Writer's Craft

A former colleague of mine teaches Unbroken by Lauren Hillenbrand. After trying several times, I've never finished either it nor Seabiscuit. Hillenbrand's stories are elegant, but for some reason, I can never focus on them as I should. I recognize the compelling nature of the story told and the masterful writing behind the story but I personally always feel distracted by other things.

Hillenbrand's process, given her long illness and general houseboundness, is detailed in this New York Times piece. I was particularly interested in her process and I can see interesting bits, particularly the rhythm of language.

Worth considering if you teach the book.

Panopticon and Elf on the Shelf

Since I was a high school student, I have loved Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. It spoke to me a in a way that was more real, more possible and more terrifying then George Orwell ever was. When I became an AP Lit teacher, it was one of the novels I was moved to teach.

One of the companion pieces I like to excerpt and teach is Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon. I have given the whole text before, but what is most compelling is from letter V when Bentham states:

You will please to observe, that though perhaps it is the most important point, that the persons to be inspected should always feel themselves as if under inspection, at least as standing a great chance of being so...

. In other words, for the panopticon to work, a person need not always be watched, but the person should have a sense that they might always be watched.

There are many fascinating aspects of panopticon, but the most important, to me personally is that society is, in many ways, a giant version of one. What keeps most of us in check is not actually being observed, but the idea that we might be observed. (E. Lockheart uses this idea to great effect in her YA novel The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks).

Imagine my pleasure, then, to discover a fantastic article about how Elf on the Shelf is a twisted holiday/kid version of the panopticon at WaPo. Peter Holley examines Laura Pinto's paper on how Elf on the Shelf prepares kids for a surveillance state.

There is much to disagree with here. This may not be an obvious stretch if you are not a dystopian literature scholar or a reader of Jeremy Bentham. But it is provocative.

My friends with whom I've shared this point out that this is not the first weirdness of surveillance state apparatus in the Santa Industrial Complex..."He knows when you've been sleeping/He knows when you're awake/He knows when you've been bad or good/So be good for goodness sake." (And yes, I just wanted to write Santa Industrial Complex).

Serial

Okay. I absolutely admit it. I'm a Serial addict. I've loved This American Life for years and I'm loving the longer format of Serial. I won't retread all of the ground that the internet has already covered this week about how great this is (see Reddit, Slate, Vox, and pretty much any pop culture blog).

One of the things I am most struck by is that Sarah Koenig's reporting is how her journey maps onto the learning. Without fail, she talks about how she is constantly probing, looking for information that will confirm or debunk what her theories are. She exists in a state of confusion

ETA I originally started this post in November and never finished. Today the last episode of Serial was posted and I am now ready to think about teaching it. Instead of trying to sell you on why you should listen or teach this, I am going to just create a link repository of commentary I want to come back to with my students.

About the Justice System

• Serial's Big Confession My favorite explanation of why this podcast is an indictment of the justice system.
• Matt Thompson weighs in on the Justice System component
• WaPo on how Serial should have gone further in showing what's really wrong with criminal justice

Is Serial Racist?

• The Awl article that started the debate about white privilege and SK's perceived prejudice in journalism.
• The Atlantic pushes back against that claim and addresses is point by point.

Parody

• Sesame Street got into the Serial/Cereal action

Narrative Work

• An opinion piece from the Boston Globe positing why the narrative works so well. In fact, this captures what I was trying to say back in November.
• Linda Holmes on what is really an ending as it pertains to Serial

A benign review NYT Review of the ending.

Slate's podcast about Serial on the ending. Mike Pesca earlier interviewed SK and asked her not to have a lame ending and he weighs in on what he thinks about the ending. I definitely agree that it was a very satisfying ending which is tricky in a serialized nonfiction piece.

Anyhow, if you are so inclined and you have links to think pieces that you think would make good fodder for students, please comment with ideas on other companions to this for my class.

Sports and Education

I think I may have inadvertently crushed some kids' dreams this week.

The text set we worked with focused on sports and education. It started with the NYT Room for Debate set on Taking Sports Out of High School. (If you've never heard of Room for Debate, it's part of the Op-Ed section where various writers weigh in on a question). This text set turns on the question "Should high schools eliminate sports program?" Without even beginning the reading, students were inflamed by this question.

