My First Inquiry Question (this year)

So after Last night’s workshop on utilizing inquiry in the classroom, I did something new with my classes.

This past week we’ve been reading Daniel Keyes’ “Flowers for Algernon”, and we’ve been reading it along with the audio version supplied by McDougal Littell. The kids think the story is funny at first, because of the way the reader plods through the text.

We’ve done all the regular stuff in the way we should do it, and until last night I was going to brag about how my students interacted with the text:

• We talked about the style of Keyes’ writing — that he shows us Charlie is mentally handicapped by the way he shows off Charlie’s problems with spelling. (”Dude, whoever wrote this book is a retard…look at all the spelling mistakes!”)
• We talked about style in the audio version and whether the reader’s voice met our expectations of the narrator after we read the text.
• We talked about mood and how the author created mood through word choice, character actions and interactions, and how mood is often dependent on the storyline itself. “The Tell-Tale Heart” has a mood about it created by the author’s word choice, the characters’ actions, and the story itself. Why not with this one, too?
• We talked about tone and what an author thinks about what’s going on in the story. (This is one of the hardest things to consider, as a reader, because we’re so often involved in being a reader that we forget about the guy/gal who wrote the story.)
• And we talked about structure and how a story is put together to get us readers involved. Two of the three stories we’ve read this year only seem to be told in chronological order, but that’s misleading.
  • Both “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Ransom of Red Chief” are told chronologically, save for their first sentences — both hint that the story is being told after the fact.
  • Both “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Ransom of Red Chief” are told in a “Cause and Effect” manner, while this new one is a bit C&E AND C&C (compare and contrast.
    • For C&E in Flowers for Algernon, we have a man who has brain surgery to make him more intelligent, and that surgery doesn’t do the wonders it was supposed to do. As for C&C, we have two versions of the same character to discuss, and that leads us back to the other three topics: style, mood, and tone.

So today I changed things up and tried out a little bit of the inquiry stuff I picked up last night. I gave them the sorta-inquiry question: How do authors make me enjoy their stories?

I handed the students this sheet of paper (click the image for a larger version) and said: Every story you read is trying to get you involved somehow. Sure, authors are in it for the money, but they need you to enjoy a story before you buy the story — they do that by getting you at the emotional level.

As we read, we’re going to pause every few pages to reflect on that inquiry question: “How is the author making me feel the way I do?”

A few classes asked for a little more explanation as to how these stylistic devices work, but just about every student got to work. They all wrote paragraphs on each device and how it was used in each section we read.

Not every student provided examples to back up their work, but I’ll address that tomorrow — that I want quotes. Examples. Proof.

But I’ve gotta say: today was the first day this year I heard students say: “This is hard, man.” and still keep writing.

Important questions get our interest, no? And this question isn’t really that important — not every student reads for fun. Not every student reads to escape. Not every student reads, period. But just about every student has something to say, and I hope that this short assignment gets the kids thinking about their roles as readers and the fact that they have an obligation to interact with a text.

(the secret is getting them to admit they interact with a text and not feel bad about it, because I hear them “ooh! and “ahh!” at the exciting parts of the things we read, I hear them groan with discontent when the main character makes abad move, I hear them question the characters’ actions in a story, and I hear them fight for the main character when he/she is in trouble. They don’t know they’re interacting with the text yet; maybe having them write about the author poking and prodding these reactions will help out.)

(is this even inquiry?)

(a better inquiry question would be: “Why do authors write for me?”)
(or, “Why are there books?”)
(right?)