English and the Common Core

After ten years of teaching mostly the same curriculum at the same high school, I guess it's time to shake things up a bit.  My school district along with hundreds across the nation have decided to band together and implement of a set of standards known as Common Core.  While as an English/literature teacher, this makes my skin crawl, as we head forward into an increasingly more technological and internationally more competitive world, the need for individuals to lay aside the beauty of literature and focus on the significance of critical thinking skills and functional print has become imperative. 

While I have conceded to aligning my instruction with the Common Core Standards and giving up some of my "core" love of the English cannon, I can not in good conscious entirely put aside imagination, creativity, and my natural love of the English language and forego literature.  The standards say that my teaching should now have a 70/30 split between nonfiction and fiction text.  Does this really mean I have to give up Bradbury, Shakespeare, Plath, Austen, Poe, and Thoreau?  Sadly, it means I can't spend weeks simply exploring the cavities of the creativity that created their works, however, I can't simply run my students minds dry with constant inundation of nonfiction (they get enough of that in their other courses).  My new challenge as I head into my second decade of teaching becomes, how to mesh reason I chose to teach English (love of literature and composition) with the rigors of the mundane Common Core.

Next begins my exploration into new unit development as I decide how to best mesh the fictional and non fictional world into the seemingly limited world of rhetoric, inform, critique, and research and present. 

Care to join me on my journey?  Care to share resources?  Care to debate and inform about Common Core?  I look forward to either the collaboration or the personal journey into a new world of instruction.  Beyond all the politics of education, I love teaching and I love students.  I won't allow those who can't teach pigeon hole me into hating my career and resenting the path in life I chose to follow and will continue to wend for at least the next 20 years.