Excerpts from Duff’s novel can be found on his website here.
A dubious standardized testing system, art pieces, and teenagers navigating through high school. Author Mark Duff is coming to Grand Junction, to sign copies of his recent novel, “This Ruler.”
Duff will be at the Barnes & Noble Booksellers on Patterson Road on Saturday, Oct 26, from 2 – 4 p.m. for a Meet the Author event and book signing.
“I think this is the kind of book that is a good college read, and for anyone who’s studying to go into education. I’ve had some teacher friends say this should be mandatory reading for everyone training to be a teacher at every university,” Duff said.
His novel focuses on the American education system, the changing of curriculums and standardized testing, drawing on his nearly 30 years of experience as a teacher.
“In my years of teaching I saw that all of a sudden, we’re changing the curriculum again even though it [was] working fine. And when [the curriculum was changed], we had all to go to new trainings, which generates a lot of money for the people doing the training. And then it would just rotate,” Duff said. “It seemed about every six years just in general that [a new test would rotate in], [there’d be] a new curriculum, [there’d be] new standards.”
His stop in Grand Junction is one of many on his book signing tour of Colorado, which included stops in Denver and Fort Collins. He hopes to do a West Coast book signing tour in the spring.
“And it was pretty set. What [usually happened was], they’d change the standardized tests. Kids would do really poorly, there’d be a big media blitz saying, ‘oh those bad teachers and the bad schools and the bad students.’ Then, they would miraculously the next year have a magic new curriculum that fit the new test, [and] everyone would have to ante up a huge amount of money to buy this new curriculum.”
With a large cast, the novel features a description and breakdown of different pieces of art in most of the chapters, such as paintings, sculptures and poems, often serving as a metaphor for events both in and out of the novel.
“[The lesson of the novel] boils down to two things: one is the kids’ journey, the young teenagers’ journey, to grow and mature. It’s a human story on that part. The second thing [. . .] is to recognize the business plan by the companies that make standardized testing and standardized curricula. It’s a simple business plan: generate change to generate money.”
Each chapter functions as its own section, containing smaller stories that serve as a more personal snapshot of the events occuring in the school.
“What I had in mind was to tell a story that I think everyone can relate to. If [one] thinks about high school, we all go through it, [and] then we [don’t] think about it after we’re done,” Duff said. “In some ways it’s targeted towards people involved in education, people involved in policy making and education, and students who are there, in the trenches in high school.”
