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But if you ask me, that's a failing of history classes, not English. Among the nonfiction the Common Core curriculum suggests are FedViews by the Federal Reserve of San Francisco. I've never read FedViews, but I know that unlike my late-night high school sessions helping other kids parse "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," no amount of discussing FedViews is going to get you to second base.
School isn't merely training for work; it's training to communicate throughout our lives. If we didn't all experience Hamlet's soliloquy, we'd have to explain soul-tortured indecisiveness by saying things like "Dude, you are like Ben Bernanke in early 2012 weighing inflation vs. growth in Quantitative Easing 3." Teaching language through nonfiction is like teaching history by playing Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" or teaching science by giving someone an unmarked test tube full of sludge and having him figure out if the white powder he distilled is salt or sugar by making Steven Baumgarten taste it, which is how I learned science and how Steven Baumgarten learned to be more careful about picking people to work with. Something he could have learned by reading Othello.
But if our nation is going to make this horrible mistake, I'd like to get something out of it, like selling copies of my book. So I asked Wilhoit if he would consider including my writing in the curriculum, to which he said, "It would be interesting to take your article on a specific subject and compare and contrast it to another author writing about the same subject. That would be ideal. We will use it. I promise you." Now I just have to find another writer who has written a compelling account of my childhood.