Pyramid Notes sparked a memory of another pyramid device. So, I was off again, in search of the muse.

The muse, in this case, was actually a man: Doug Buehl, author of Classroom Strategies for Interactive Learning. Doug's strategies are universal, across-the-curricula, and easily adaptable. The fourth chapter of the recent third edition is all about fact pyramids. I reread the chapter, noting that the key to this pyramid was the fact that the bottom contained general knowledge facts while the top contained the overarching idea. The middle section contains short-term, organizing concepts. For example, a fact pyramid on the Crusades would have large concepts like the causes, effects, and impact of the Crusades, while the middle section would list the Crusades: First, Second, Third, and Fourth. The bottom slice would include related terms and names like "Pope Urban II" and "Cruciata." Thinking about Jim, Kelly, and Doug, I began to work on a synthesis of the fact pyramid, the text frame, and the drafts of reading.

And that is as far as I have gotten. Another colleague and I are going to work on it tomorrow (yeah...Election Day; let's hear it for the work day). I hope to post more later in the week.

In the meantime, what do you think? Do you have any strategies for teaching the main idea? If the problem is as widespread as it seems, please share away.

(P.S.) Click the title to see the post on the NCTE Connected Community.

The Future is...Overcast?

The future is usually portrayed as a dystopic nightmare of oppression and limited freedom. In Max Barry’s novel Jennifer Government, the future is dystopic, but very livable. You see the government, that stalwart body of justice, law, and order, is now privatized. Nothing can be done unless the revenue is raised to do it. Someone kills your loved one; you better have the money to mount a trial. Of course, the power in this world has become vested in those places that have the most money, corporations. So the battle-lines are drawn—the government takes on the corporations with unadulterated fervor.

And they need to be opposed. The corporations, bearing their actual names (a genius device), gives guerrilla marketing a whole new, almost literal, meaning. From the murder of fourteen teenagers to sell shoes to the attempts to assassinate the government president, the corporations will stop at nothing to gain that niche market. There are even alliances of companies that use the NRA (yes, that NRA) to wage war on each other. Amid all of this corporate chaos, Jennifer Government emerges to restore order, or at least snag the bad guy behind it all.

The names are where Barry’s genius really emerges. As I said before, Barry uses actual corporation names. Nike sells shoes, the NRA sells its services as corporate mercenaries, ExxonMobil launches a computer virus to cripple Shell. The list goes on and on. And the characters…Jennifer Government? She works for the government. John Nike. Violet (She is unemployed). Billy NRA. Claire Sears. Whichever corporation you work for is the last name you adopt; even if you transfer jobs. One minute you are Bob Nike, then you are Bob Wal-Mart. The eeriest aspect of this naming device is the schools. Schools are owned by corporations as well. Kate Mattel (Government) is Jennifer’s daughter.

This balance between our admiration for the larger-than-life heroes and our wariness at a society that owns our children is masterfully maintained throughout. One minute, you are rooting for Jennifer Government and her partner, Calvin. Then you are sympathizing with Billy NRA as his quest for finding a good skiing destination leads him further down the path to becoming a NRA assassin.

Perhaps the most chillingly balanced scene in the entire novel is near the beginning during the massacre at the Nike Town store. One of the characters, Buy Mitsui, a stockbroker, attempts to save a young girl who has been brutally shot in the back of the neck, all in an effort to sell more Nike shoes. As he tries to heroically staunch the bleeding, everyone else ignores his calls for help. Then the real scare starts. Buy dials 9-1-1 and tries to get an ambulance. He can’t get an ambulance mobilized unless he pays for it. Buy is more than willing to do so, but the operator requires pre-payment. The scene ends with Buy futilely reading his card number into the phone as the operator continuously messes it up while the girl bleeds out on the floor.

That darkness emerges frequently, but not nearly enough. One of the flaws of the novel is its tone. It is a satire, but, unlike Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, it never brings us to the edge of the abyss to let us sneak a peek. The latter portion of the novel gives way to raucous action sequences that bring up the ghosts of Riggs and Murtaugh more than Yossarian and Orr.

For all that distraction, we still get a smart critique of the culture of “capitalism” that seems to predict the real-life horrors we’ve seen in the past 4 years. Villains like John Nike are nothing more than fiction-clad Bernie Madoffs, bringing destruction through their own personal quests for more. As you turn the last page, you realize, with sudden satisfaction, that you’ve read a satire of capitalism that is willing to give that system a chance. The usual down-with-capitalism-socialism-will-save-us shtick gets old after the fifth time you teach 1984. Jennifer Government is a rollicking, fast-paced read with a smart economic bent. You’ll like it, and I bet students will, too.

