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
No comments:
Post a Comment