Call for E-book Pilot Partners

Is your literature class currently using an e-book reader, electronic notebook, or tablet computer for delivery of textbook content in lieu of a hardcover student edition?

EMC is looking for partners to pilot a sample from our literature program (grades 6-12) in portable electronic devices. For more information, please contact us at litmail@emcp.com.

EMC Authors Host Annual Writers Week

February 28 through March 4, Gary Anderson and Tony Romano, authors of EMC’s Expository Composition: Discovering Your Voice, are hosting the seventeenth annual William Fremd High School Writers Week. During this week-long celebration of writing, Fremd students, faculty, and staff learn about the art and craft of writing from nationally-known and local authors, as well as from Fremd student and faculty authors. Since its beginning in 1995, Writers Week has brought more than 200 writers to the Fremd campus in Palatine, Illinois.

Writer’s Week XVII guest writers include Chris Crutcher, Sierra DeMulder, Buddy Wakefield, Dave Cullen, Jonathan Eig, Billy Lombardo, Mary Fons, Julie Halpern, and Fremd alumni authors Daphne Willis ('05), Kathryn Janicek ('94), and Mark Buenning ('03).

I was lucky enough to attend a session on Writers Week presented by Gary Anderson and Tony Romano at NCTE last fall, and it was truly inspiring. To find out more about Fremd Writers Week, visit the website at http://fremdwritersweek.ning.com/.

Read Across America Day March 2

The National Education Association’s Read Across America day is March 2, the birthday of Dr. Seuss. The goal of the NEA’s signature program, now in its thirteenth year, is to build a nation of readers. Thousands of schools, libraries, and community centers across the country participate in this national reading celebration by bringing together kids, teens, and books. The program focuses on motivating children and teens to read through events, partnerships, and reading resources year-round.

In Anna Quindlen’s essay, “How Reading Changed My Life,” that appears in EMC's Mirrors & Windows Level V, she writes,

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself.…There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger.

Make sure to celebrate Read Across America by sharing a favorite book with a young person on March 2. For more information about ways to participate and activity ideas go to http://www.nea.org/readacross.

Global Perspectives in Grade 10 Mirrors & Windows

Because World Literature is sometimes taught at grade 10, schools have asked how many world literature selections are included in the grade 10 Mirrors & Windows Level V literature text. We developed our grade 10 book with a strong global perspective and it includes over 20% world lit selections (30 out of 144 selections). In comparison to other literature programs, Mirrors & Windows includes significantly more world literature selections at this level.

For example, in Unit 1 Fiction, the following authors from around the world offer their perspectives:

Doris Lessing - Persia/Africa
Hernando Tellez - Columbia
Nadine Gordimer - South Africa
Guy de Maupassant - France
Hwang Sun won - Korea
Khaled Hosseini - Afghanistan
Chinua Achebe - Nigeria
Italo Calvino - Cuba
R.K. Narayan - India

Just take a look a the grade 10 table of contents--this is characteristic of the world lit representation throughout the book. http://www.emcp.com/product_catalog/index.php?GroupID=2886

At all levels, the Mirrors & Windows program offers a diverse variety of classical and contemporary literature to help students reflect on themselves and their world and to connect that understanding to people from around the world.

Common Core State Standards FAQ #3: Range of Text Types

Q. Do the Common Core State Standards include a required reading list?

A. Here’s what the CCSS has to say:

“Through reading a diverse array of classic and contemporary literature as well as challenging informational texts in a range of subjects, students are expected to build knowledge, gain insights, explore possibilities, and broaden their perspective. Because the standards are building blocks for successful classrooms, but recognize that teachers, school districts and states need to decide on appropriate curriculum, they intentionally do not offer a reading list. Instead, they offer numerous sample texts to help teachers prepare for the school year and allow parents and students to know what to expect at the beginning of the year.”

Mirrors & Windows offers high-quality literary works that were carefully chosen to enrich and enhance students’ understanding of themselves and their world. Each unit in the program presents a diverse body of rich and relevant selections related to a particular theme or topic. The correlations in each teacher’s edition list texts illustrating the complexity, quality, and range of student reading required by the CCSS.

In addition, Mirrors & Windows includes 100% of the range of text type subgenres recommended by the CCSS for grades 6–12 in every grade level!

Choose Mirrors & Windows to help your students

master the Common Core State Standards!

Common Core State Standards FAQ #2: Argumentative vs. Persuasive Writing

Q. Please address the emphasis on argumentative writing versus persuasive writing in your materials.

A. Consistent with the common core state standards, Mirrors & Windows places a strong focus on writing logical arguments as an important form of college- and career-ready writing. The labels “persuasive” and “argumentative” writing are often used interchangeably—the purpose of both types is to persuade. The common core state standards draw the distinction that “logical arguments should convince the audience with the perceived merit and reasonableness of the claims and proofs offered” rather than to persuade using “either the emotions the writer evokes in the audience or the character or credentials of the writer.”

While Mirrors & Windows uses the label “persuasive writing” for the numerous argumentative writing opportunities throughout the program, these assignments clearly ask writers to support their arguments and opinions with convincing, reasonable evidence.

As an example, the Mirrors & Windows Grade 10 Unit 4 Writing Workshop assignment asks students to “Write a persuasive essay, aiming to convince a larger audience to consider your viewpoint about a subject that is important to you.” The text offers the following definition for a persuasive essay:

“In a persuasive essay, the writer respectfully presents a clear position on an issue, using logic, reason, and information, to convince readers to see his or her viewpoint and, if appropriate, to take action on it.”

Mirrors & Windows provides persuasive/argumentative writing activities throughout the program in post-reading Writing Option assignments and in-depth Writing Workshops at the end of each unit and in the Exceeding the Standards: Writing supplement.

“Twain’s Forest vs. literalists small trees”

Columnist D.J. Tice’s January 13th Minneapolis Star Tribune article in the wake of the media “blizzard of blather” about the publication of a "sanitized" version of Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn makes an excellent point. We shouldn’t get so caught up in the language of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn that we lose sight of the real message of Huck’s story.

Tice states that “Huck Finn is about the folly of ever trusting the fashionable morality of one's own time and place. Any time, any place. It's a warning that some of the worst mistakes come when we're absolutely sure about something -- and everyone we know agrees with us.
Huck dramatizes this by violating the slave South's moral order without for one moment realizing that his society's values are corrupt. Huck simply loves Jim, the runaway slave, as an individual, and can't help himself.”

EMC’s Access Edition novels of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer are published in their original “unsanitized” versions, in the vernacular of the time and place. When teaching Twain's work in the secondary classroom it is important to emphasize the context of the language and the true meaning of his message.

You can view samples of EMC’s Access Editions novels at http://www.emcp.com/previews/AccessEditions/

Read Tice’s complete StarTribune column at
http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentary/113314639.html?elr=KArksUUUoDEy3LGDiO7aiU