“A wonderful story of triumph over imperfection, shame, and loss. Large, awkward, learning-disabled Maxwell Kane, whose father is in prison for murdering his mother, and crippled, undersized Kevin are both mocked by their peers; the cruel taunting they endure is all too realistic and believable. The boys establish a friendship-and a partnership. Kevin defends them with his intelligence, while Max is his friend’s “legs,” affording him a chance to participate in the larger world. Inspired by tales of King Arthur, they become knights fighting for good and true causes….The author writes with empathy, honoring the possibilities of even peripheral characters; Kevin and Max are memorable and luminous.”

For the past three years, my eighth graders have found it engaging, entertaining and moving. Here are ten reasons why you should consider reading it to your seventh or eighth grade class:

1. The main characters are seventh graders going into eighth grade, and they’re portrayed like realistic junior high kids.
2. Both characters are social outsiders, which does two important things: a) it gives the social outsiders in your own class someone to identify with; b) more importantly, it helps the rest of the kids in the class be more accepting of the differences of others.
3. There is a strong pro-reading anti-TV message to the story that doesn’t come off preachy, corny or phony.
4. The novel shows that a person’s value does not come from what they can do or not do, but from their very being.
5. The book constantly makes reference to Arthurian legends, always a popular subject with 8th graders.
6. Both boys and girls find the story compelling, from the adventurous antics and kidnapping subplot to concern over the treatment of those with disabilities.
7. The chapters are short enough to read at the beginning of class without cutting into the period too much.
8. With only 23 chapters, the book can be read in about a month.
9. Kevin is a loveable geek, and there aren’t enough loveable geeks in fiction
10. Finally, there are at least a half a dozen ways the book can be incorporated into literature, reading or religion class; a few examples:
    • As an exploration of what writing fiction is – Kevin often talks about the power of remembering, and the control a person has over what he or she remembers
    • As an example of how writing can be therapeutic – Max writes the story to get over the traumatic events of that year
    • As a discussion-starter for how to treat people with differences – Both Max and Kevin struggle with being different, and the book offers hope to those who feel left out

In a gesture of great generosity, Rodman Philbrick has made available at no charge a version of Freak the Mighty as a one- or two-act play. To get a copy of the play as a pdf, visit Mr. Philbrick’s website and follow the directions you find there. While you’re at the site, be sure to look at the teacher’s guide.

I also highly recommend the movie adaption, The Mighty, starring Sharon Stone, Kieran Culkin, Gillian Anderson, and James Gandolfini. Even the soundtrack is incredible, with the title song performed by Sting. Be sure to preview the movie before showing it due to some swear words and few “birdies” flying, if you know what I mean.

[Cross posted at Catholic School Chronicle]

As the Save the Words website expresses it:

Each year hundreds of words are dropped from the English language.

Old words, wise words, hard-working words. Words that once led meaningful lives but now lie unused, unloved and unwanted.

Today 90% of everything we write is communicated by only 7,000 words.

You can change all that. Help save the words!

When you adopt a word, you make a solemn vow: “I hereby promise to use this word, in conversation and correspondence, as frequently as possible to very best of my ability.”

This would be a clever and fun way to get students playing with words. After they adopt a word students could use it in a poem, in their daily work, or in class discussions.

How would you use this site in your classroom?

If you’re looking for interesting and relevant Shakespeare resources, be sure to check out Schmoop, a site “lovingly created by Ph.D. and Masters students from top universities.” I’ve just started looking into the site myself, and it looks like a must-have resource for literature and history teachers.

If you use Schmoop, leave a comment sharing your opinion.

For a fun way to engage students in writing and help them with the trait of word choice, challenge them to write their own lipgrams.  When they’re done they can exchange the lipograms and try to guess the missing letter.

Another interesting exercise in word choice might be to imitate Mary Godolphin’s one-syllable adaptations.  Godolphin (Lucy Aikin) wrote one-syllable versions of Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe.  Students could adapt short stories or they could make up their own.

Each week National Public Radio airs 3-minute personal essays written by ordinary people and occasionally by more famous personalities. The essays express the authors’ deeply held beliefs, and their reasons for believing. As the website states, “This I Believe is an international project engaging people in writing, sharing, and discussing the core values that guide their daily lives.”

Recent essays have included the following statements of belief:

• “I believe that each and every human being on this planet is tied to every other human being on this planet in one way or another.”
• “I believe that we as individuals, nations, and as groups of any size in between are ultimately capable of compassion and care for those with whom we do not identify.”
• “I believe in giving blood.”
• “I believe that the best kind of grief for the dead is gratitude.”

This I Believe, Inc. encourages everyone to contribute to the project, and provides teachers with a curriculum for helping students write their own 300-500 word essays. The essays can be submitted directly to the This I Believe website, and essays that are selected to be recorded for radio earn the author $200.

