Overheard in the Hall: Gatsby Talk

 

"I feel bad for Tom though," one boy said.

"What?!" a girl in the group replied.

"Well, he's lost both of his women..."

"You can't side with the white-supremacist, ..."

"Well, I feel for him. Daisy cheated on him and ..."

"TOM CHEATED ON HER!"

"Well, yeah, but... then his other woman is killed...and Daisy..."

"Bro, seriously? What?! No... "

What does this exchange tell you about learners' beliefs? 

Students in tenth grade English might read The Great Gatsby as a core text during an analysis unit. There are benefits and barriers to teaching whole-class novels and before coming to Singapore American School, I'd moved away from the practice and focused more on teaching skills and standards with short texts, reserving long texts or novels for independent reading or book clubs. The practice here was different, so at first, I conformed. 

Then,  in my second year of teaching English 10 here, and after reading Disrupt Texts piece on teaching Gatsby, I shifted.  I went from teaching Gatsby to the whole-class to offering it as one of many book club choices. That change required PLC conversations as well as support from the department in purchasing titles.  I'm glad I had the opportunity to both talk through the what, the why and the how as well as to make the change in my own classsroom. 

Book club choices for 3 of 5 units in sophomore English.

I teach a few of those tenth graders this year in my AP Language class; they still talk about the books they chose during those units.  

Though we've just finished a unit on race in AP Lang (now not possible to teach such a unit in my home state of Florida, but that's another story).  We read Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, excerpts from Oluo's So You Want to Talk about Race, and  Nguyen's article discussion of the Asian model minority stereotype and many other choice articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Straits Time, The China Morning Post, The Economist and more. During our discussions and conversations in class, nobody brought up Gatsby and his dream. 

Surprising? Maybe. Maybe not. 

Students need support in order to transfer and connect knowledge be that knowledge skill or content. In order to connect concepts from last year's work, I likely need to plan for that more intentionally. Now that I'm reflecting on it, I wish I had pulled a few dream passages from that set of novels as well as a dream passage from Coates or a promise passage from Oluo--that would have been a good Socratic practice there, zooming in on specifics. Always, I could do something a bit differently. Next time, I tell myself.

Many thanks to the team at Two Writing Teachers (TWT) who hosts Slice of Life Story Challenge
every day in March.Swing by TWT to serve yourself up another slice or  write your own, link up and join us!