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Saving Summer: More Good Things

Literary Analysis, Themes, and Essay Writing, Oh my!!

How did I not know about this? (probably because of PG-13 language: I’ll get permission slips, promise!)

ThugNotes is narrated by Sparky Sweets, Ph.D., and yes there is some language, but the plot summaries and analysis are epic. For a secondary audience, this modern version of CliffsNotes is helpful and entertaining. Since I’m teaching a unit on Lord of the Flies next year I am thankful for his analysis and insight.

Next: thinking about essays and writing structures differently:

An Essay Primer for Adults: Six Essay Types You Should Know by Lorraine Berry

An Essay Primer for Adults: 6 Essay Types You Should Know

Here they are to preserve and keep:

The linear narrative essay: This essay structure is self-explanatory. The story is told in a straightforward narrative, and is usually told in chronological order. Sometimes, there are flashbacks contained in the essay, but that doesn’t disrupt the forward motion of the narrative. One essay that may be of interest in the coming weeks as we approach the August 21 “Great American Eclipse” is Annie Dillard’s “Total Eclipse,” which is published in her collection, Teaching a Stone to Talk.

The triptych essay: Just as a triptych painting features three panels, so too does a triptych essay feature three separate sections that are not continuous with each other, but that may shed light on the other two parts. See “Triptych” by Samina Najmi, which was published in World Literature Today.

The collage essay: This type of essay features bits and pieces – vignettes – of prose that are collected together to form an essay. They often resemble poetry as the writing for a collage essay tends to be lyrical. One of my favorite collage essays is Sherman Alexie’s “Captivity,” which appeared in First Indian on the Moon.

The experimental essay: These essays seem to buck all known structures. One of the most unusual of these essays is “The Body” by Jenny Boully. The pages of the essay are blank – except for the footnotes, which are extensive. It turns out that the footnotes are the entire essay. “The Body” is characterized as a lyrical essay

The last two forms of essay that I wish to discuss are the “hermit crab” essay and the “braided” essay, and here I’d like to offer more exploration of two particular essays that are examples of them.

The hermit crab essay: In 1972, John McPhee wrote “The Search for Marvin Gardens,” and it was published in the New Yorker. He used the original game of “Monopoly” – the original American version that was based on the streets of Atlantic City, New Jersey – and he uses going around the board as the frame for the essay, making this a perfect example of a “hermit crab” essay.

In the essay, McPhee is playing a game of Monopoly but he is also recounting walking the streets of Atlantic City. The game is taking place at an international singles championship of Monopoly play, where it is possible for two skilled players to play an entire game in fewer than fifteen minutes.

McPhee intersperses the history of America in the details, but also how Atlantic City was the planned “invention” as a railroad terminus that would be a “bathing village.” In preliminary sketches, the village was labeled as an “Atlantic city,” and the name stuck. In the early 1930s, Charles B. Darrow took those early sketches of the city and based a game board on it.

So, as McPhee lands on each property or group of properties, he tells the story of each part of town. When McPhee’s piece lands him in jail, he uses it as an opportunity to visit the city jail, which in 1972 seemed to be chock-full of drug offenders. He also documents the “facade” aspect shared by resort towns. Once you travel off the beach-side main drag, you are in “the bulk of the city, and it looks like Metz in 1919, Cologne in 1944. Nothing has actually exploded. It is not bomb damage. It is deep and complex decay. Roofs are off. Bricks are scattered in the street.”

He walks these streets and sees long lines of people standing in line at the unemployment office. Newspapers in 2017 tell us that we have an “opioid crisis,” but a multiplicity of signs urging addicts to get help are present in Atlantic City in 1973 (perhaps another reminder that something doesn’t become a crisis until middle class white kids in the suburbs are dying).

McPhee walks through these neighborhoods looking for the one Monopoly property he can’t find: Marvin Gardens. No one with whom he speaks, those living in their bombed-out neighborhoods, has heard of it. It turns out that Marvin Gardens, “the ultimate out wash of Monopoly, is a citadel and sanctuary of the middle class.” It is a suburb within a suburb, what we might now refer to as a “gated community,” separated from the rest of Atlantic City and patrolled with a heavy police presence to keep the rest of the city out.

