The great thing about teaching English is that every moment is a "teachable moment." Awash in language and communication, it takes little effort to find something in the real world to illustrate what you are teaching.
The content Kentucky educators are supposed to teach students is prescribed in something called the Program of Studies (POS). For English, the term "content" is a bit of a misnomer, because the POS does not mandate readings or assignments, but rather a set of reading, speaking, and writing skills that students should master. I maintain a chart with these skills and regularly grade each class (red, yellow, green) on how well the students have mastered a skill.
Recently, I realized we were "yellow" on identifying the purpose of a piece of writing. We've certainly exercised this skill, but since we typically teach only one type of writing in each unit, the students hadn't been simultaneously presented with multiple texts and asked to decide the purpose (inform, persuade, entertain) for each one.
So I put together a mini-unit of activities for the first ten minutes or so of several classes. I had the students read brief passages and then articulate the purpose of the text and what textual clues they'd used to discern it. All well and good, but talking about stand-alone excerpts of text felt a little de-contextualized to me.
So, I was eating lunch, reading the news, and the teachable moment presented itself.
I opened up Fox News and took a screenshot of the main page. Predictably, it was a tale of how the country is being led into Socialist ruin by the Obama administration. There were headlines on the Massa controversy, 6-7 stories about how health care reform is hated by Americans and doomed to fail, mockery of "Climate-Gate" (the recent revelations of redacted research on Global Warming) and a sarcastic story title about the United Nations. "Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria."
So then I went to CBSNews.com. Just as predictably, the website praised the Obama administration's leadership and vision. Jobless rates were down. Foreclosures were down. While assisting Nancy Pelosi on saving America through health care reform, President Obama was increasing exports to other countries. Change had come to fruition; morning had broken in America.
So I showed the students the two screenshots of the US news (taken seconds apart), and asked them to identify the purpose for these pieces of writing. In some classes, a few hands flew up and said that the purpose of news stories was to inform. I agreed, but then I asked them to do what they'd been doing--look at the text and find evidence to support their answer. Shortly afterward, the students started murmuring--then answering out loud--that the writers' purpose was clearly to persuade.
I stressed that I would never tell them what political view to hold, but I wanted them to understand that they needed to be conscious of the bias so they could consider that persuasive intent in assessing the information presented. In the discussion that followed, some classes made it clear that they understood the necessary conclusions: Never trust one source. Look at multiple views and make up your own mind.
I recognize that heavily politicized journalism is neither novel nor specific to US news, but it's sad that the easiest way to find heavily biased writing is to peruse the front pages of websites designed to give us data about our world.
The scariest part is that I don't believe the tin-foil hat wearers who claim we're being manipulated by covert political machines and duped into accepting spin for news; I'm afraid we're getting exactly the news we want. A pre-designed narrative is so much more unified, coherent, and soothing than the discordant, nuanced truth.
The latter requires real thought, compromise, and engagement. The former asks us to simply lie back, close our eyes, and listen to the sounds of the story. We already know how it ends, so it's just fine if we go ahead and fall asleep.
