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

Rutgers Writing Program Presents at the New Jersey Writing Alliance Conference

Michael Goeller, Associate Director of the Rutgers Writing Program, and Agnieszka Goeller, Interim EAD Coordinator and Associate Professor, presented at the New Jersey Writing Alliance Conference on May 25. The pair presented their talk, “Teaching Writing to Second-Language Learners: Focusing on Vocabulary over Grammar,” for the second year in a row.

Michael and Agnieszka’s presentation explained the reasons behind a spike in English Language Learners at Rutgers. In short, Rutgers began recruiting international students more in 2011, and the amount of students coming from Asia to attend Rutgers spiked. This prompted Rutgers to quickly come up with ways to best accommodate and educate their increasing population of foreign students. The increase in students needing more help from the Writing Program means that now, 17,000 students are served each year.

Michael and Agnieszka explained that there are two types of English Language Learners that Rutgers might see. Type 1 is the resident student, or a student who has lived in the United States for at least two years prior to attending Rutgers. The second type of student is called a visitor, and they often arrive in the United States less than a month before the first day of classes. At this time, Agnieszka estimates that 90% of Rutgers’s ELL students are visitors.

Surprisingly, visitors often have stronger grammar skills than residents because they have studied for the TOEFL. But, visitors face the challenge of having a limited vocabulary, and thus present a high level of errors without a clear pattern.

Agnieszka explained that a reader needs to know 98% of the words on a page in order to be able to guess the remaining 2% with context clues. This statistic reflects the importance of having a strong vocabulary at one’s disposal. She further elaborated that vocabulary is more than just memorizing SAT words one by one. In fact, educators need to shift the focus of vocabulary to phrases. When a student understands the words that typically surround a vocabulary word, then they can appropriately understand and use that word in an essay.

Oftentimes, though, educators see an error in preposition use, for example, as a grammar error rather than an error in the student’s understanding of the word requiring the preposition. Then, in marking the paper, the teacher will correct the error, drawing attention to the grammar mistakes rather than flagging the vocabulary word the student needs to understand more deeply.

To combat this issue, Michael and Agnieszka suggest having students keep a vocabulary log. When correcting a paper, the teacher should correct the error but also mark the misused vocabulary word with a highlighter for the student to add to their log.

Students can learn the phrases associated with a vocabulary word by using a collocation dictionary, available online here, or by simply googling “[word/phrase] sentence.” This simple Google search will bring up tons of sample sentences available online, and the student can learn from reading the sample and jotting some down in their vocabulary log.

To learn more about Michael and Agnieszka's vocabulary logs, you can access their powerpoint and handout from the conference here, as well as other supporting materials from presenters throughout the day.

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.