My students worked with a chart that asked that they record the writer's particular argument, the type of evidence presented with examples of the evidence. Once they had read all eight pieces, they also ranked them in order from the most enthusiastic supporter of sports in schools to the most skeptical. For the most part students were in general agreement about where writers landed on that spectrum. What I also loved about this set is how wide-ranging the reasoning for a writers' support or ambivalence was. One author focused on the positive benefits of Title IX while another author did not deride the importance of sports, but instead of focused on how sports have become overly central to school life.

These texts provided some basis for thinking about the role of sports in school and allowed students to see the diversity in thinking on this topic.

The next text, though, blew them away. Students wrote descriptive pieces on The probability of continuing in organized sports after high school. My co-worker taught an excellent lesson on how to write a graph description. She used Julie Groves' work as a basis for understanding how to translate data to text. This provoked some phenomenal thinking because this is the other piece of what we have been teaching around justification. While we spend plenty of time teaching how to attack prose work, we rarely dig in deep to think about how to read data.

What was heartbreaking, though, was how surprised students were about these numbers. For them, working hard at a sport should lead directly to fame and fortune and a professional contract. What we didn't read due to time, but I did summarize for my students was this wonderful piece in the Toronto Star about the shockingly low salaries of minor league players in Major League Baseball. The infographic midway through the page is excellent. Spoiler alert: the 5 month contract for a Class A player is $6250. Not a month, mind you, but for the entire contract. Given that, perhaps even being a professional player is not exactly renumerative either.

But of course, many who want to play at the NCAA level are not thinking about going pro. They talk of leveraging a sport into a college scholarship. This article, which I reformatted when I printed and would be happy to share if you plan on using this, from the Houston Chronicle provides a look at the myth of the college scholarship for athletes. There are many more articles like it, including one from CBS that also talks about the average dollar value of athletic scholarships that are equally accessible.

I think what my personal takeaway from this is not that schools should not have sports, but that sports participation fills a need that is separate from financial considerations. The writing we will do will look at whether the benefits of sports outweigh the limitations and costs of such programs.

As a side note, this text set would be an excellent precursor to Stefan Fatsis's book, which I write about here.

Friday Round Up

In the New York Times:

Russian soldiers who have died in Ukraine challenge the endorsed Russian narrative that Russian soldiers are not involved in Ukraine.

Another article about Why Poor Students Struggle that would work well with the articles I talked about in the text set this week.

Violence is what the NHL sells, so why are people surprised when players are also violent off the field?

From NPR:

Shonda Rhimes has been in the news this week because the NYT called her "angry black woman." I like Rhimes and her shows and I think Linda Holmes from NPR, who interviews her here, is an astute and careful writer. Her take on this situation is well done.

Bringing together two of my favorite thingsvolcanoes and Iceland.

Recommendation: A Few Seconds of Panic

My first experience reading a Stefan Fatsis book was truly enlightening. I picked up Word Freak on a whim or on a recommendation of a friend. I love words, I rarely play Scrabble, but I am compulsively competitive. Fatsis looked at this world of freaks and geeks and not just wrote his way in, but also played his way in. I was charmed.

When A Few Seconds of Panic came out, I had almost decided to give it a pass. Not my thing. I do not care about professional sports at all. But after hearing Scott Simon interview Fatsis I was intrigued. Like Word Freak Fatsis did not merely write about the NFL, he became a part of it.

Full disclaimer: my own upbringing taught me the basics of football from the sidelines. Friday Night Lights could have been about my town, minus the Texas-ness of it all. In college, I chose a school that had a weak sports program, nor did any of the schools near my alma mater field a football team at all. My antipathy towards football is, in actuality, more of an abhorrence. Yet this book was fully engaging to me.

What surprised me about this book was the nuanced and even-handed way Fatsis addresses professional athletics. He shows the pre-season training camp as grueling and the general player as a hardworking journeyman with only a few years shot at a career with pay that is not as great as billed. The portrait is extremely sympathetic.

For your students who are convinced that they will be a professional athlete, their minds will be blown by this account. Athletes are shown to be intelligent, hardworking, talented, and, for the majority, vulnerable to the vagaries of the marketplace. For the record, another way to blow their minds around this topic is to share the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook for Athletes and Sports Competitors. According to the BLS they will make on average $40,000 a year and there are fewer than 15,000 of them in the US. By comparison, High school teachers make an average $55,000 and there are 955,000 jobs according to the same data. Let them sit with that. High school teachers on average make more than professional athletes. Of course, the highest paid athletes make significantly more than the highest paid high school teachers.