My own students are currently in the middle of writing their own essays. We began the unit last week by looking at the difference between personal narratives and personal essays. I played a few This I Believe recordings and contrasted them with a personal narrative included in the curriculum unit.

The students were then given various belief statements to agree or disagree with, and they had to tell a personal story about why they held that belief. This week students will write their essays, and next week we will submit them to This I Believe and record them for our Called 2 B Saints podcast.

The students are discovering that it’s pretty easy to name a belief, but what’s not so easy is explaining why they have a particular belief. One of the challenges of teaching a unit like this is to keep it from evolving into a persuasive paper where every student tries to convince the class that their belief is right and everyone else is wrong. That’s not really the purpose of the project.

The goal project “is not to persuade Americans to agree on the same beliefs. Rather, they hope to encourage people to begin the much more difficult task of developing respect for beliefs different from their own.”

At the other end of the spectrum, it’s a challenge to help teenagers retain their own values and beliefs in the face of so many differing statements.  Too often, teenagers think they have to abandon their personal beliefs in order to get along with others.  Or, out of a well-intentioned desire to be accepting and tolerant, teens will often say that everyone is right, regardless of the fact that beliefs contradict each other.

The This I Believe unit can help students clarify their own beliefs while at the same time learn to respect the beliefs of others.  If you choose to teach a unit like this, it’s a good idea to be ready to talk about how to “agree to disagree,” something that more adults could learn to do.

But the teacher’s main job in a curriculum like this is mostly to get out of the way so students can write.

I’ll let you know when the students have finished writing their essays so you can read them and listen to them on Called2BSaints.com.

Example: Soundless Nocturnal Timespan (answer: Silent Night)

1. Move Hitherward the Entire Assembly of Those Who Are Loyal in Their Belief
2. Ornament the Enclosure with Large Sprigs of a Berry-Bearing Evergreen
3. Vertically-Challenged Adolescent Percussionist
4. First Person (Singular) Experiencing an Hallucinatory Phenomenon of a Natal Celebration Devoid of Color
5. Majestic Triplet (First Person Plural)
6. The Yuletide Occurrence Preceding All Others
7. Precious Metal Musical Devices
8. Omnipotent Supreme Being Elicits Respite to Ecstatic Distinguished Males
9. Caribou Afflicted with Vermillion Olfactory Appendage
10. Allow Crystalline Formation to Descend
11. Jovial Yuletide Desired for the Second Person (Singular or Plural)
12. Commence Auditory Reception, the Celestial Messengers Produce Harmonious Sounds
13. Village Expectations of a Yuletide Emmisary
14. Bipedal Travel through a Geographic State of Fantasy During the Season of Mother Nature’s Dormancy
15. Arrival Occurred at Twelve O’clock During Clement Nocturnal Period
16. Exclamatory Remark Concerning a Diminutive Municipality of Judea
17. Ecstatic Experience Directed Toward Global Inhabitants
18. First Person (Plural) Acoustic Awareness of Extra-Terrestrial Messengers at Great Altitude
19. Obese Male Personification Consisting of Aggregate Compaction of Individual Water Crystals, with Appellation of Surface Crystalline Deposition of Water Vapor
20. Tintinnabulation of Vacillating Pendulums in Metallic Resonant Spheres
21. Improvised Infant Furniture in Remote Location
22. Imperative Expedition for the Purpose of Proclaiming Upon a Specific Alpine Formation
23. Wintertime Festivity Consisting of a Dozen Planetary Sidereal Rotations
24. My Sole Desire for the Yuletide Season Is Receipt of a Pair of Central Incisors
25. Are You Detecting the Same Aural Sensations as I Am?
26. Who’s the Mystery Offspring?
27. Testimony of Witness to Maternal Parent’s Infidelity with Kris Kringle

Answers:

Some of my students read this blog, and I haven’t given this to them yet this year, so I will post the answers early next week. If you can’t wait that long, use the contact form on the About page and I’ll send them to you via email.  [Update 12/18/2007: Click this page for the answers.]

Share!

If you use this is in class, consider sharing one of your Christmas activities with Teen Literacy Tips readers by posting to your blog and leaving a link below in the comments section.

In her article “How to Write a Thank-You Note,” Leslie Harpold outlines six elements of an effective thank-you note:

1. Greeting the giver
2. Expressing your gratitude
3. Discussing your use of the gift
4. Mentioning the past, alluding to the future
5. Thanking the giver again
6. Closing the note

Read Harpold’s full article for an explanation of each element and for some concrete examples of the thank-you note in action. You could even print the article for your class.  Then, buy some inexpensive thank-you notes or have students make their own, and take some class time for students to use Harpold’s outline to write notes to give out at Thanksgiving dinner.