If you’ve been paying attention while reading, you realize that McPhee has used his hermit crab essay to write a critique of capitalism.

The braided essay: “The Fourth State of Matter,” by Jo Ann Beard is, I must confess, my favorite essay. It, too, was originally published in the New Yorker in 1996. Beard offers a braided essay – in which she is telling a number of stories that are all related to the time she spent on the editorial staff of a physics journal at the University of Iowa. Over the course of the essay, which begins with Beard’s poignant description of the daily routine she experiences as she cares for her aged, incontinent dog, the reader is braced in anticipation that the dog will die.

 

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Saving Summer: Why do I need this?

Relevancy: how many students passively sit in class, waiting to be entertained? Engagement is key, but as the wise man said, “I’m afraid that some times you’ll play lonely games too. Games you can’t win ‘cause /you’ll play against you.” In other words: sometimes you’re going to have to enjoy your own company and think/create your own thoughts.

Why Humanities? Why read? Why listen? Why talk?

To be an interesting human.

The other morning scrolling through social media I watched a Buzzfeed talk — and immediately recognized it as a character analysis. “Captain Obvious,” yes, that may be; however, many students watch and critique the media they love, or hate, all the time–they may not know it. The trick is to make school not so “school-y.” Still a work in progress for me.

@BuzzFeedCocoaButter posted this on Facebook. I could not find it on Youtube, so this is a screencasting. My apologies for the quality.

 

CocoaButter does a beautiful job of how this character relates to her personally (“If you could be friends with this character…?”) and how the character relates to the whole of the narrative, including her own parallel narrative in the series.

This article in Edutopia outlines precisely how to teach literary analysis:

Teaching Literary Analysis

https://www.edutopia.org/blog/reaching-literary-analysis-rusul-alrubail

What may be the bridge between this example of literary analysis (with its focus on character) is explaining to students (the teaching part) that CocoaButter didn’t just talk off the top of her head. She went through this process of discussion, gathering evidence, etc. It would be an interesting lesson to see if students can deconstruct her process. But most of all: the topic of Jodie Landon was clearly important to her, and she brought the “So What?” importance to her topic. It’s not enough to summarize and answer questions rotely–students must connect emotionally to their ideas and topics, and then have the tools and platform to share.

“Analyze”

This critical stage is often a learning curve for many students. It’s important that the teacher helps them distinguish between descriptive writing and analytical writing. Descriptive writing answers the “who,” “what,” “where,” and “how” questions. It often tends to summarize the text. Analytical writing, however, answers to the “why” question. When students consider the question, “Why is this point important?”, it pushes them beyond mere description into ideas that are convincing, argumentative, and defend a position.”–https://www.edutopia.org/blog/reaching-literary-analysis-rusul-alrubail

This infographic is going to be a big part of the writing process, too, as well as a path for literary analysis. This is an important step before I bring them to the funnel writing method.

What character has changed how you view the world or connected with you on a visceral level?

Key Ideas and Details:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.8.1
Cite the textual evidence that most strongly supports an analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences are drawn from the text.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.8.2
Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text, including its relationship to the characters, setting, and plot; provide an objective summary of the text.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.8.3
Analyze how particular lines of dialogue or incidents in a story or drama propel the action, reveal aspects of a character, or provoke a decision.
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Next Level Stuff (revised)

So, your students are fully versed in many close reading strategies, they’ve noticed, noted, whispered, and have mountains of texts and ideas. Now what? Well, the Short Answer Response and the Funnel/Hourglass analysis, that’s what! I have begged, borrowed, and outright pilfered these ideas from two great mentors, Kim McClung and Holly Stein, and provided some Google doc links, too.

The Funnel Paragraph in Literature Analysis

Funnel Paragraph Lesson Plan Template/Example

What It Says graphic organizer – student example

What It Says for The Raven

Funnel Chart graphic

Example of Funnel Paragraph with my notes/based on Steinbeck