The Value of a Story Chart

       I have been using this story chart in my classes for as long as I can remember.  For literary analysis, the chart allows students to take apart any short story, play, novel or non-fiction narrative by reducing that narrative to its basic elements.  For me the most important part of the chart concerns the conflict, for without a conflict a story simply doesn’t exist.
       I have always used the same anecdote to illustrate this point.  An older, somewhat disheveled gentleman is sitting at the counter in a coffee shop with a cup of coffee in front of him.  A waitress is straightening up behind the counter.  They are the only two people in the shop early on this weekday morning.
       No conflict exists in this scenario, so as interesting as these two characters may be, nothing is going to happen.  Now if the waitress were to pick up the fresh pot of coffee behind her and walk over to where the man is sitting in order to offer him a refill, lose her balance because of a slick spot on the floor behind the counter and pour steaming hot coffee down the front of the man’s shirt, quite suddenly and unexpectedly a story has begun.
       Of course, the author of this story has to decide from whose point of view the narrative should be told, the customer or the waitress, and she or he probably ought to have some sense of who these two people are (although that may change over the course of the story); nevertheless, this particular narrative has begun.
       For creative writing, the story chart provides a good way to help students get started when they are writing their own original short stories.  In addition to filling out the chart, I usually ask each student to write a description of her or his main character, the setting and the conflict before he or she actually starts writing a draft of the story because I want to try to steer him or her away from disaster, and descriptions of these basic elements give me some sense of where each student is headed.
       As I have already mentioned briefly at the start of this note, the story chart also provides a student with an equally good way to get a sense of how any story that he or she is reading operates.  One way or another, in filling out a chart for that narrative, students will discover something they wouldn’t have realized if they had not done so.  Whether students are taking stories apart or putting them together, a story chart can become an essential tool in their literary toolbox.  I hope you will agree!  Best of luck, Harper       

Writing Poetry in Middle School

       Teaching students to write poetry in middle school should be a joyful activity, and one of my favorite poets, Donald Hall, implies as much in the last three lines of his poem, “The Sleeping Giant.”
 

 Later the high and watchful sun instead
 Walked low behind the house, and school began,
 And winter pulled a sheet over my head.

The narrator in the poem spends the earlier lines reminiscing about a time when he was four and his imagination allowed him to believe that a hill in Hamden, Connecticut, called “The Sleeping Giant,” actually concealed a giant who was fast asleep but would eventually awaken, wreaking havoc on the nearby community for burying him in dirt and vegetation.  In the last three lines of the poem, the narrator is suggesting that as we grow older “school” or “winter” causes us to lose the sense of wonder we once possessed when we were younger.

      In my experience that sense of wonder thankfully survives into a student’s middle school years, which is why teaching poetry to sixth, seventh and even eighth graders can be so rewarding.  When you look at the pieces in this packet, I hope you will quickly realize that the least important of them is the sheet on poetic terminology.  You may want to use that sheet to show eighth graders that to write traditional poetry involves a great deal more than the effective use of imagery, figurative language and the combination of sounds that make what I like to refer to as “the music” of a poem.

      Using figurative language, rhyme and rhythm effectively so that a poem sounds as if it has occurred as naturally as the spoken word takes a great deal of practice.  Some students may want to try their hand at something like iambic tetrameter, and I would not discourage them, but for sixth and seventh graders working with sound combinations and line length in addition to removing excess verbiage seems more than enough to tackle.  On the other hand, I would try your best to disavow them of the notion that all poetry must rhyme; otherwise, you will get nothing but greeting card verse.

      I hope the materials contained in this packet prove helpful. I certainly have enjoyed developing and using them over the years! Good luck!  Harper

On Teaching Poetry in General and "My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke in Particular

Once students are capable of taking literature seriously, which in my experience occurs sometime during their seventh grade year, the poem you select to teach first is important, as it serves as a doorway into the two worlds of poetry and literary analysis, which many students feel uncomfortable entering.

I have found that introducing poetry first by having students write their own original poems based on appropriate models like William Carlos Williams’ “This Is Just to Say,” which is presented to us in the form of a note from the speaker of the poem to his wife concerning the matter of some missing plums, works best.

Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” has always been my favorite starting point when it comes to analyzing poetry because it has just about everything a teacher could possibly want in a first poem:  a great deal of highly evocative imagery, a bare minimum of figurative language, an easily discernible rhythm and rhyme scheme, and an intriguing situation.

I rarely assign the reading of a single poem for homework, at least not in sixth or seventh grade. I would much prefer to have a member of the class read a new poem out loud to his or her classmates at least twice, once to feel his or her way through the lines and once to give the reader’s increased sense of the poem a chance to shine. 

Then, based on what students have heard and on the text of the poem, which they all have in front of them, I begin a conversation about what the poem might “mean."  Obviously, during this discussion I ask some leading questions, and I also try to get students to reread lines to make what they believe even more apparent.

Eventually I will distribute a handout defining such terms as the poem’s subject, speaker, audience, and tone, and eventually we will talk about theme, but not too quickly. “My Papa’s Waltz,” written in iambic trimeter, is a wonderful poem to scan, and as soon as I define rhyme scheme, my students nail it.

I hope you will take the trouble to find the poem, read it, and, employing the materials I have provided, use it in your classroom.  Good luck! Harper

On Teaching Andre Dubus' "The Doctor"

Andre Dubus, the father, has long been one of my favorite short story writers, and I still own my original hardcover copy of his collection Separate Flights, which contains the short story, “The Doctor,” first published in 1969 in The New Yorker.  Like so many of his stories, the writing is clean and spare as is the plot. 

I have taught the story in the seventh grade, but it is appropriate for almost any grade above that.  Indeed, if ever a story illustrated the value of the three Greek unities of time, place and action, “The Doctor” does.  The story takes place within the timespan of a week, but its focus concerns the events of a single twenty-four hour period.  The place consists of the several miles of country road the main character runs each morning, over a nearby brook, past neighbors’ houses and back. The action involves more what the doctor, Art Castagnetto, cannot do as opposed to what he can to save the life of a neighborhood boy who drowns in the brook.  The story is told in the third person from Art’s point of view from start to finish as he struggles to come to terms, first as events unfold and then in their aftermath, with the fact that he, an obstetrician, can and could do nothing to save a young boy’s life.

Beyond its cover and this “Note to the Teacher,” the packet contains both a blank and a completed story chart and a set of blank and answered discussion question sheets.  I use the blank question sheets immediately after students have read the story, breaking the class into small groups and asking the students in each group to answer the questions on the sheets together.  Towards the end of class, I review their answers with them as we discuss each question as it appears on the Smart Board.  I use the answered discussion questions as a vehicle for students to review for a larger assessment on a group of short stories, and I use the blank story charts as a way for students to step back and take a look at how this story in particular and any short story, or novel for that matter, works. Good luck with “The Doctor” and the packet!  Andre Dubus, the father, and Andres Dubus lll, the son, are both exceptional writers, worthy of your attention! Enjoy!

On Teaching “A & P” by John Updike

I don’t recall when I first read a short story written by John Updike.  I would like to think it happened in high school.  I attended a boarding school very near Ipswich, Massachusetts, where Updike lived and wrote for much of his life.  I was a freshman in 1963 and Updike’s Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories had just been published the year before.  My English teachers in high school were a pretty sharp group, and I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them slipped an Updike short story onto our reading list.

But perhaps I had to wait until college.  My copy of Olinger Stories has my name and the name of my freshman dormitory and room number written very neatly in the corner of the first page just inside the front cover.  I know I read four of the stories, including “Pigeon Feathers” and “A Sense of Shelter,” because I marked them up a bit, not so much with underlining, for I seemed to have outgrown that practice in high school, but with carefully placed checkmarks in the margins.