For a taste of the book, check out the first chapter which is available at NYT.

Quick Bit: Yo-Yo Ma from On Being

I am finally catching up on some of the podcasts that I usually follow. Yo-Yo Ma's interview with Krista Tippet on On Being is absolutely fantastic. Of course he is a genius and fascinating; to hear the whole podcast go here: podcast

I did want to share this snippet from the podcast, though. Ma asserts:

"Yeah. Good music. Look, or any type of music can be part of good music in the sense that — but I'm not even saying good music. I'm saying good musicians would be able to, you know, to compose, to improvise, to be virtuosic in what they do, and can easily absorb other influences and make it organically their own. So that, you know, new influences are embedded. So there's the process of constant growth. And then, finally, the last quality would be the musician that actually is able to transfer — to inject all of their knowledge and give it to somebody else so that they can actually look at the world and figure it out for themselves without the first musician being there — so it's a process of birth. It's a process of constant cultural rebirth."

I love this! I love that for Ma, mastery is not about merely replicating but it's about generating. In other words, to be educated means to be a person who takes new information, allows it to influence what you already know how to do and transmits that understanding to others. I would love, as a teacher, to aspire to the same.

Recommendation: Stiff

Mary Roach's book, Stiff, freaked me out. I was teaching middle school at a K-12 span school, and the cover, with it is perfectly beautifully buffed foot and toe tag was just too much to handle. But one of the high school teachers at my school taught the book and recommended it. I didn't read it at the time because I was in the middle of a multi-year run of Young Adult work, but when I began teaching nonfiction, I remembered the teacher and picked it back up.

Mary Roach's books (and her website, which features a cockroach crawling along the page) are not for the faint of heart.

Indeed, Stiff is an examination of what happens to cadavers in our society -- what uses we have for bodies that only the dead can fulfill. In some ways, it's a love note to eccentric and the bizarre and it's definitely not for those easily squicked. It is laugh-aloud funny, though. You catch yourself giggling, perhaps in horror, at her description of maggots or of heads-in-trays. It might make you question your own taste.

Roach is part of the story, though definitely more of a periphery figure. This is a book that unfolds with information and you can treat it episodically. If the chapter on cadavers as medicinal food before lunch seems a bad ideas to you, skip it! No harm in reading around.

If you are teaching this book, consider talking about the modes of writing she uses, how she uses them, and the effect of transitioning between historical information, definition, classification and argument. The best non-narrative nonfiction deals with a variety of modes (narrative nonfiction tends to be almost entirely sequential or descriptive, much like novels). Why do the modes matter? For inexperienced readers, the writers' purpose. With nonfiction, it's not enough to recognize that an author's purpose might be to inform or to persuade. Apt readers also begin to recognize that writers may use definition or classification as a way to establish criteria or to clarify what is being discussed and how. They should also know that explanation, in a larger sense, supports a writer's ability to argue for or against something. Knowing the specific purpose of smaller sections allows students to create a filter to understand what they are reading.

Stiff lends itself to this modal analysis because Roach is so adept at interweaving modes together. Moreover, her entire book is an argument, albeit a subtle one. If you are teaching her book and would like some ideas on what questions to ask, the Norton Reading Guide gives you a general place to start.

Recommendation: "Will Portland Always Be a Retirement Community for the Young?"

Last week I was scrolling through what felt like the entire internet looking for a bit of entertainment. Does that ever happen to you? You feel like you've read or seen everything that there could possibly be of interest, that perhaps you have actually reached the end of the internet?

While I battled back that sense of boredom and despondency that follows this revelation, I reloaded the New York Times and saw Claire Cain Miller's, "Will Portland Always Be A Retirement Community for the Young?" With tongue planted firmly in cheek, this article examines some of the reasons why Portland is an outlier in how cities have grown and changed in the past couple of decades. (Spoiler alert: there is a surplas of college grads, unlike many other urban areas which actively try to seek the same in order to drive their economies).

What I love about this piece is the artful use of structure to help create Miller's argument. She starts focusing on a personal anecdote, then expands to a city-wide perspective, then to a national one. Then she zooms back in, going back to city-wide then back to personal, ending the first section with a rhetorical question. What I love about those first 6 paragraphs is the elegant and balanced way that such a structure emphasizes the problem, allowing for easy comparison. Often, emerging writers will create a point/counterpoint structure for comparison, but here we have the sense of spiraling, of sort of that medieval interlocking spheres as a way of highlighting how enmeshed the problems are.