So You Think You Can Read? Rigor in Reading

“About two-thirds of those who enter high school graduate. About two-thirds of those who do go on to some form of higher education. About two-thirds of those who go on to higher education take remedial courses in college (so they are not doing college-level work; they are really in high school). Fewer than half of those who go to college get a degree of any sort. Yet virtually all analysts agree that those who do not have at least two years of real college-level work will be in real trouble as adults” (NCEE, 2008, p. 35).

The following scene may be familiar to some of you:

It is a hazy weekday morning. You pull into your parking space at school, open your car door, sling on all your gear, and enter the building. You pray you balanced all of your things correctly because you must sidestep a zillion teenagers who will, and have, run teachers down on occasion. You make it to the office, sign in, sigh at the mountain of mail in your mailbox you wish you had a hand for, and then you head to your classroom. The smell of freshly-brewed coffee drifts slowly down the hall, welcoming you to another morning at school. You drop the gear in your room, run back to the office mailbox, grab your mail, and then return to your desk. (They should call it your castle since the numbers of student papers piling up in the corners are beginning to look like parapets.) You grab your mug, head across the hall, and fill up your cup. Then, you walk back across the hall, grab a legal pad and a pen, and head for your weekly department meeting. Your serene morning is about to end.

At the meeting, you and your colleagues debate over the use of materials in the classroom. The honors/Advanced Placement/Dual Enrollment/ International Baccalaureate students get short shrift. The special education students get mentioned and the special education liaison takes them on by him or herself. Then there are the standard students. I have found that whenever these students come up, people get weird. Once motivated and intelligent people become work-o-phobic. Teach them Shakespeare, you say? Make them do homework, you say? Do I look like a miracle worker? Yes, you do. You are a teacher—time to start acting like one.

If this scene is familiar, then perhaps the quotation from the National Center on Education and the Economy’s report Tough Choices or Tough Times also struck a familiar chord. Our standard students are being fed fairy tales of the power of education. They are being told of the empowerment an education can provide while some teachers quietly exchange rigor in the curriculum with easy-to-read books and easy-to-grade assessments.

At our school, the newest drive is for literacy. We have been adapting all sorts of new methods (new to us that is) to raise students’ vocabularies. We have adopted root word strategies, interactive reading strategies, cross-curricular classrooms, ad nauseum. What we haven’t added is the rigor. What possible vocabulary growth can tenth grade students get from To Kill a Mockingbird? What a fantastic novel; its simple language makes it all that much more powerful. The problem is that that may be the only major work students read all year. The rest of the time, students read short stories, poems, and the phenomenal, yet equally simple, Night. Where is the challenge of Shakespeare? Some of our teachers teach Julius Caesar to tenth grade, others try to find ways to run out of time. Where is the challenge of at least one difficult novel? I mean, my AP Literature class will read A Tale of Two Cities because we have it for twelfth grade. Some districts use that novel as a freshman text.

The bottom line is what the bottom line always has been in a meaningful education: effort. Many teachers do not want to struggle with their students to teach them Shakespeare. They would rather pull out Harper Lee or Elie Wiesel and get a powerful story with little linguistic development. Learning language is hard, but I’ve never thought it was optional.

So, what is to be done? The answer is simple. Next time you consider what to teach next, think about the numbers. Do you want half of the students you teach to be unsuccessful? I think the answer to that question will give you all you need to know about the importance of a rigorous curriculum and whether or not you should push your students to become better readers. They will need two years of college to be successful. Could your students make it that far?

I know mine will; we just started reading The Merchant of Venice as an anticipatory piece for The Great Gatsby. The play is the thing for a comparison with Gatsby. Considering its discussions of wealth, dangerous conflict, and forbidden loves, The Merchant of Venice could be Gatsby’s long-lost cousin. The students are using many of the tactics offered in the Folger’s Shakespeare Set Free collection to become comfortable with the language. I am not worried about them getting the story…yet. Right now, I am tackling the task of getting students excited about reading Shakespeare. Turns out, with the Folger’s help, it is not all that hard.

How do you inject rigor into your curriculum? What are some strategies you use when teaching a difficult text?