New+Indiana+Standards

Somehow, the language of standards leaves me cold; standards do not inspire great teaching, in my way of thinking. So I decided one year during the Hoosier Writing Project Summer Institute to write my own set of standards. At the time, we hadn't yet been introduced to the Common Core State Standards, so I used the categories from Indiana's English/Language Arts Standards. Writing Project teachers have enjoyed these standards; I really should find a way to publish them. Well, I guess now I have found one way to do that: here they are on this public wiki! Enjoy, and let me know what you think.

A Supplement to the English/Language Arts Standards for Indiana Schools
Standards are like a guidebook on the journey. Don’t mistake them for the journey itself, or for the destination. Sometimes, you need to take a side trip that’s not on the itinerary. And above all, enjoy the journey, keeping eyes and ears open for what you might discover.

This supplement is meant to bring life to the official standards. It is not grade-level specific, for it aims at a broader sense of what literacy education might be. Notice that statements begin “students and teachers,” for we are all learners together. It also borrows freely from the words of writers, educators, artists, and thinkers. I hope it helps us all see the forest in the midst of caroming off the trees.

“Think about the kind of world you want to live and work in. What do you need to build that world? Demand that your teachers teach you that.” (Peter Kropotkin, //Mutual Aid//, quoted by Colman McCarthy in //I'd Rather Teach Peace//)

“You could teach writing,” she said. Impulsively, I replied, “I’d rather teach peace.” (Colman McCarthey, //I’d Rather Teach Peace//)

“The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.” (Pablo Casals)

READING: Word Recognition, Fluency, and Vocabulary Development
Students and teachers will encounter poetic language that “may, like a piece of ice on a hot stove, ride its own melting into your soul and bring you face to face with the madness of space.” (Mark Haddon, “This Poem is Certificate 18,” //The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea//)

Students and teachers will learn, as Mark Twain put it, that the difference between the right word and the almost right word is like the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

Students and teachers will enjoy learning the story of language, including the English language. They will fall in love with words.

Students and teachers will appreciate many varieties of language. They will understand that no group or person’s language is incorrect or nonstandard or inferior; instead, they will celebrate the many languages spoken in their midst and learn to speak many languages.

"Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work." (Carl Sandburg)

READING: Comprehension
(Focus on Informational Materials)

Students and teachers will learn how to find reliable, useful, and meaningful answers to real questions. When they want to operate the overhead projector, they’ll know how to read the manual. When someone brings an issue into class, people will know how to ask good questions that will help everyone understand the implications of that issue; then they will find the best material dealing with that issue and know how to compare the different answers given.

“But words are things, and a small drop of ink, Falling, like dew, upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.” (Lord Bryon)

READING: Literary Response and Analysis
Students and teachers will read books that serve “as the ax for the frozen sea within them.” (Franz Kafka)

Students and teachers will spend at least 20 minutes a day in school on free pleasure reading, and will develop a lifelong love of reading.

Students and teachers will engage in lively conversation about their reading and learn to identify features in the writers’ craft that generate such responses.

"I'm trying to cause people to be interested in the particulars of their lives because I think that's one thing literature can do for us. It can say to us: pay attention. Pay closer attention. Pay stricter attention to what you say to your son. "  (Richard Ford)

READING AND WRITING: The Inseparable Pair
"If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape." (Ray Bradbury)

“As much as writers need to understand writing, they need to understand reading and readers more.” (Gregory Colomb and June Anne Griffin, “Coherence On and Off the Page”)

WRITING: Process
Students and teachers will experience a messy writing process and not be discouraged by it.

“They write a word and then another word.

It is usually wrong. Their crossings out are legion.” (Mark Haddon, “Poets,” from //The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl// //and the Village Under the Sea//)

Students and teachers will engage in writing tasks that are authentic. Teachers will provide an environment that encourages students to write with commitment and attachment. “Writing has as its backbone a fierce attachment.” (Virginia Woolf)

Students and teachers will learn what Annie Dillard means in this passage about writing: “When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood-carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.” (//The Writing Life//, p. 1)

WRITING: Applications
Students and teachers will write multi-genre research papers that are “deeply textured. . ., interesting, vivid, specific, insightful, diverse with many genres. . ., intelligent, bold, experimental. . . and comprehensible. . . . [The reader will] be gasping for air from the excitement of reading [it].” (Tom Romano, //Writing With Passion: Life Stories, Multiple Genres// (Heinemann, 1995): 120)

Students and teachers will learn to begin and end all writing projects with authentic questions. They will experience research and writing as inquiry.

"I believe in not quite knowing. A writer needs to be doubtful, questioning. I write out of curiousity and bewilderment." (William Trevor)

Students and teachers will write about the personal, the local, the global, heeding the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself and all things.”

“If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then I will not only drop my defenses and my hostility, but I will sing your praises and I will help the desert bear fruit.” (Ralph Ellison)

Students and teachers will come to understand, through their own writing workshop experiences, what Langston Hughes was writing about in “Theme for English B.” (see below)

Students and teachers will come together as writers in a lively workshop, bringing drafts of writing for a variety of purposes and audiences, and help each other find clearer purposes and revise effectively.

WRITING: English Language Conventions
When teaching this standard, teachers should ponder Janet Allen’s words: “The skills worksheets were an insult to the words waiting inside her.”

Teachers will avoid emphasizing Error so much that young writers become like the students in this poem by Connie Weaver:

Twas class time, and the stunted youths Did slouch and huddle in their seats; All shortened were their sentences, And their words had met defeat.

Students will learn about conventions in the context of their own writing and reading.

Teachers will, to quote Carol Booth Olson: • Make students consciously, linguistically aware of the grammatical repertoire they already possess; • Provide them with a vocabulary to talk about writing from a technical standpoint; • Help them understand how sentences are constructed and empower them to manipulate language and to make stylistic choices; • Expand their awareness of the grammatical and stylistic options that are available to them as writers; and • Assist students in the revision and editing of their writing. (//The Reading/Writing Connection//, p. 288)

Students and teachers will appreciate the power of syntax and punctuation.

Grammar is the piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of the camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about the camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement can be found in the picture in your mind. (Joan Didion, “Why I Write”)

LISTENING AND SPEAKING: Skills, Strategies, and Applications
We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak. ~Epictetus

Appendix
THEME FOR ENGLISH B By Langston Hughes

The instructor said,

Go home and write a page tonight. And let that page come out of you--- Then, it will be true. I wonder if it's that simple? I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem. I went to school there, then Durham, then here to this college on the hill above Harlem. I am the only colored student in my class. The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas, Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y, the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator up to my room, sit down, and write this page: It's not easy to know what is true for you or me at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I'm what I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you: hear you, hear me---we two---you, me, talk on this page. (I hear New York too.) Me---who? Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life. I like a pipe for a Christmas present, or records---Bessie, bop, or Bach. I guess being colored doesn't make me NOT like the same things other folks like who are other races. So will my page be colored that I write? Being me, it will not be white. But it will be a part of you, instructor. You are white--- yet a part of me, as I am a part of you. That's American. Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me. Nor do I often want to be a part of you. But we are, that's true! As I learn from you, I guess you learn from me--- although you're older---and white--- and somewhat more free. This is my page for English B. --1951