Response to "American Born Chinese"

Gene Luen Yang's graphic novel, American Born Chinese, is great and can be used effectively in a secondary classroom.

First, since American Born Chinese is a graphic novel it offers a unique strength in its ability to engage a variety of student learners whom may not learn best with traditional texts. Providing options to our student populations helps differentiate instruction to those students because learners will engage better and learn more if they are interested in what they study or read.

Second, American Born Chinese has a style and subject matter that appeals to a lot of students. The mythical kung-fu-practicing Monkey King and his quest for recognition is something that would interest a lot of students who spend hundreds of hours a year playing video games with similar stories.

Third, American Born Chinese includes a lot of themes common to young adult literature: overcoming differences within one's self or community, integrating into other communities, dealing with attraction to others, etc. It includes parallel stories that weave together in the end to present its message.

Fourth, students struggling with reading comprehension could benefit from American Born Chinese too. Helping students find the meaning of words in the context of the graphic novel could be helpful. I wouldn't know what the abacus was unless I looked at the drawing myself. Instead of writing a prediction of what happens further in the story, students could draw their own cartoon of what they think could happen next. Adapting these reading comprehension strategies to a graphic novel could change the pace of a class and successfully help struggling readers.

Fifth, though American Born Chinese is over two hundred pages, I blew through this graphic novel in less than an hour. Due to how quick it is, students may be more likely to read this novel.

Sixth, American Born Chinese is a novel that can be successfully paired with another novel. How does The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian compare with American Born Chinese in its graphic art, with how the main characters encounter and react to differences and adversity, etc. There are a lot of avenues to go down with this text.

Response to "Romeo & Juliet"

William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet is a bit different than the other texts that we have read in this class. Its most importance difference: if I end up teaching freshman ELA, it is not a question of if I will teach Romeo & Juliet, but a question of how. Virtually every freshmen ELA class in the country teaches this play and chances are that I will teach it too.

So, how would I teach Romeo & Juliet? The first important thing to realize is that I need to meet the students at their level and teach to that. I love Shakespeare. I find Elizabethan England fascinating. I loved English 350 (Shakespeare with Dr. Smith) and learning about previous works that Shakespeare's plays are often directly based on, how words were pronounced in Elizabethan England, etc. All of this context is fascinating, and high school freshmen don't need to know about almost any of it. In fact, it could be detrimental to their learning if I bring in tangents that I personally love when they themselves are struggling with the basic text, still learning about plot development and character development, etc. Romeo & Juliet is mainly a text to introduce students to for its difficulty and plot development. It is a good introductory piece to Shakespeare, arguably the greatest and most influential writer ever in the English language.

The great emphasis of a unit on Romeo & Juliet would be text comprehension. This could be the first truly difficult text that students encounter. When a large swath of freshmen ELA classes are below reading level, this creates serious challenges. First and foremost, this play will be read entirely in the classroom. Comprehension will have to be checked after every scene and after every act. Teaching students how to read a difficult text like this--how to comprehend a text like this--is the challenge. Some of Tovani's strategies can be useful with this text->making predictions, defining words (thankfully almost all Shakespeare editions have a list of defined terms at the bottom of every page for words that have dropped out of usage), visualizing what is happening, etc. This includes characters, characterization, plot and plot development. Having students understand and comprehend the basics from this text is the goal with a unit on Romeo & Juliet.

In addition to what I typed above, Romeo & Juliet does provide other teaching opportunities. If the curriculum calls for poetry, it could be good to teach poetry basics prior to reading Romeo & Juliet. I could end the poetry unit with a couple lessons on sonnets too. Since Romeo & Juliet begins with a sonnet and includes at least one other sonnet, in addition to poetry, the chance for student comprehension is instantly increased. The chance for student retention of knowledge is increased too as students will apply recently learned knowledge on poetry and sonnets. There would probably be an element of writing involved with Romeo & Juliet. It may be profitable for student learning to teach the Jane Schaffer essay style (or a district appropriate ninth grade essay style) and have students write an essay at the end of the unit on Romeo & Juliet too.

Response to "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian"

First, I must say that I really enjoyed this book. I read all of it in the library yesterday and was pleasantly surprised.

With that noted, this book can be used in an ELA classroom for a variety reasons. At the back of the novel is a 'Discussion Guide' that provides plenty of ideas itself that can be adapted to study guides, projects that could involve drawing to engage more students, classroom discussions, individual or group research assignments, maybe even a field trip to locales in the book, etc. I'm not worried about that. I do want to touch on some subtle strengths of the novel though.

This novel has two real strengths intrinsic to teaching it.

The first strength is reader engagement:

Its cartoons can help appeal to students that may be hesitant on reading a 230-page novel. In addition, the cartoons help engage different types of students, such as artistic students that like to draw; Its relatively local ties may also appeal to students that may be tired of reading about far-off cities and worlds they've never seen and may never see; and that it is a novel, almost a personal narrative written in the first-person from a narrator of the same age as 9th-10th graders, so students may be more willing to engage the text because of that. Additionally, the personal issues discussed in the book make it more likely that young adult readers will connect and engage with this text.

The second strength is its ties to social studies:

The race relations, the history behind the plight of Native Americans and the challenges facing Native Americans and their tribes today, the local geography, the socioeconomic differences between the Reservation and Reardan, etc.

This novel could be used in a social studies/ELA block class effectively because of all it offers.

Response to Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart"

I recently enjoyed re-reading Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart." I first read this novel in my 10th grade non-honors ELA class when I was 15 and living in Scottsdale, Arizona.

I can definitely see using this text if the curriculum asks for multiculturalism of some sort. Even if the curriculum doesn't ask for multiculturalism, the text is still valuable and can be used to teach to other learning targets. It really two stories in one, and how Achebe intersects his topic with his focus allows for myriad teaching strategies. Theme, plot development, characterization, symbols and motifs, the book offers it all.

Achebe's hidden world can be difficult for struggling students to comprehend--in my 10th grade class we read the whole book aloud and never had to read parts for homework (non-honors)--but it is written at a reading level that is very low. Achebe writes with such fluidity, concision and clarity that it is very easy to read. This means that it is a good text that can be shared with struggling readers to encourage them in reading difficult texts. While the reading level is low, the comprehension level can be challenging and provides ample opportunities to have students identify the tribal terms, ask clarifying questions, make predictions, etc. As a teacher I could use this text to provide my students with practice (I have a good worksheet idea in mind that pulls passages from the text) in using contexts to identify words they are unfamiliar with too.

For a higher-level class, concentration on how the two parts compare and contrast, how Achebe maintains the balance between his topic and focus, theme development, etc., all prove that this novel can be used as a valuable instructional text.

This is also a text that can be used in a humanities class as it provides ample opportunities to teach social studies in addition to ELA.