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TEACHING THE GIVER & 9/10: A SEPTEMBER 11 STORY
In my internship placement during the spring semester, the 8th grade ELA students that I will be teaching at Portage Northern Middle School will be reading the novels The Giver by Lois Lowry and 9/10: A September 11 Story by Nora Raleigh Baskin.
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HOW THE TEXTS ARE "TYPICALLY" TAUGHT IN PPS
I have gathered much of my understanding of this class through conversation with my future mentor teacher about the policy and procedures of Portage Public Schools. Portage Public Schools place a high level of importance on teaching student towards the goal of being successful in their Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) in the final years of high school. They use literature as a vehicle to prepare students for district standardized tests with goals of preparing students for other standardized tests to come in the future.
THE PAST, PRESENT, & FUTURE + MULTICULTURALISM
Despite the aim of teaching English language arts being test preparation, the texts selected provide the class with a basis to discuss futurism and multicultural perspectives in literature. In The Giver by Lois Lowry, students examine utopian vs. dystopian futures and the actions that may lead to a future like that in the novel. 9/11: A September 11 Story by Nora Raleigh Baskin examines the events of 9/11 through three multicultural perspectives, and allows students to examine how different cultural perspectives are unique, and also similar in many ways.
STUDENT CREATIVITY & ACTIVISM
Although these texts have the power to evoke creativity and activism in students, what I have formulated is that the aim is more towards mastery of skills than of fostering creativity and activism through analysis of literature.
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