At
one point in the novel, after a squirrel has taken a harrowing trip through a
powerful vacuum cleaner, a young girl named Flora overhears her neighbor ask
his wife if she is going to leave the Ulysses (the vacuum cleaner)
outside. Immediately young Flora names
the squirrel Ulysses. The author tells us “she knew the right word when she
heard it.”
Why
is this the right word? Here we have factual information begging for an
inference. Why, indeed did Flora name the squirrel Ulysses? In my mind, the
author was referring to the Ulysses of Greek myth. That Ulysses, like our
squirrel, had experienced travels fraught with danger and had been transformed
by his experiences. Similarly, Ulysses the squirrel was also transformed; he
became a thinking squirrel able to type out poetry. This connection gives the
events in the story the grandeur it seems to me to be seeking.
.
. . But not to my students. They, instead, connected the name Ulysses to Ulysses
S. Grant. True, he was a hero, a man of decisive action, a fighter, and a
president. Yet I was totally surprised by this connection and I asked the class
to develop their idea so we could compare it with mine to see which held up
better.
So
what does this have to do with Common Core? The connections we make—our
intellectual leaps and inferences—are where our most exciting thoughts are
happening. The Common Core asks students to make inferences they can defend by
supplying evidence. Students are to make inferences within a single text and
inferences across multiple texts. This is true for both fiction and nonfiction.
This is important intellectual work.
Making
and defending inferences based on evidence is the heart of historical thinking.
Similarly, making and defending claims is central to the nature of science
(NOS). Perhaps it is not too much of a stretch to say that inferential thinking
is the heart of all original thinking. That is why when we embed the ideas of Common Core into our
teaching it is rewarding, but when we race from standard to standard, trying to
cover them all, it is not.
I
am always struck by how exciting it is to come up with an original claim,
pursue it, and defend it. We don’t have to look very far for examples. In her most
recent post on this website, the one just before this one, Mary Ann Cappiello
talked about how after rereading works by Elizabeth Partridge she discovered
the central role Bob Dylan played in the careers of Woody Guthrie and John
Lennon. Here are her exact words
describing this experience: “...I am always surprised at how powerful it is to
make my own connections through a series of texts, cultivating curiosity,
building knowledge, and pursuing my questions.” I couldn’t agree more.
So,
which Ulysses was it? What do you think?
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