It’s a very simple template, but if you can get your students to use it, then you will have made the world a better place.

The Three Parts of a Simile (or Metaphor)

Every simile has three parts: a tenor, vehicle and grounds. Let’s use the following simile as our example: Sheila moved like a panther.

• The tenor of the simile is what the writer is trying to clarify or make more understandable. In our example, the tenor is Sheila.
• The vehicle is the concrete object that is being compared to the tenor. Sheila is like a panther.
• The grounds of a simile refers to the qualities of the vehicle that the reader is meant to apply to the tenor. For example, the writer is most likely trying to say that Sheila moved with power and stealth, not that she has whiskers and four feet (although she may be prowling on all fours–we would have to see more context).

Two More Examples

James was like a bull in a china shop.

• Tenor: James
• Vehicle: a bull in a china shop
• Grounds: big and clumsy

The students on the playground were like a herd of cattle.

• Tenor: the students on the playground
• Vehicle: a herd of cattle
• Grounds: in groups that move together; herded by a teacher

Similes and Metaphors in the Classroom

It’s crucial that students understand how similes and metaphors work from the perspective of both reading and writing. Writing similes (while avoiding cliches) requires high level thinking, and giving students practice creating them will improve their overall communication skills.

Mike Miller’s Simile Generator produces a relationship between a random abstract noun and a random concrete noun and challenges the reader to create a connection between them. Here are some similes it produced for me:

• Integrity is like a dagger.
• Bitterness is like a flea.
• Loyalty is like a candle.
• Optimism is like a towel.

The students must supply the grounds. How is bitterness like a flea? This is a terrific question, because first students must have a solid understanding of “bitterness,” and then they need to use their imaginations to connect it to a flea. They might come up with something like this: “Bitterness is like a flea; it’s a constant irritation and it distracts you from what’s really important.”

Other students may make other connections, which gives you an opportunity to talk about interpreting literature or the importance of personal experience in making meaning from a text. My experience of fleas may be different from yours, so the way I connect them to bitterness may be different from the way you connect them.

You can use the generator in your classroom in several ways. You can generate 5-10 similes yourself and then type them up for students to work with, or you can instruct students to visit the site themselves and to generate a few to solve on their own.

Try this in your classroom. It’s like eating a box of chocolates–you never know what you’re going to get.

I came across a website the other day called Gramlee, which charges money to proofread documents.  They’ll proofread anything, for about 5 cents a word.  You can send them an email, a research paper, whatever, and their proofreaders will correct it and get it back to you.  Gottabewrite is another similar service.

You can use these websites to talk to your students about independence and money.  If students learn how to write well, they should have no need to pay anyone to proofread their writing.  In fact, if they learn to write well enough, they can get people to pay them to proofread.  Writing well puts them in the driver’s seat, rather than being stuck in the back getting car sick.

Paying people to proofread your papers is like paying someone cook your food: it’s a luxury most people can’t afford.  And even if you can afford it, you still have to depend on someone else.  What if the cook gets sick?  What if he or she poisons the pot roast?

No, thank you, I’d rather do it myself.

• They’ve already indicated to me their area of interest: blogging, audio production or video production.  Fortunately, there are an equal number of students interested in each area.
• Right now they’re in the process of developing the mission statement of the site in order to have a clear focus when it comes time to create content.  They’ve looked at various mission statements from around the web, including the mission statement from SQPN, the model for our project.
• After they’ve developed the mission statement, the class will brainstorm domain names and we’ll go through the process of seeing what’s available.  We’ve already done some preliminary work on this, so it shouldn’t take too long.
• Once the domain name has been chosen, students will get into their groups to develop an editorial calendar.  The blogging group will decide on recurring content for each day of the week, and the other two groups will develop a production schedule for their weekly podcasts.
• As they begin working on content, they’ll also have input on the appearance of the site and we’ll begin to make some decisions about what it should look like.  We’ll use freely available blog themes to begin with, as we don’t have money to pay a designer, and none of us are experienced enough with template design to make our own.
• Our target goal for publishing our first content is October 12, but our public launch will be November 1, All Saints Day, since our school is All Saints Catholic School.  We hope to have several weeks’ worth of content before that time.
• In the days leading up to November 1, students will learn how to market their site to the Internet community, as well as to their own school community.

This is the first time I’ve ever done anything like this, and I’m a bit nervous about how it will go, but I’ve got great faith in the students.  My job will be to function as the editor-in-chief– approving stories, suggesting rewrites and edits, helping them learn the audio and video software, and so on.

You can be sure that the readers of Teen Literacy Tips will be a part of our public launch, so keep checking back for stories of our progress.  Better yet, why not subscribe to Teen Literacy Tips.  You can get every article via email, or you can have the content delivered to your blog reader.

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