The Difficulty in Finding Engaging Text for Seventh Graders

Seventh grade is a terribly awkward year in every sense. For students, wild hormones combine with a sudden awareness that other people have thoughts about them, turning them effectively into paralyzed, self imprisoned weirdos. Familiar with their childhood selves, and inexplicably called to an adult world they they don’t really understand, their lives are constant tension centered around social issues. It behooves the writers of curriculum to keep this in mind when picking study materials for an age group so heavily in the middle of things.

Of course, seventh grade is awkward for the teachers as well. Not only do the sometimes bizarre actions of students put us in uncomfortable situations as their caretakers and disciplinarians, but simply trying to accommodate the odd little buggers and hold their interest is uniquely difficult. It’s out of a concern for their interest that I historically haven’t taught full length novels, relying instead on short fiction to convey most of my key learning.

But then again, I teach English, god damn it. I want to read a novel with my students. The question simply becomes which? The answer is harder to come by than expected.

Even Charlotte Doyle looks bored with The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle

When I think back on my own seventh grade experience, I find that I can recall the titles I read surprisingly well, better even than those of some college courses I took. They were pretty well worn middle school fare: Avi’s The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson, and April Morning by Howard Fast all stick out in my mind. Though vastly different stories, they all shared one commonality: They bored the hell out of me. There’s an entire cannon of novels for middle school that are slowly falling out of favor with young readers.  Even the most recent of those listed, Charlotte Doyle, was written in a markedly different world than the one in which kids now find themselves. The times have changed, and I want to teach something that reflects the world my students see around them. And so, my struggle begins.

 

Thanks to their thoroughly in-between nature, twelve and thirteen year olds often come up against the wall of appropriateness preventing them from discovering meaningful , potentially motivating content. Parents are often careful what they allow kids of this age to consume. As a teacher, I need to be extra careful to avoid offending families of varied sensitivity to sex, language, and violence. This year, in particular, I have felt my pedagogical creativity stifled by that wall, to the point where I needed to pose a question: in protecting our kids from inappropriate material, are we not also smothering the sparks of their interest? Which is the greater good, to shield students from the world’s nasty bits, or to engage their developing minds, possibly helping them connect their own struggles to their studies?

Should kids of that age be allowed to read, watch, and play absolutely anything? Of course not. But I think at times those who would censor school materials focus on the superficial. Take for example the unit I sought to develop this year on Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian. The book is a modern classic of young adult literature. However, because our protagonist at one point proudly admits to masturbating and refers on occasion to erections to describe interest in things only occasionally sexual (ex. having a “hard-on for words”), I was shot down.

My problem with this is twofold. First, these sexual references are superficial. They are the surface language through which the book’s deep thematic material is delivered, rather than the thematic material itself. Second, the book, being about a kid’s upbringing on a Native American reservation, contains several ties not only to historical content covered in seventh grade social studies, but to the world these kids experience daily. In the year that the indigenous people of Standing Rock had to suffer to stave off the desecration of their sacred grounds, what would have been more pertinent that reading a book which takes as its backdrop the genocide and relocation of the Native American?

Disappointed, I turned first to the internet for alternative narratives reflecting the Native American reservation life. Nothing even came close to covering the material in quite the depth or quality of Alexie. (If someone knows of one, please point me in the right direction). So eventually, I began to look outside the subject I was planning on covering. What other novels out there might I find that are modern, relevant, gripping, connected to other subject areas, and appropriate?

The solution is, unsurprisingly, hard to find. I looked into a new novel called The Last True Love Story by Brendan Kiely. It’s got relevance, being set around Ithaca, NY, where my students live. It has a connection to other content, being itself a sort-of YA Odyssey, and drawing on students knowledge from 6th grade. And yet, like every epic hero, it has its tragic flaw: a bunch of naughty words. Common Sense Media rates it 14+, the same death blow dealt to my beloved Alexie unit that never was. Raunchy language, again, is superficial. It is the delivery vehicle for the book’s meaning. And certainly, most of these kids have never heard or used such language before, right?

I didn’t just look into these two books, either. Finding a book that is both meaningful to the students and appropriate has proven unexpectedly difficult for me this year. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. By seventh grade, kids are no longer living school appropriate lives. Why should a novel that reflects these lives be any different? We should make a distinction between objectionable material on a superficial and thematic level. Allowing the former would create so much more opportunity to draw students in and encourage thoughtfulness, while still shielding students from material they are not yet ready to process.

 

 

 

On Teaching in the Fake News Age

Stanford University recently published a study of middle school to college age students with some shocking findings. As the authors noted, large swaths of students were unable to distinguish credible news sources from fake and sponsored news sources online. The study, given to students in twelve states and from schools of varying affluence, goes in depth to detail some of the astonishingly poor reasoning the kids  use in asserting that highly questionable sources like sponsored ads, tweets from interest groups, and even photos with absolutely no attribution are credible and therefore fit to be used in forming opinions.