The shift in the article occurs when Miller posits, "Portland’s residents may, as the saying goes, want to keep their city weird. But do they want to keep it broke too?" Emerging writers often rely on the crutch of starting with a question. They do so dogmatically and often artlessly often asking something as pat as "Have you ever wondered why...." Here, though, you have a writer in full command of how to use that question to turn the article on its heel as well as to advance her own argument.

The next portion of the writing concerns itself with historical trends, starting with national trends then looking at those relating directly to Portland by comparison. This structure is a more common way of handling comparison, yet it's well done here and definitely emphasizes her point that Portland may be at risk of the "the amenity paradox, [which] refers to cities where the same amenities that attract people end up eroding what made a city desirable in the first place."

The article then ends on a tonal note that is, as the College Board might say, complicated. Throughout the article, there is a sense of gentle mockery that Miller tries to lessen by parenthetical phrases admitting to her own personal experience having lived in Portland. While she uses the stereotypes of "designers and baristas" and "kombucha brewing" as coded language for hipsters, she generally sticks to the psuedo-academic tone that relies on studies, experts and statistics. This use of emotionally distant language slips in the last paragraph where she notes that as economic trends change people will be compelled to move to less cool cities, "the ones that people move to when it’s time to become an adult." The implication, obviously, is that for now Portland is a haven for, as her example shows, 35-year-olds playacting at adulthood while holding decidedly non-adult jobs. In some ways, she seems to buy into an argument that the hipsters she decries would inherently object, that is that adulthood comes with decent and steady incomes, health insurance and a tidy 401K.

Moreover, the last sentence which declares that when such a shift a happens, "Portland will find out who the true believers really are." Again the implication is that those who live in Portland now, who are intent on keeping Portland weird are cult-like, or at the very least, irrational in their devotion.

Definitely a fun article to teach since it is easily accessible while still full of examples of interesting rhetorical moves. Most importantly it might serve as a very nice model for student writing with some patterns that would be easy to replicate.

(As a footnote, as an avid nonfiction reader online, I often find myself reading things that elicit hundreds of comments. There is no quicker way to kill your kind view of humanity than to read comments on the internet. Why is that? And why do I still do it? I do find the comments at NYT and to a lesser extent NPR for the most part thoughtful, but at the end of the day, I still think what is wrong with people?)

Recommendation: Text Set on Life after Graduation

One of the units I have been teaching has been adapted from the CSU Expository Reading and Writing Course Curriculum. This course was originally intended to help produce students who are able to place into English 101 and to be otherwise ready for the heavy reading and writing demands that college places on matriculating students.

This unit is all about what comes after graduation. I won't talk about everything, but I do want to point out two long-form texts I teach and one short piece, as well as some other places to pull some interesting information.

If you are looking to get juniors and seniors to contemplate what makes college students successful, I'd highly recommend what Karen Lopez, a teacher in the William S. Hart Senior High School in Valencia recommended to us. Karen is a trainer for ERWC. She recommended the wonderful introduction of Jim Burke's School Smarts. Burke is a renowned and award-winning teacher, but in this introduction, he writes about his confusion and bafflement in school, where he grappled with understanding not only the purpose of learning, but the "culture, language, and customs of this strange new country called School." The voice in the piece is wonderful and there are couple of beautiful syntactical moves (including this great conditional sentence that starts with "I'd like to be able to tell you....") and students, or at least mine, immediately identify with it.

This piece is quite wonderful when paired with a New York Times article titled, Who Gets to Graduate? This lengthy but engaging article predominantly focuses on a program at University of Texas that works on retaining and supporting first-generation college students. One reason I find the article and the intro so interesting is that both deal with the idea that there are bigger reasons than just economics that make it difficult for kids from lower income families to graduate. It's not just college tuition, but there are some things that are not taught in the classroom the directly translate into school success in college. Leaning to navigate higher ed, in other words, is daunting and more difficult than learning to navigate kindergarten or middle school or high school. There is an entire culture of school that might look different than anything else you have experienced so far and you are expected to do it alone.

