It happens every once in a while — that monster you spring on the classroom is more frightening than you expected it to be. You planned on turning that monster into a cute, cuddly stuffed animal, and instead you accidentally added another set of fangs, a tail made of glass shards, and chainsaws for eyeballs.
This isn’t the first time this has happened in my classroom, and I don’t expect it will be the last, but I hope I’ll always stay aware enough to recognize it when it happens. But today I may have fallen a little short — I didn’t catch this until my third class of the day.
Here’s the problem. We’re writing an essay about Flowers for Algernon, and my plan is to get the students to choose a major theme in the story and use that theme to examine exactly how the author (Daniel Keyes) built the story to teach us that theme.
My plan was to have the students write one paragraph a day on a specific topic, mainly due to time constraints — they just finished a very long paper and project assignment, and here we are jumping into the next one — but also so that we can focus on one literary element at a time (teaching new material), and so that we can go through that writing process as a process (that we’ll have to revise as we write).
This essay is due Monday, and this means we’re really cramming it in. It’s not my choice it’s due Monday, and again it’s my fault for scheduling this within a week of the last project.
Anyhow, Bonnie left me a comment saying:
I’ve been thinking hard about your question, RT and I always think before I respond on these essay questions, how to unpack them. I would imagine that you are spending lots of time writing with your students, building their writing muscle. I think the best thing is to unpack this question in a way that they are excited and challenged. It’s the tone that you create and the excitement about all writing that you bring to the table. This is just yet another opportunity to develop their writing voice and sense of audience.
I think the worst thing is to make this seem formulaic.
I hope this helps. I love seeing how you are sharing your challenges on this blog.
Bonnie
She’s got it right — unpacking this whole question is difficult, and I want to do it in a way that keeps their writing authentic and personal; I have to grade these essays, as will a number of other educators, and none of us want to read the same essay over and over. We don’t want rehearsed, repetetive work. We understand that if we teach a specific type of writing on a specific topic that we’ll get back a collection of rote work, but that’s not the objective (for me).
I want to know what these kids think about the story. I want to know what they gleaned from it.
I also want them to choose what they write about, and that’s why they have a bank of topics for writing. And I’m hoping that this small amount of freedom will produce some interesting work.
Anyway, here’s thr problem Iran into today — once I introduced the idea of writing about the Theme of the story and discussing it through those elements of literature, many students got confused. My first class actually took to this pretty well, while my second class just scrambled. It was like they’d never been to class before. They didn’t know the story, didn’t know what we were talking about, didn’t know what the hell was going on. They were absolutely lost, and so I changed my methods.
Instead of having the kids write a paragraph on Theme today (keeping in mind they already have a “gimme” paragraph from yesterday), I decided to have each class chose a specific theme from our small list we’ve come up with as we read the story.
Themes in Flowers for Algernon
- Mentally challenged people should be treated equally.
- People shouldn’t take advantage of others.
- Friendship is a hard-won honor
There are a number of other themes lurking around in Flowers, but we haven’t discussed them yet. In our discussion today, most classes chose the first theme — it’s the most evident in the story — as what they’d like to discuss.
And so we did, in place of writing, so we could practice that discussion on one topic while seeing it through other topics. We wrote a possible introduction on the board:
“Flowers for Algernon,” by Daniel Keyes is a story about…
I gave them that much and asked them to fill in the remainder of the sentence with a short summary of the story.
With this story, Keyes is trying to tell us that…
Here they are to pick one of the themes from our list, and write it word-for-word.
This lesson becomes clearer when we analyze the literary elements Keyes used in creating the story. He teaches the message of … through the use of …, …, and ….
Here they outline their thesis statement.
Writing that paragraph is essential and wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t realize that some kids were struggling. And it also couldn’t have happened if I didn’t teach them about Characterization and Structure
We talked about how authors create characters and how they show us about the characters, and we talked about structure and how authors build stories (like people build houses — with a plan in mind) to make us think more about the real meaning behind the story. We talked a lot about how authors respect us and don’t treat us like garbage. We talked about authors and how they care for us. We talked about what we saw Daniel Keyes do for us so that we might recognize that ultimate meaning or message.
Here are a few example conversations about this topic:
So, Jeb, what’s the theme of this story, to you?
“I don’t know.”