In recent months, fake news has been treated in the media as a new issue suddenly bubbling up from the dark underbelly of the internet. While I reject the idea that it is a new concept, I do believe that it has grown in volume and in resemblance to actual news with the advent of the internet, and more specifically, social media. Social media is something of a wild frontier; it has existed just long enough for people to become wise to its power, but it hasn’t been around long enough for government to get too involved in it. Online, everyone can play the demagogue. What we say garners the attention of our followers. The more radical our statements, the more attention (good and bad) we get, and the more attention we get, the more visibility our posts earn. To add to this, we can say virtually whatever we want. No one filters us, or forces us to support our claims. We are allowed to speak our minds in the form of social media posts, blogs, and personal websites, and we’re free to give these posts as much visible similarity to actual news as we want.

And people should be able to do that. All of it. I’ll admit, I signed that Change.org petition to get Mark Zuckerberg to take action against fake news on Facebook. I also immediately regretted it. When a nation elects a demagogue thanks, in part, to misinformation, there is a problem to address. However, we must be cautious in how we address it. Simply not allowing less than truthful claims to become public is a form of censorship, which is an idea that should not be turned to in haste or panic. I believe we need to look elsewhere for a solution, which is where Stanford’s recent study comes in.

The students who participated in the study are just as susceptible to fake news and post-truthism as adults, if not more so. The difference is students are more malleable than adults. Their world view is still forming. While the adults in their lives will no doubt play a large part in the formation of their opinions, they have less rigid schema at stake than a 40 year old die-hard republican or democrat. Students who are unable to tell the difference between real and fake news represent a clear deficiency in our curriculum, but also our brightest hope to correct this issue.

I teach 7th grade English in upstate New York, so upon reading about Standford’s study, I pored over the Common Core Learning Standards to see what they said on the topic. I had some vague memory of bias being mentioned in the standards, and I was certain I’d discover that there are standards devoted to preventing the bleak scenario described by the Stanford researchers. What I discovered did less to ease my concern than I’d hoped.

I found two seventh grade standards which, when taken together, serve to bolster students’ defenses against misleading articles. Informational Text Standard 8 requires kids to “Trace and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, assessing whether the reasoning is sound and the evidence is relevant and sufficient to support the claims.” A teacher who addresses this standard thoroughly might teach his or her kids to discredit articles based on a lack of substantial evidence for its claims. However, through this process, the students are never taught to consider the agenda or allegiances of the online source from which the article comes.  Standard 9 asks that students “Analyze how two or more authors writing about the same topic shape their presentations of key information by emphasizing different evidence or advancing different interpretations of facts.” This can be used to detect bias in an article, which is important, but again, does not require that students evaluate the credibility of the larger source. Dismayed, I expanded my search to include all informational reading standards for grades 6-12, and discovered that while standards on evaluating arguments based on reason grow in rigor across the years, the same lack of source consideration remains. Furthermore, these standards do nothing to combat the larger issue of fake news, which is the fabrication and gross recontextualization of events which are then presented as facts in order to induce a visceral reaction. When you make up facts, it’s easy to use perfectly fine logic to come to any conclusion you wish.

I considered the idea that the standards I sought might appear elsewhere in the NYS curriculum, so I turned to the standards for Social Studies. At the 7th grade level, the Social Studies standards don’t even mention the internet as a medium for receiving information, focusing entirely on historical content. I am willing to entertain the idea that these standards exist somewhere, but if it’s a struggle even to locate them, I can’t imagine they are taught well in our schools. I encourage anyone who can locate standards relating to this issue in any content area to contact me.

In short, there is a gigantic, gaping hole in the Common Core Learning Standards where students should be taught to consider their sources, particularly digital ones. The standards stop just short of this, helping students to dispel individual arguments (provided that they suffer flaws in logic and reasoning), but not the publications they come from. This deficit is almost certainly a reflection of who wrote the standards: people who did not grow up with the internet, and thus did not entirely realize its alluring pull to impulsive, wild thinking. Thus, I am calling on my fellow teachers to redouble our efforts on this issue. We need to teach our students how to evaluate their sources, and we need to teach it this academic year. The next four years have the potential to wreak havoc on our world socially and environmentally. We must do all we can to ensure our youth are equipped to handle the sea of information that will make up their daily lives if we are to fight for our continued prosperity and well being.

I implore lawmakers to work as quickly as possible to prepare students for the future in this respect. Federal lawmakers should continue to push for nationwide curriculum to address this issue. In the event that federal measures fail, state legislators should ensure they are ready to pick up the slack. In New York, standards are currently under revision. Plans to present the new standards to the Board of Regents are set for early 2017, at which time there may be time for public comment, according to NYSED.gov. At that time, I encourage everyone to voice concerns over this lapse, which the proposed revisions still fail to address.

In my admittedly short career as an educator, never before has the answer to the age old question, “Why do I need to know this?” been so urgent and tangible. Why? Because look at the news, that’s why. These events serve as a sobering reminder why quality public education is the foundation of a healthy democracy. We cannot afford to let our educational institutions trail behind the times so severely. Teachers, administrators, and lawmakers: the time to look ahead is now.