The charts in the New York Times piece are worth spending time on too. I spent several moments discussing what the first chart about SAT score and grad rates by income level really said and then we looked at the shorter text, which is an the October 2013 issue of Postsecondary Opportunities. I'm not sure where I found the original citation to this (perhaps the College Board's "Education Pays?" report?), but the chart on the front is striking. Only 8% of students from families in the lowest income quartile will graduate with a bachelor's degree before age 24, while over 80% of students from the highest income quartile will. Wonder about one of the roots of income inequality. BAM. There it is.

These are not the only articles I teach in this unit, but they are ones that I am interested in, sometimes for the quality of writing or the interesting ideas. I'll post more in the Faculty Lounge with ideas on what I do with all of this.

What do you all read about college that you find interesting?

Close Reading, Quick and Dirty

The Common Core asks teachers to focus on close reading of complex and rich texts. What precisely is close reading and how do you get your students to do it.

According to The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) (which, coincidentally, is also one of two consortia that is creating the assessments that will be used to test CCSS)

Close, analytic reading stresses engaging with a text of sufficient complexity directly and examining meaning thoroughly and methodically, encouraging students to read and reread deliberately. Directing student attention on the text itself empowers students to understand the central ideas and key supporting details. It also enables students to reflect on the meanings of individual words and sentences; the order in which sentences unfold; and the development of ideas over the course of the text, which ultimately leads students to arrive at an understanding of the text as a whole.

This lens is useful because it emphasizes the need to slow down and attend to textual details in orderly way as a function of analysis. It seems to me that there are essentially two types of close reading: reading that focuses on craft and reading that focuses on concept, though often the focus on craft will lead to conceptual understanding. For example, imagine reading the second paragraph of the Declaration of Indepence, which has the famous Life, Liberty and pursuit of Happiness line. If I am focused on craft, I am looking at diction, parallelism and other techniques Jefferson used. If I'm looking at meaning, I'm looking at definitions of words, ideas, confluences and contradictions.

Adept readers do this as a matter of course, shifting between craft and meaning seamlessly. Emerging readers need explicit prompting and, in some ways, tricks to remember to read closely.

To that effect, these are generic but typical things my students do with a small piece of text. Be warned, though, that you cannot and should not attempt to have anyone read an entire novel or book closely. Choose excerpts, pieces of articles, or shorter pieces to practice. Choose questions or activities that force a student back into the text. It's not especially useful to know what a student thinks Happiness means or for him to describe a time when he was happy. If you are really checking the student's ability to understand the text, make the question text-based; ask instead what Jefferson meant by Happiness and ask them to back it up with details.

Quick and Generic Steps to Close Reading

Close reading happens after you have already read the text once. You don’t have to go in this order but you should always start with step 1 and end with step 7.

Step 1: What is your first understanding of the text? What would you say the text is about right now? What are the Big Ideas or what is the focus you find most compelling?

Step 2: Look for and mark interesting words that jump out at it you. If you were going to group them together and give that group a name, what would it be? Is there a pattern to the words? What is the author describing with these words?

Step 3: Divide the text into natural sections. Look for shifts. What is the purpose of each section?

Step 4: Examine the syntax. Is there anything interesting that this author uses? Do you see sentence variety? Is there a short sentence among long sentences? Are there plenty of questions? Repetitions? Parallelism? What is he emphasizing with this and why?

Step 5: What images are interesting? What do you picture? How are those images created (devices)? What is the purpose of these images?

Step 6: What’s the tone at the beginning? What is it in each section you have marked? What is the tone at the end?

Step 7: What new claims or ideas about the focus of the text do you have now that you have looked at it closely?

What are your thoughts? What ways do you get students to revisit text?

Recommendation: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

In 2010, Rebecca Skloot published The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks to critical accolades. This narrative nonfiction examines the story of the HeLa cells which are cells that have revolutionized biological testing, been the basis of at least 60,000 scientific studies because these cells dynamically thrive in a laboratory environment. According to the New York Times, if you have taken a pill stronger than aspirin, than you've benefited from the HeLa cells.

The cells originated from a tumor that Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman from Baltimore Maryland, who was diagnosed and eventually died from cervical cancer, had biopsied. Lacks had never given permission for her cells to be cultured and grown and she had never benefited from the growth and sale of these cells.

Skloot covers a remarkable amount of history and science in this book in a way that is conversational (at times) and completely accessible. While I am widely read, my understanding of genetics, cell replication and biological research is limited to what I learned in high school. I was able to follow the science without any problem because I was deeply engaged in a sympathetic portrait of the Lacks family dealing with poverty, segregation and racial politics.

