Letters

Commonalities

To the Editor:

A retired English teacher who mercifully escaped the recent torrent of standards, rubrics, and scaffolding weighing down the profession, I thoroughly enjoyed Carol Iannone’s “Experiencing the Common Core” in the Summer 2015 Academic Questions (vol. 28, no. 2). Simply “letting the facts speak for themselves,” Dr. Iannone demolishes the ten pounds-plus teacher’s edition of Prentice Hall’s The American Experience: Common Core Edition, with its sidebars, underbars, proposed questions, and assessment measures. I’d like to underscore a few of her points, as someone who for many years taught American literature to high school juniors, the target grade for the new textbook.

The fact that this book is a reader, comprised entirely of excerpts except for its one full-length work (Arthur Miller’s politically motivated The Crucible), is the giveaway that the textbook is designed for