Week 8, February 26th 2020

I was interested by standard  "CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.6: Analyze a particular point of view or cultural experience reflected in a work of literature from outside the United States, drawing on a wide reading of world literature." I thought it was interesting that they didn't specify anything other than "outside the United States" for where the literature from that standard needs to be from. I like the open-ended nature of this standard, but I think it could be misconstrued into just including literature from Britan. In my high school, we never read anything that wasn't a product of a writer from the United States or Britan. I think more specificity with where international texts need to come from would be beneficial for teachers to be more inclusive. I also think, however, that it would limit teachers who are including a wide range of texts on their own. I also think it would be beneficial to include some texts in classrooms that would highlight the experiences of different peoples within the United States, other than The Grapes of Wrath. I think including books written to show the experiences of people in America like American-Born Chinese, or explaining how the Superman comics were written by Jewish-American men and show the idea of what a 'real American man' looks like. This is the kind of literature that we are focusing on in Green’s World Literature class and I feel it has greatly benefitted from learning about these different texts. I think that it is important for us to also include Native American texts. Especially in the Inland Northwest, we are surrounded by very active tribes and a prominent Native American Writer is from here, Sherman Alexie. After doing research, I found that a lot of his work is on the banned books list, which I thought was interesting.