What’s the evidence, not in your feeling, but in the text? Show me where the text says that, that I can prove your argument, make an argument, and then this idea of point of view, and this gets to what’s so important and exciting about the Common Core, the Common Core from 5th grade on is having your people understand that all nonfiction has a point of view. That is not to say that it’s all relative, everyone has a point of view as in it’s all the same.
Maybe the Earth is flat. No, it’s not saying that. What it is saying, however, is when we look at any nonfiction, whether it’s an encyclopedia entry or a vitriolic op-ed, there is a person who wrote it, and that person wrote it from a particular stance. They had an objective, they had a voice, they had a reason for writing about it in that way. And so when you look at nonfiction, it’s not as if there is this perfect truth out there that we channel and absorb and regurgitate.
There are arguments. There are contentions. There are points of view that we come to recognize, that we juxtapose one against the other, that we compare and contrast, and that out of that process we begin to develop our own argument, our own contention. Well, where this is going to relate to parents, and I think this is so important. Under Common Core, in elementary school, 50% of the reading across all subjects is non-fiction. In middle school that becomes 55%, and by high school it’s 70%.
That means your English Language Arts class, or in elementary school your homeroom class, is reading nonfiction, but not nonfiction by topic, who were the pilgrims, who was Pocahontas, any of those kind of identify and define questions, but rather to read it with the same texture and complexity that you might have read a novel, that you might have read The Giver in one year or Maniac Magee in another year.
You’re going to try to look at voice, point of view, writing style, use of evidence with the same richness that you have also and will continue also to do with novels. That also means that you won’t be, quote, “covering” as much. You can’t possibly get from Plato to NATO if you’re going to stop, look, inquire, think. Now, there are many wonderful things about this if it’s done well, and if it’s done well of course is the question.