Light speed — NOW

I made an error in my planning. While I think the Caste System assignment was good and smart, and that the students produced some fantastic materials (both written and visual), I did it without thinking about the upcoming paper on the elements of literature.

Every year we teachers have the students write to a common prompt on a specific theme, and this year we’re focusing on the Elements of Literature — or, how an author purposely constructs a story. This is a very difficult assignment, especially considering that in previous years the students focus on short writing assignments, and that this year we’re just introducing thesis statements. Now we want them to take all that stuff they’ve learned (characterization, conflict, mood, setting, theme, tone) and start thinking about how the author chose those things to make the story become what we see it as: realistic, with real characters; characters with real problems; actions with definable outcomes, etc., etc.

What, now?

I described this to the students as a car: We can open up the hood of the car and see that it has parts. We can name all the parts and describe them. What we’re going to do this time around is figure out how those parts work together to make the car go. We’re also going to take a look at the engineer — the guy who built the car — and try to decipher his reasoning as to why the car does what it does.

Let’s Make Something

To do this, I started with having the students make something — The Pocketmod

Click the link above to read about my prior experience with the pocketmod, or take a look below to see how to make it

Once the students assembled the three sheets of paper, folded them, and cut them in half, they turned the two packages back to back and created a two-sided graphic organizer with six layers per side.

All I had them do today was write LITERATURE on one side’s top sheet, while POETRY adorned the other. (This was to let them know that this organizer will be used for both poetry and literature, and that we’ll likely have 12 terms to study). We only filled out one flap, on the Literature side, and that was labeled CHARACTERIZATION.

Under Characterization we wrote:
The techniques an author uses to make a character real and understandable. These techniques include: a character’s description, speech, actions, and thoughts; the author also uses other character’s behavior toward him/her to describe the character

EX: Progris Riport

As soon as I wrote the example, the kids jumped all over it.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Hey, you spelled that wrong.”
“Don’t you know how to spell, mister?”

I said: Oh, I’m glad you picked up on that. Imagine I didn’t write that. Imagine those were the first two words in a story. What would you think about the main character?

“He’s stupid.”
“He’s retarded.”
“He doesn’t know how to spell.”

All great guesses. We’d think, ‘aw man, this guy is dumb.’ Or, ‘Maybe he’s mentally challenged.’ We’d think the main character has a problem, and we’d like to figure it out.

“Are you mentally challenged, mister?”

Did I write that?

“Yeah.”

Then you must have read me well. Good job. But what if it wasn’t me who wrote that? What if an author decided to show you his main character through those two words? Would you think the character was mentally challenged?

“Yeah.”
“Definitely.”

How old would you think that person is?

“Like, 6 or 7.”

Why?

“‘Cause he can’t spell.”

What if he was 40 years old?

“Dude! That guy’s a retard!”

You’d think he was mentally challenged, right? You’d think he had a disability.

“For sure.”

Well, those are the first tow words in a story we’re going to read today. It’s a long short story (about 25 pages in our books)…

“What the hell? That’s like a book!”

But I think you’re going to like it. And I think you’re going to like it because we’re going ot read the story to enjoy a story, and we’re also going to read it so we can see how the author built it. Like I said: you know what goes in a car; now we’re going to see how a car works. We’re going to see how this author made this story work.

And then we got into the story, and we discovered that the main character’s name is Charlie, that he’s mentally challenged, that he wants to be part of an experiment to make him smarter. We talked about Rorschach tests and even practiced a few, so that we could discuss why Charlie thinks this is a pass/fail test; that he equates everything he does to school — where he failed — and that all he wants in life is to be “normal”; and so that we could experience what he’s experiencing.

The kids took to it pretty well, and ended up doing more work today than they have in previous classes — they built something, took notes, discussed the meaning of one part of literature (characterization), practiced it with a model, and then put it into practice later as we discussed the author’s choice in spelling conventions, punctuation conventions, and why the author decided to make our disabled character so driven to succeed.

What the kids don’t know

Tomorrow, when they enter class, they’ll write to a specific prompt about characterization. Since we talked about characterization today, I want them to put it into writing tomorrow, complete with details taken from the story, and information to back up what they think. Tomorrow, they’ll write one paragraph about characterization, and then they’ll read more of the story. At the end of class, they’ll take a few notes (for the pocketmod) about conflict — which they already know. The following day, when the come to class, they’ll write to a specific prompt about conflict.

What else the students don’t know

To make up for the fact that I dumped another paper on them shortly after they finished the last one, I’m helping them build a paper with these short lessons — they’re building the paper as they read the story. They’ll write a paragraph each day, and by the end of the week they’ll have five paragraphs which they can pile into a longer paper about this story and how the author built it, or they’ll have five paragraphs to pick and choose form in contructing a paper about how the author built this story.

Let’s hope it all works out. We’re on a timeline, and I want my kids to shine.
At the