Welcome to Teaching The Outsiders. This is yet another attempt at blogging; the last couple have sort of petered out, and there were some administrative “issues” as well, and…well…anyway. This one will follow me and my seventh graders through the process of reading S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. That’s the plan anyway. I have said for years that The Outsiders is the best way to make junior high, sorry, middle school kids like to read. To make them “get it” about literature having something to say about life. To make them understand what writers and readers do. To understand that it’s characters that make the story. And on and on. It’s my favorite thing we do in my class. So mostly, I guess this is for those middle school teachers out there who want to see what it looks like in someone else’s room when they “cover” or “read” or “study” a novel. Stay tuned. Meanwhile: Check out SeventhGradeEnglish.com for stuff to tide you through until September.
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Wednesday. Vocabulary Pretest. Talk of facades and irony. Both figure large in The Outsiders. More on that later. Today I have more insight from my friendly class. We’re reading chapter 4 (the death of Bob, Dally helping with the getaway, jumping the train out of town), and we get to where Dally is telling Pony and Johnny to “hop the 3:15 freight to Windrixville.” We pause and talk about how it’s only been less than 36 hours (book time) since the beginning. They find it hard to believe until we start to do the timeline. Figure that Pony gets out of the movie in the late afternoon, and gets jumped and saved. Pony and Johnny and Dally go to the Nightly Double the next night, and it’s now 3:15am that same night. Then I make sure they know that a freight is a train. And one girl says, “How cute. Like hobos…” Hobos maybe. Cute? [Audio clip: view full post to listen] Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used to Do? When the boys run to find Dally at Buck Merrill’s house, Pony offers a brief description of Buck that ends with, “…he was out of it. He dug [...]
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