Choose one from the list we have. Honestly, I think that an easy paper to write would talk about the first theme: “Mentally challenged people deserve to be treated equally.” I think that theme’s obvious. A harder, and more fun theme would be the second one: “We shouldn’t take advantage of others.” There’s a lot in both of those themes, and you’re welcome to choose a totally different theme. Which one would you like to talk about?
“Uh, the one about we shouldn’t take advantage of people.”
Sweet! How do you know Kayes is trying to tell us this?
“What do you mean?”
How do you know the author is showing us that we should treat people fairly, and that we shouldn’t take advantage of those around us?
“‘Cause Charlie’s retarded.”
Yeah! How many stories have you read where the main character is disabled? How do you know Charlie is mentally challenged?
“‘Cause of the way he writes. He can’t spell. He can’t write. And he always says he wants to be smarter.”
And which of the topics we’ve talked about does this fit under. Is this THEME, CHARACTERIZATION, or STRUCTURE?
“Characterization.”
Perfect. So, in your paper, after you tell me what the story is, who the author is and describe the basic story, you’d also tell me that Daniel Keyes i trying to tell us that we shouldn’t take advantage of people, right?
“Yeah.”
And then you’ll make a list of what topics, what literary tricks he uses to teach us that, right.?
“Yeah.”
That’s your thesis statement. You’ll tell us he teaches this through characterization. Then your next paragraph will be all about characterization. How would you write about how he builds the characters to teach this theme of not taking advantage of others?
“I’d say what you said. I’d say ‘Daniel What’s-his-Face says we shouldn’t take advantage of others by making the main character mental.”
Dude, that’s perfect! That’s exactly what you should say! You should tell me the author did this on purpose. How are you going to SHOW ME that he created a mentally challenged main character?
“I’d talk about his spelling and grammar. And I’d talk about how he always wants to be smart.”
That’s great. You’ve just talked about one character, now what about the others? What is it about the other characters in the story thatmakes you believe we shouldn’t take advantage of others?
“Well, first off, his friends are dicks. They get him drunk and probably beat him up and they’re always making fun of him ’cause he doesn’t realize that’s what they’re doing. And then his bosds takes advantage of him by giving him $25 when he saved the company $10,000. And then there’s the doctors — Dr. Nemur and Dr. Strauss argue over who’s going to get more famous because of Charlie, and that’s not cool either.”
I totally agree. And think about what you just did. You told the whole class how to write a paragraph in an essay — you didn’t worry about the number of sentences we have, and you didn’t worry about how many words were in those sentences — youspoke from the heart. You told us about how Daniel Keyes built the main character and how that relates to the overall theme. And then you told us about all the other characters and how they treat Charlie. Everything you said was about how Keyes built the characters and how that helps us understand your theme. You just wrote a gigantic paragraph and you know there’s more you could put in there, but for now…that’s awesome.
Was that as hard as you thought it would be?
“No, that was easy!”
Ok then, tell me about structure. How did Keyes build this story to show off the theme you chose?
And then the kid went off…
“Well, he had Charlie write it in a diary so that we get to hear what he thinks. And it’s told in first person, which makes me hear Charlie talk about how he feels. And it’s told in chronological order, which makes me think about how Charlie didn’t know people were taking advantage of him until he got smarter, and then he realized it all. It made me think that Daniel Keyes did this so that I would watch Charlie get smarter and smarter and figure out what’s going on.”
Why did he let you do that?
“‘Cause he wanted me to feel bad for Charlie.”
Why?
“‘Cause he wanted to teach me the theme.”
Honestly, the frustration I dealt with today was likely nothing compared to what the students felt when I gave them another paragraph today. I didn’t realize that I’d been doing this whole thing backward. I should have TAUGHT the topics, and then asked how the THEME related, but that didn’t happen until halfway through the day. I wish I would have recognized this sooner, and I’l admit that the change allowed for a deeper discussion and also allowed me to gauge the students’ understanding of the story.
Like Bonnie said: the unpacking of the question is key. Do it incorrectly and everything’s for naught. Do it correctly, and you’ll be flying.
I thin I’ll try to have this same conversation tomorrow with the classes I failed.
Good buddy Kevin was overly kind and offered to host the weekly Boil Your Day Down into One Sentence edu-meme.
Hi there.