I also don’t recall when I first encountered “A & P.”  I would bet I was simply looking for a short story to teach to my seventh graders as one of the models we would discuss in class before they began writing their own original stories.  I needed something narrated in the first person, told from the point of view of a character with whom my students could connect, if not identify.  Although he is nineteen-years-old, Sammy is a perfect narrator.  He looks at the world of the A & P from the vantage point of a totally unengaged, slightly superior witness.  He has no stake in what normally transpires, and he draws great amusement from the behavior of the customers who roam the aisles like “sheep.”  However, his reaction to “the queen” when she enters the store with her two companions occurs on an entirely different level.  From the start of the story, Sammy’s feelings for Queenie constitute so clearly the kind of devout adoration that a much younger boy might feel on encountering his first crush.  The difference is that Sammy is willing to admit how he feels a least to himself, whereas a normal seventh grade boy – if there is such a thing – would have no idea what hit him.  As a result, teaching the story in the seventh grade, I completely ignore Sammy’s attraction to Queenie, addressing it only if someone in the class brings it up.  Of course, if I were teaching this story to a group of ninth or tenth graders, I would take an entirely different approach.

At any rate, whether you are teaching the story to seventh, eighth, ninth or tenth graders, through Sammy’s eyes Updike does a wonderful job of ushering us into a world where everything appears to be controlled by the adults, that is until Sammy, in defense of what he innocently sees as an unattainable damsel in distress, defies Lengel and his parents and takes his life into his own hands.  Clearly the idea of adolescent rebellion and/or separation figures into the story’s attraction to students of almost any age, just as it lends itself to a discussion of class differences in the United States. Arising out of a discussion of those differences are a variety of issues connected to human sexuality and relationships and what is “attainable” and what isn’t.  What I value most about the story on a thematic level is that Sammy has no idea what he wants to do with his life; he just knows that he doesn’t want to work as a cashier at the A & P.  His not knowing leaves plenty of room for a discussion of possibilities. While the obvious quick fix at the private schools where I have been teaching is COLLEGE, in so many ways, that’s too easy and clearly not what Updike intended because it immediately puts Sammy in the same sort of box he has just escaped.

As far as using the question sheets and the story chart is concerned, I vary my approach.  Sometimes I give my students the blank question sheets to guide them in their reading; sometimes I don’t.  Usually we fill the question sheets out together in class the day after they have read the story.  I also may select the best questions and create a “pop” reading quiz, asking students to answer five out of seven, to get some sense of how much they are comprehending on their own.  My favorite use of the question sheets involves handing out a set of blank sheets to each student, breaking the class into groups of two or three students each and having them answer the questions in their groups.  After every group has finished, we will go through the questions one at a time, and I will show each answered question on the Smart Board using the shade to block out the questions we haven’t gotten to yet. 

When I am teaching a story, a poem, a novel or a play for the first time, I often create the answered question sheets with my students during the class after they have read the particular reading assignment.  I have had the luxury of using a Smart Board over the past six or seven years, so I allow each student to type the answers that the class comes up with to two questions, each student getting to choose the font and the color in which they will type.  While this can be an incredibly time-consuming process, the excitement the students get from serving Smart Board scribes makes it worth the time.  On a rare occasion, I have even given students the opportunity to generate questions as they read, emailing those questions to me the evening before we discuss the story so that at least a sample of theirs can be included on the sheets.

I use the story charts with stories, novels, autobiographies or plays as a means of taking notes in a more comprehensive way, especially when students are facing some sort of cumulative assessment on a number of stories or a combination of novels, autobiographies, and or plays.  Completing the charts allows students to pull back from the details of character and plot so as to gain a better perspective on each work as a whole.

                                     

                                           Good luck with the story!

                                                         Harper

A Preview of What's in Store

I was just about to upload my first packet of documents, over ninety pages of parts of speech highlight sheets, exercises, answers sheets, quizzes and tests all in the form of amusing stories appropriate to middle school, when I realized that the first packet to be posted on the TpT website should quite appropriately be free to all comers and relatively short.  As a result, I had to hold back on the parts of speech packet while I created a literature packet on teaching John Updike's "A & P" to seventh and eighth graders and high school students.  I will be posting that packet, which consists of a note to the teacher, a blank story chart, a blank set of question sheets, a completed story chart and a completed set of question sheets, this weekend.  I am also planning grammar packets on parts of a sentence, phrases and clauses and types of sentences, once again all in the form of stories.  I will also be posting literature packets on William Gibson's The Miracle Worker and on Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me.  Sorry this is taking me so long, but I am starting a new business tutoring students in writing, which is also very exciting!  Thanks for your patience.  The wait will be worth your trouble, I hope.