Common Core

“Common Standards, then, far from offering solutions, exacerbate the problem, making our schools more like the vast tracks of monocultural corn fields blanketing the Midwest, fields that produce corn syrup for the processed food industries. If we allow our schools to be dominated by the logic that created industrial agriculture, we risk processing our children like fast food.”

—Stephanie Wade
Associate Professor, Unity College

My ENG101 students are submitting persuasive essays this week. Last week they read a piece from 1925 by the Reverend John Roach Straton concerning the Scopes Trial, the then-trial-of-the-century. Straton warned of the threat to the contiguous United States and all of Christendom should evolution be enshrined in school curriculum. They also read a section from Susan Sontag’s “Watching Suffering From A Distance” on the scope and significance of our reactions to images of violence and atrocity. Both Straton and Sontag employed three persuasive approaches I wanted the students to add to their rhetorical tool-belt: contrast, anecdoate, and re-branding. Continue reading →