A Summer Reading List for Teachers

We can't believe that Summer College for Teachers came and went so quickly! During our time collaborating with high school educators in June, we often talked about non-fiction texts that teachers can use to revise their prompts, in order to bridge the gap between high school and college writing. Here is a list of recommendations, complied by Brendon Votipka. Check out the selections below and use them to revised your prompts before the new school year begins!

Nonfiction Reading List

Compiled by Brendon Votipka, Rutgers Writing Program

Family

Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work
Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity

Fear

Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America

Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined)
Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning
Kurt Spellmeyer, Buddha at the Apocalypse: Awakening from a Culture of Destruction

Health
Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Identity

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

Michael Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men

Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

Kenji Yoshino, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights

Psychology

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love and the Meaning of Life

Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door

Social Interaction

Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine

Janet A. Flammang, The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society

Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

Technology & the Mind

Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
Cathy N. Davidson, Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century

Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

Sherry Turkle, Simulation and Its Discontents

Writing, Thinking, and Communication

Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, “They Say / I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing

bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen, Writing Analytically

Deborah Tannen, The Argument Culture
Kate L. Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations

College-Level Nonfiction Anthologies

Barclay Barios, Emerging: Contemporary Readings for Writers
Michelle J. Brazier, Points of Departure: A Collection of Contemporary Essays

Kurt Spellmeyer and Richard E. Miller, The New Humanities Reader

Reality Hunger

I am reading Reality Hunger by David Shields, which you can find mostly reproduced on the web -- perhaps because so much of the book itself is a collage of stolen quotes that it might be difficult to sustain claims of copyright violation against the poster.  It's a much more slippery consideration of the rising importance of nonfiction than represented by Shields's critics, who universally quote his statement that he will not read the latest Pulitzer Prize winning novel because fiction "has never seemed less central to the culture's sense of itself" (section 523).  While I couldn't agree more with that sentiment, I am not sure if Shields himself truthfully agrees with it, since he tells us in so many ways that the boundaries between nonfiction and fiction are more blurry than we might want to admit.  


The term "nonfiction," like "truth" or "reality," is almost a word in which we do not believe: as Shields writes, "Reality, as Nabokov never got tired of reminding us, is the one word that is meaningless without quotation marks" (section 1).  The best proof of how slippery "nonfiction" can be is the title of the book currently at the top of the bestseller list for "nonfiction" (New York Times and Amazon): Heaven Is for Real.  This is just one of many such books on the market -- my favorite example of which is The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven by Kevin Malarkey -- and it follows in a long tradition of such books, which were already so numerous by the early 20th Century that they inspired Mark Twain to write his comic Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven (1909).


In the end, Shields is so slippery in his defense of nonfiction that you begin to wish for a more coherent defender of that mode of writing.  But his book does remind us that it is difficult to make fine distinctions among nonfictions as we move toward introducing them into the curriculum.  


What sort of nonfiction should we be teaching?  I used to say "fewer first-person narrations" and more "books about ideas, in clear conversation with other voices."  But then I consider this strange book itself, which is a collage of quotations from others intermixed with the authors own writing -- all represented as first-person narration -- and yet so clearly a book about ideas in conversation with other voices.  I'm not sure if that means we need a clearer distinction or if that means all distinctions can inevitably be deconstructed.

Writing and the Common Core State Standards

Professor Dorothy Strickland of Rutgers University last week made a PowerPoint presentation to the New Jersey Board of Education on The Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSS), which might mark the beginning of a wider discussion how these standards will change the curriculum.  We think it's important that those in education looking to improve college readiness get involved in the process, especially before major corporations begin selling their solutions.   Ultimately, the spirit of the Common Core can only be honored if we find a way of communicating its standards to teachers so that they can put them into practice themselves rather than purchasing some "one size fits all" solution.

As a slide in Professor Strickland's presentation cautions, it's important to "Establish a long-term program of information, communication, and active collaboration with all stakeholders" before buying into the "mass delivery of standardized instruction."  After all: "Knowledge and understanding of the Standards and the new Assessment Programs will be critical for good consumerism."

The Rutgers Writing Program is definitely a stakeholder in seeing that students are honestly made ready for college success.  We hope that the Common Core does not go the way of No Child Left Behind and become just another test-focused program.  As you move from recommending pedagogy to developing assessments, though, there is always the danger that standards will get boiled down into bubbles that #2 pencils can fill and a large corporation can sell.   And then the teachers become simply the means of delivering content.

Some of the news coverage of the Common Core suggests that we should be cautious about it being hijacked by the education-industrial complex.  Though the CCSS initiative began about two years ago and its standards, released last year, have been adopted by 44 states, it seems it only began to make the news when corporations began showing interest, as when the Gates Foundation announced that it will partner with Pearson Publishing to develop Common Core materials for classroom use, or when other potential content providers sent out press releases about their plans (such as: "LitLife to Assist Schools with Common Core Compliance").

Newspapers have been late to cover the CCSS, but a few have done a good job of reporting its calls for change.  Some of the better recent stories include "A Trial Run for School Standards That Encourage Deeper Though" (The New York Times), "Education Standards to Be Unveiled" (Charleston Daily Mail), and "Will Common Core Standards Make Students College-Ready?" (Huffington Post).  Last week's story in the Charleston Daily Mail emphasized the need for more complex non-fiction readings and more expository writing in the English and language arts curriculum: 

Assistant State Superintendent Robert Hull says changes to [English and language arts] will primarily involve the use of more 21st century literature and nonfiction, rather than just fiction. Educators also want a better focus on the writing process.

The amount of informational texts (nonfiction) compared to literary (fiction) found in classrooms is not known, but Edwina Howard-Jack, English/language arts coordinator for the state office of instruction, says the new standards place much more emphasis on informational texts.

Even in kindergarten, the new English/language arts standards call for half of the texts to be informational and the other half literary. By senior year, that would become 70 percent informational and 30 percent literary.

Another change will be reflected in increasing the difficulty in the required texts. Howard-Jack says there is generally a two-grade difference in the level of difficulty of most required texts currently offered.

'In working with teachers within the West Virginia framework, the teachers are just thrilled with these new standards and objectives. This is the direction we need to go and will make a difference in public and higher education,' Howard-Jack said.

Tightening the standards to become more focused on factual texts is also reflected in changes to writing expectations. Less emphasis will be placed on narrative and more on argumentative and explanatory writing.

The Rutgers Writing Program has long advocated the use of non-fiction prose about complex ideas and the need to emphasize the reading and writing of expository (rather than narrative) prose in high school.  The only way to engage students with this literature and the ideas it contains is to get them writing on their own, applying those ideas in novel ways, and making connections across multiple complex texts.  It's not something you can boil down to filling in bubbles with a number two pencil.  And it requires knowledgeable and engaged teachers to administer.  We hope everyone keeps that in mind.