Dwight Garner, in his New York Times review captures the force of both the writing and the story when he states

I put down Rebecca Skloot’s first book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” more than once. Ten times, probably. Once to poke the fire. Once to silence a pinging BlackBerry. And eight times to chase my wife and assorted visitors around the house, to tell them I was holding one of the most graceful and moving nonfiction books I’ve read in a very long time.

Another interesting aspect is that Skloot herself is a piece of the story. She took 10 years to research and write this book and the reader definitely is aware of her telling the story. In some ways she resembles narrators such as Nick in The Great Gatsby, a steady but sympathetic voice. The Lacks family initially accuses her of essentially writing her book on their backs, but she convinces them to allow her to tell the story, which she does with extreme sensitivity, bordering on bias.

You finish this book with an understanding that this has been Skloot's labor of love. It is moving and shocking in ways both large and small.

For an excerpt, click.

If you are a teacher who is looking for resources visit the Faculty Lounge for links and ideas.

Why Does Diane Ravitch Hate Nonfiction, or Let's Shift the Debate

As many readers already know, the Common Core State Standards have what Diane Ravitch calls "arbitrary percentages" for what the split between fiction and nonfiction taught in K-12 classrooms should be. While I agree that arbitrary percentages are nobody's friend, and I strongly believe that this is a conversation that is essential.

For some background, I was not an English major, though now I am an English Teacher. I took AP English Literature with Sister Mary Eileen Quinlan. I hated almost everything we read in that class, and, in fact, can't remember much of it, except, I will admit it prompted my continuing antipathy for Huck Finn. When I finished her class and passed AP Lit exam with a 5, I prematurely swore off of English for the rest of my career.

Does that mean I hate fiction? Quite the opposite. I love stories. I love a good strong plot that can pull me through the plodding nonsense that author's use as character development. I love poetry (though that may only be since I discovered Billy Collins and Mary Oliver). My senior year, when I should have been reading Thomas Hardy, instead I read every book in the oeuvre of trashy romance. I read Judith Krantz and Julie Garwood and Danielle Steele. Read everything other than what I should have been reading. I may have read five books a week. While I was busy reading bodice-rippers, I avoided nonfiction in high school.

Imagine my surprise when I arrived at my Alma Mater and I spent $800 on required reading for classes like World Politics and Beyond Sovereignty and Macroeconomics. I was pleased, knowing I could read books and no one would question whether or not I understood the symbol of the green light on the dock. Having been an avid reader, I had skills that I could transfer. I knew how to get through a book and fast. But I didn't know the ins-and-outs of actually understanding nonfiction. There's an art there, but I didn't know it then. I could survive the nonfiction. I could glean information, but I could not understand or really hear it sing.

In high school, I was also voted most likely to become a writer. I scribbled poorly realized stories and angsty poetry in my journals. Sister Eileen did a bang-up job getting me to be a fast writer and an analytical one. I could write a 5-page paper on Contemporary Russia in 60 minutes and still make it to happy hour. But when I made it to a composition class for pre-law students my second-year of college I realized how I had skated by, how weak my skills were when dealing with this specific type of nonfiction.

Flash-forward a dozen years and I was sitting in a conference room at the annual convention of CATE, California Association of Teachers of English. Some presenter asked, "Why do we spend so much time in English classrooms training kids to be English teachers? Shouldn't we teach them forms of reading and writing too?"

Ah. There it is. Nonfiction or at least a yeoman's explanation of why to teach it. The truth is more complex than we should teach nonfiction because it's good prep for college. We should teach nonfiction because some of the most passionate, beautiful, moving and insightful writing that is currently being published is nonfiction. Nonfiction can't only answer the question you are researching for your paper, but it can make you laugh, cry and wonder, just like fiction.

Recently, Sara Mosle argued that one of the most important reasons to teach nonfiction is to help our students have excellent models for good nonfiction. I don't disagree. How much nonfiction is a ridiculous red-herring. In fact, Mosle is most prescient when she states "What schools really need isn’t more nonfiction but better nonfiction, especially that which provides good models for student writing."

Mosle goes on to enumerate a list of good nonfiction which could be lifted from my Google history or NPR.

This blog, then, is to not only encourage you to read more nonfiction but to choose the good stuff, the nonfiction that can stand alongside the literature that is also taught in English classrooms. It's out there, I swear. Some days you just need to search a little more for it.

So welcome. Pull up a chair.