Not an Instruction Manual

While reading King's passage, I feared for my students. As King describes the "instruction manual" style of writing, I flashed back to the kind of texts I despised in high school. All of these were non-fiction pieces about science or sports that were written with no imagination and in such a patronizing tone that I seldom managed to finish them. It doesn't mean all non-fiction falls into this category. I remember my emotional outpouring to Orwell's "To Kill an Elephant" and my sly smiles at the simplistic snark of Woolf's "A Room of One's Own." Yet I worry for my students because the current system patronizes them by removing legitimately interesting and compelling narratives in favor of tasteless nonfiction that removes imagination and creativity from the process of reading. Similarly, how can we expect students to write in any meaningful manner when the method of instruction suggested by the Common Core seeks to largely remove fiction and frankly more interesting texts from the curriculum in favor of nonfiction.