Cover of Crime and Punishment (Vintage Classics)
With Rigor for All, Second Edition: Meeting Common Core Standards for Reading Literature
Carol Jago, the book’s author, has plenty of credentials, published work, and years of classroom teaching to make her qualified, but even without knowing all of that, her confident, sure tone and practical approach would be enough to convince any reader. Every chapter is full of easily adaptable classroom stories, lessons and assessments, including reading lists grouped by category and age range and with titles such as “Comprehending Complex Literature” and “Developing Proficient, Independent Readers.” The back of the book includes a study guide for Professional Learning Communities and would be useful for any English department who chose to read the book together.
My favorite chapter is “Testing That Teaches,” where Jago addresses not massive state-wide standardized tests, but the objective tests many teachers give to assess a student’s understanding of a text. She begins the chapter asserting, “Every time a teacher of literature gives an objective test, students’ confidence in themselves as readers is undermined,” and moves from there to systematically dismantle any argument in favor of tests. I was thrilled to read so many cogent arguments that aligned with my own frustration with quizzes, and my own refusal to give objective tests in my classes. For Jago, these tests waste teachers’ valuable professional time, encourage destructive competitiveness in the student community of learners we are trying to build in our classrooms, discourage critical thinking, and place the emphasis on what a student is able to recall under pressure, rather than concrete and valuable reading and writing skills. While all of this is important and thought-provoking, what makes Jago so useful for the classroom teacher is that she offers alternatives, assessments and activities she uses in her teaching to assess understanding. The most creative example is giving her students Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird for class discussion, and then asking them to write poems titled “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Raskolnikov,” while reading Crime and Punishment (Vintage Classics)
While I understand altering the title for this edition, when so many public school teachers are adjusting to Common Core standards, I hope independent school teachers will still check it out, because I found it incredibly useful. I’d like to read her Classics in the Classroom: Designing Accessible Literature Lessons
Related articles
- Increasing Rigor in Your Classroom (donnaroman.wordpress.com)
- What English classes should look like in Common Core era (washingtonpost.com)
- Four Quick Ways To Boost Rigor In Your Classroom (teacherpop.org)
- What English Classes Should Look Like in the Common Core Era (dianeravitch.net)
, some of the family background was familiar to me, but Nasaw does a great job of outlining Joseph as a separate figure, not just as backdrop to his legendary children. The sections of the book dealing with his relationship with Franklin Roosevelt, and the ensuing and spectacular failure of his ambassadorship to England as World War was approaching, are truly fascinating, and offer some really good lessons on how business success and expertise don’t necessarily translate to political skills (ahem, Mittens Romney).
is striking and memorable, but 
was absolutely breathtaking, one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read). Hattie is a novel that shifts from one member of the sprawling Shepherd family to the next, across decades, genders, and the chasms that can develop between the closest of relations. This is not a heartwarming family epic, but instead often shows each character in moments where they are faced with their own flaws and limitations, and the wreckage they have caused or survived in their lives. For example, the first narrative has a teenage Hattie watch her first children, twin infants, die in her arms for lack of penicillin. Hattie is a striking and powerful character, not because she has a lot of power in her life, but because she forges her own image of womanhood, fiery and uncompromising, and refuses to sugarcoat her view of the world or the relationships she has in it. She’s a loving figure, not necessarily a warm one, and a warrior in her own distinctive way. This is the first novel from Ayana Mathis, and while I’m not quite ready to proclaim her the next “Toni Morrison” (sorry, Oprah), I’ll be looking forward to her future works.
or 
, 
or 
, 
or 
. My favorite books are the ones that make me feel like I’m living in their landscape for awhile. Those are the books I’ll reread, over and again.
, by 
holds a certain place in my heart for complicated reasons (let’s just say I dated Rob and identified with Rob at one point in my life and leave it at that) but more importantly, the book is full of references to fantastic music. For years, I’ve wished I could have a soundtrack to the book–not to the great American film version 
(although I do own the 
), but to the book.
by 
, which touch on two critical areas that are more abstract as far as pedagogy, but no less important.
makes for a funny, sexy, gritty and feminine addition to the category. It might sound funny to use the word “sexy” to describe a story in which the author loses five toenails and doesn’t shower for weeks on end, but even without the sensual interlude Strayed does find along the trail, she describes plenty of other sexual episodes with Joe, her heroin addict ex-boyfriend, and the confidence she gains through each daunting section of the trail. I found the book easy to connect to on personal levels, as Strayed and I share some similarities, but I think it’s also so easy to connect to the narrative because Strayed has such a distinctively honest and intimate voice, so that you feel like she’s talking directly to you.
. If you haven’t been a fan of Sugar’s, I can’t recommend her work highly enough, and if you are a fan, you’ll find Wild a great read as well.
as soon as possible, pre-ordering it for my Kindle and then reading it as quickly as I could (though my grades were also due last week, which put a cramp in my reading plans).
or 
, two of my favorite novels. Goodbye features a male hero very similar to men Tyler has shown us before: a crotchety kind of guy who adheres to rigid routines and a cranky outlook on the world, regardless of his age, but who ends up being drawn to women who are flightier, feminine, without always realizing what warmth and richness the women in his life bring to it. There’s not much here that we haven’t seen before from Tyler, and the novel has a roundness, an “happily ever after” aspect that Tyler usually doesn’t have, the kind that’s more often the province of women’s fiction authors like 
. I had been reading so much about the book, and I’m a devotee of food memoirs, and for a trip to such a legendary foodie city, it seemed completely appropriate.
