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@karenvaites There should be a demand for whole books. However, as someone who has been making that demand as a teacher for over a decade, Texas's law makes me want to quit. Expect English teachers in blue states who care as much as I do about teaching books to respond similarly.

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@karenvaites @AmherstCollege If you can, please reach out to him to post the list of readings for his "Why Read?" course. I think it would be beneficial for English teachers. I know that I need to make that case to my high school students in a couple weeks.

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@TiredBambooLaw Making us hang up Ten Commandment posters in our classroom gives the game away to what this really is.

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@carlrosin @JoshPhillipsPhD @DStrungk making me hang a Ten Commandments poster in the classroom, crow about values and morals and bringing God back into school, and whipping up false uproar about Muslims in the state.

This is not about background knowledge. This is about control.

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@carlrosin @JoshPhillipsPhD @DStrungk Whichever way I do it will be the wrong way for someone, I guarantee it.

And while I think it's a good and necessary thing to teach the Bible as literature, it is another thing entirely for the state to mandate specific passages and translations of the Bible while also...

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@iluvektar100 Have you ever looked into selling these as actual postcards? I would snap these up in a second to send them to folks.

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@eduleadership How much do you think students should have to read outside of class? As is, they do little if any. What should schools do to make them? How long do you thing it should take to read Great Expectations as a class?

Those aren't rhetorical questions.

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@eduleadership School boards control curriculum and are already democratically elected. And a local school board is more responsive to a citizen than any state position.

And, unfortunately, the 50% claim is laughable at the 9-12 level.

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@eduleadership Oddly, I am pushing back against this mandate because I believe so strongly in books and literature. I appreciate you for doing what you can for knowledge building and literacy across the board. I'd just take what Texas is doing with a few tons of salt.

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@eduleadership My school has taught 1984 for seniors for the past 30 years. That is our canon. Texas blowing that up so they are forced to read Pride and Prejudice? That's not a worthy project for the legislature.

If they wanted books and knowledge in schools, there are better ways to do it.

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@eduleadership I don't trust state politicians to declare what books are worth reading and what books are not. Has any state up until now declared a canon by law? Would you trust a progressive state's canon if it excluded all of Shakespeare?

They have the power to do it. Doesn't make it wise.

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@eduleadership Why trust Texas politicians with the creation of a canon? Especially when they showed you their first draft. 1984 not in the canon? Lord of the Flies? Romeo and Juliet? No Emerson? No Twain?

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@eduleadership I'm not saying school shouldn't teach content. They must. We agree on that. And I broadly agree with the idea of a canon. You're saying that Texas politicians are not trying to codify values and morals with a mandated K-12 curriculum. They very much are.

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@eduleadership This list works the same way. That’s why they included an essay about why labor unions are bad as a supplemental text for The Great Gatsby. Labor unions don’t show up in that text at all. But they need to meet the ideological need of criticizing unions.

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@eduleadership It’s the same thing with the 10 commandments in the classroom. On the one hand supporters say it’s for historical knowledge. On the other, supporters say it’s bringing morality back to the classroom.

Seems like they are using “historical knowledge” as a Trojan horse for values.