Doug Lemov's field notes

Rue Ratray, an English teacher at Boston’s high-performing  Brooke Charter Schools, sent me a note this morning to ask about embedding non-fiction. He’s reading The Giver with his 6th graders, and anyone reading The Giver pretty much gets my immediate attention. (It’s my favorite work of youth fiction, as I discussed here.)

Rue was wondering about the effectiveness of using shorter embedded texts. He noted that his twice weekly embedded text lessons often feel too long. As it happens, I think there’s a real opportunity to use shorter embedded non-fiction and to focus more intensively on the texts themselves (reading them close-reading style) and on the application to the fiction.

I ended up putting together two examples that I thought I’d share.

First, I suggested using parts of this interview with Lois Lowry (the author): (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/04/lois-lowry-the-giver-son_n_1940969.html. Specifically I might have them read several paragraphs bit and ask them a series of close reading questions to make sure students could follow her arguments (interviews are less syntactically organized then formal texts so it’s often challenging to follow for a young reader). Then I’d highlight this section:

LL: I don’t set out with an agenda when I write a book. I create a character and want to tell a good story. With “The Giver,” at the time [of writing] my father was very old and losing his memory, and I was interested in memory and how it works. And I thought, what if we could control human memory? Though I hadn’t ever written science fiction before, I did set it in this hypothesized future time. And that was kind of fun, creating a whole different sort of world.

I’d then want my students to be able to answer these questions.

1)      Lowry describes the setting as a “hypothesized future time.” What do you think she means by this?

2)      How do you know it takes place in the future, especially if the primary means of transportation is the bicycle?  What does it tell you about the future if the primary means of transportation is the bicycle?

3)      What evidence do you see so far that Lowry is “interested in memory,” specifically in the way people do or could control memory?

I’d want them to write their answers to at least one of these and I’d probably want them to try to do one answer in a single well-wrought sentence that the revise over and over.

I also like parts of this article about the appeal of Dystopian fiction:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-astor/why-do-we-like-dystopian-novels_b_1979301.html

Again i think it’s be very important to start with text-dependent questions. In this case I’d want them to paraphrase this the section that contains this paragraph.  It’s very allusive and has some high discourse (“the great Atwood”).  Great practice unpacking all of the syntax here.

Sometimes, authors of dystopian literature temporarily ease the tension a bit with humor, as the great Atwood does with some of the clever genetic-engineering terms she coined for Oryx and Crake. And dystopian books can have seemingly utopian elements — with things not appearing too bad even though they are bad; Brave New World is a perfect example. There are even novels, such as The Shape of Things to Come, that mix dystopian and actual utopian elements.

We admire the best dystopian novels because they’re written well and depict people we can relate to. We’re fascinated by the terrible things these characters face, and by how some react bravely and some react cowardly or with resignation. We, as readers, rubberneck to see the misery; we can’t avert our eyes even as we’re enraged by what despots and other vicious officials are doing to citizens. And we’re compelled to turn the pages as we wonder if rebels and other members of the populace can somehow remake a wretched society into something more positive. We also wonder who will survive and who won’t.

Then I’d want to ask:

What “Utopian elements” do you see in The Giver? What makes things appear “not too bad”?

How does The Giver stack up to the author’s description of Dystopia (in italics above).  Are there “vicious officials” who are “doing things” to citizens? How do they succeed? And do the citizens have any role in allowing those things to be “done to them”?

 

In short, my gut is to agree with Rue: better to do more with less, in a very language-focused way, and ideally to combine embedded non-fiction with close reading.

 

Close Reading, Embedded Non-fiction; close reaing; the Giver, reading