非虚构阅读 (2013-06-19 10:04:15)

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What Should Children Read?

Malcolm Gladwell, author of “The Tipping Point” and a New Yorker staff writer, told me how he prepared, years ago, to write his first “Talk of the Town” story. “Talk” articles have a distinct style, and he wanted to make sure he got the voice straight in his head before he began writing. His approach was simple. He sat down and read 100 “Talk” pieces, one after the other.

The story nicely illustrates how careful reading can advance great writing. As a schoolteacher, I offer Mr. Gladwell’s story to students struggling with expository writing as evidence that they need not labor alone. There are models out there — if only they’ll read them!

Mr. Gladwell’s tale provides a good lesson for English teachers across the country as they begin to implement the Common Core State Standards, a set of national benchmarks, adopted by nearly every state, for the skills public school students should master in language arts and mathematics in grades K-12.

The standards won’t take effect until 2014, but many public school systems have begun adjusting their curriculums to satisfy the new mandates. Depending on your point of view, the now contentious guidelines prescribe a healthy — or lethal — dose of nonfiction.

For example, the Common Core dictates that by fourth grade, public school students devote half of their reading time in class to historical documents, scientific tracts, maps and other “informational texts” — like recipes and train schedules. Per the guidelines, 70 percent of the 12th grade curriculum will consist of nonfiction titles. Alarmed English teachers worry we’re about to toss Shakespeare so students can study, in the words of one former educator, “memos, technical manuals and menus.”

David Coleman, president of the College Board, who helped design and promote the Common Core, says English classes today focus too much on self-expression. “It is rare in a working environment,” he’s argued, “that someone says, ‘Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood.’ ”

This and similar comments have prompted the education researcher Diane Ravitch to ask, “Why does David Coleman dislike fiction?” and to question whether he’s trying to eliminate English literature from the classroom. “I can’t imagine a well-developed mind that has not read novels, poems and short stories,” she writes.

Sandra Stotsky, a primary author of Massachusetts’ state standards (which are credited with helping to maintain that state’s top test scores) challenges the assumption that nonfiction requires more rigor than a literary novel. One education columnist sums up the debate as a fiction versus nonfiction “smackdown.”

A striking assumption animates arguments on both sides, namely that nonfiction is seldom literary and certainly not literature. Even Mr. Coleman erects his case on largely dispiriting, utilitarian grounds: nonfiction may help you win the corner office but won’t necessarily nourish the soul.

As an English teacher and writer who traffics in factual prose, I’m with Mr. Coleman. In my experience, students need more exposure to nonfiction, less to help with reading skills, but as a model for their own essays and expository writing, what Mr. Gladwell sought by ingesting “Talk of the Town” stories.

I love fiction and poetry as much as the next former English major and often despair over the quality of what passes for “informational texts,” few of which amount to narrative much less literary narrative.

What schools really need isn’t more nonfiction but better nonfiction, especially that which provides good models for student writing. Most students could use greater familiarity with what newspaper, magazine and book editors call “narrative nonfiction”: writing that tells a factual story, sometimes even a personal one, but also makes an argument and conveys information in vivid, effective ways.

What Tom Wolfe once said about New Journalism could be applied to most student writing. It benefits from intense reporting, immersion in a subject, imaginative scene setting, dialogue and telling details. These are the very skills most English teachers want students to develop. What’s odd is how rarely such literary nonfiction appears on English — or other class — reading lists. In addition to a biology textbook, for example, why can’t more high school students read “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”?

Narrative nonfiction also provides a bridge between the personal narratives students typically write in elementary school and the essays on external subjects that are more appropriate assignments in high school and beyond. David Coleman may dismiss self-expression. Yet he recommends authors, like the surgeon and medical writer Atul Gawande, who frequently rely on personal storytelling in their reporting.

Models of narrative nonfiction are everywhere, on programs like “This American Life” and “Radiolab,” in nonfiction books for young adults, like “Sugar Changed the World” (which is about slavery and science in the pursuit of the food additive), and even in graphic nonfiction works, like “Persepolis,” which tells the story of a young woman who grew up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Each has a personal angle that students can relate to but is also a genuinely enthralling narrative. Adult titles, like “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” already have young readers editions, and many adult general-interest works, such as Timothy Ferris’s “The Whole Shebang,” about the workings of the universe, are appropriate for advanced high-school students.

Most readily, narrative nonfiction is available every day of the week in the dwindling outlets for long-form journalism. Students are a natural (and the future) audience for serious, in-depth reporting. Skilled practitioners can demonstrate the power of facts, and provide models — topic sentence by topic sentence — for compelling narrative.

