Let’s face it, reading the standards isn’t like reading The Hunger Games. The Common Core is dense and saddles educators with the same requirement the standards demand of students: close, careful reading. As a teacher educator, I feel the full weight of this responsibility. If I don’t fully understand what the standards are saying, I will never be able to help others implement them with fidelity. So this charge has launched my mission to develop my own deep understanding of the standards, setting me on a course of finding ways to interact with the Common Core and expand my ways of knowing. This quest has led to many ahas but none of them compare to what happened this week as Jan and I explored the Common Core through the lens of poetry.
Poets relentlessly pursue words that convey just the right image or tone or emotion. As I considered this, I realized that as educators we are all working to understand the standards with the insight of a poet and when I mentioned this to Jan, she wondered out loud what would happen if we tried to write the standards in haiku.
The standards in haiku? That was a novel thought. I certainly hadn’t experimented with that lens for close reading so I decided to give a try. I turned to the reading standards and randomly chose number four:
Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning and tone. (Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts, p.10)
I read it. I read it again. I asked myself, “What is that really saying?” And then it occurred to me: If I wanted to translate those words into a seventeen syllable verse, I needed to do more than read and reread the anchor standard: I also needed to consider what the standard meant at every grade level in both literary and informative text. I set to work, and after revising several times, I arrived at this poetic interpretation:
Take note: words matter.
Careful choice shapes tone, meaning.
Is a rock a rock?
I continue to revise the poem, looking back and forth between my words and the words of the standards. I still wonder if I have captured the essence of this achievement goal, making me realize yet again the focused lens haiku provides for closely reading the standards. In fact, it worked so well, I would recommend it to any educator wrestling with understanding the standards. We invite you to try your hand at writing the standards in verse and to share your poems with us. Tomorrow we will post the latest versions of our haiku for the other nine reading standards.
Common Core Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects. Retrieved from http://www.corestandards.org/assets/CCSSI_ELA%20Standards.pdf
This is a comment about your Haiku slide show with music. Bravo! Though I think those just starting out getting to know the standards may be somewhat mystified, I think it is a great metaphor! And I can see how creating haiku for the standards really will require one to learn and know it and then apply it. Why, it is Maslow’s hierarchy, at least I think it is Maslow’s…..the literal to the applied???? (Need to check the correct verbiage on that, but I think it is very appropos!) One suggestion is can you slow down the introduction of the verse so that the reader can read the standard and pause a moment to think and then the verse appears. You could either put in a “choose your own timer speed” or make it in another version and label one as “regular” and the other as “more time to ponder”. I would like to be able to show a bit of this in my poetry workshop at IRA, would you give me perrmission with full attribution to you? I plan to tell everyone I know about your sites and work!! Have spent a long time reading the Appendicies for ELA standards for Text Complexity and Vocabulary etc. and find those actually quite helpful and I would like to say surprisingly comforting. Many key points in these standards which need to be taken as a whole work and then parsed into the separate pieces. I think without a full understanding of the complete vision, curr. developers, etc. may rush things out to schools and teachers that don’t necessarily keep the forest in full view!
Thank you!
Quickly a suggestion….could you put up a list of the standard with each Haiku? I think seeing them together would be very helpful. Thanks. I am not sure everyone has a copy of the standards at the ready. You do have it in the video/slide show, so if you could have one more “view” or link ie haiku and standard (but keep the haiku as is……for those who are more conversant) it would be helpful!