There are anthologies of great literature and primary documents, but why not “30 for Under 20: Great Nonfiction Narratives?” Until such editions appear, teachers can find complex, literary works in collections like “The Best American Science and Nature Writing,” on many newspaper Web sites, which have begun providing online lesson plans using articles for younger readers, and on ProPublica.org. Last year, The Atlantic compiled examples of the year’s best journalism, and The Daily Beast has its feature “Longreads.” Longform.org not only has “best of” contemporary selections but also historical examples dating back decades.

If students read 100 such articles over the course of a year, they may not become best-selling authors, but like Mr. Gladwell, they’ll get the sound and feel of good writing in their heads. With luck, when they graduate, there will still be ranks of literary nonfiction authors left for them to join.

放两个有用的连接在这里：

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/fiction-or-nonfiction-considering-the-common-cores-emphasis-on-informational-text/

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/4-sources-great-nonfiction-literature

Use these sources to find the best nonfiction, including informational text, biographies, news stories, and narratives.


As Nell K. Duke, Ed.D. and V. Susan Bennett-Armistead recommend in Reading & Writing Informational Text in the Primary Grades, check out titles that have received these honors:
IRA Children's Book Awards for primary, intermediate, and young adult nonfiction

http://www.reading.org/Libraries/choices/ira-cbc-childrens-choices-reading-list-2013.pdf

Orbis Pictus Award

Award book: Monsieur Marceau: Actor without Words by Leda Schubert illustrated by Gérard DuBois

Honor Books

Citizen Scientists: Be a Part of Scientific Discovery from Your Own Backyard by Loree Griffin Burns, photographs by Ellen Harasimonwicz (Henry Holt & Company)

Electric Ben: The Amazing Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by Robert Byrd (Dial Books for Young Readers)

The Mighty Mars Rovers: The Incredible Adventures of Spirit and Opportunity by Elizabeth Rusch (Houghton Mifflin Books for Children)

Those Rebels, John & Tom by Barbara Kerley, illustrated by Edward Fotheringham (Scholastic)

We've Got a Job: The 1963 Birmingham Children’s March by Cynthia Levinson (Peachtree Publishers)

Recommended Books

A Black Hole is NOT a Hole by Carolyn Cinami DeCristofano, illustrated by Michael Carroll (Charlesbridge Publishing)

Abraham Lincoln & Frederick Douglass: The Story Behind an American Friendship by Russell Freedman (Clarion Books)

The Amazing Harry Kellar: Great American Magician by Gail Jarrow (Calkins Creek)

Beyond Courage: The Untold Story of Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust by Doreen Rappaport (Candlewick Press)

The Case of the Vanishing Golden Frogs: A Scientific Mystery by Sandra Markle (Millbrook Press)

Chuck Close: Face Book by Chuck Close (Abrams Books for Young Readers)

Hands Around the Library: Protecting Egypt’s Treasured Books by Karen Leggett Abouraya, illustrated by Susan L. Roth (Dial Books for Young Readers)

Life in the Ocean: The Story of Oceanographer Sylvia Earle by Claire A. Nivola  (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)


The Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Outstanding Nonfiction

NONFICTION WINNER:
Chuck Close: Face Book, written and illustrated by Chuck Close (Abrams Books for Young Readers) 
Chuck Close’s art is easy to describe and especially attractive to children because he creates only portraits—in almost every possible medium with an intriguing trompe l’oeil effect. This book explores how his life story and so-called disabilities relate directly to his style. In this Q&A–style narrative, Close himself answers with a clear voice without a hint of famous-artist self-aggrandizement or angst.

NONFICTION HONOR WINNERS:
? Georgia in Hawaii: When Georgia O’Keeffe Painted What She Pleased by Amy Novesky, illustrated by Yuyi Morales (Harcourt Children’s Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt imprint)
? The Elephant Scientist by Caitlin O’Connell & Donna M. Jackson, photographs by Caitlin O’Connell and Timothy Rodwell (Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt imprint)

The Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Award from the American Library Association.
Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon
written by Steve Sheinkin, published by Flash Point, an imprint of Roaring Brook Press

2013 Honor(s)
Electric Ben: The Amazing Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin
written and illustrated by Robert Byrd and published by Dial Books for Young Readers, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group
Moonbird: A Year on the Wind with the Great Survivor B95

written by Phillip M. Hoose and published by Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers
Titanic: Voices from the Disaster
written by Deborah Hopkinson and published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc.



Instructor Magazine's 71 Top Nonfiction Books of the Century (PDF)
Print this list of titles for quick reference.

Best Bets for Nonfiction Books (PDF)
Scholastic editors present their top picks for grades K-2 and grades 3-5 divided by subject area.

Scholastic News, America's leading news source for kids
Make students' experience with nonfiction compelling and relevant with daily news stories, in-depth special reports, critical thinking questions, and interactive features that spark classroom discussion.