When we ask students to read independently our goal is that they enjoy reading, that they begin to view it not as a painful task to be finished, but as an exploration which relates to and extends personal experience. To make this possible we select stories carefully and screen them for difficulty and subject matter.
Difficulty
In assessing the difficulty of a story we consider length, vocabulary, and sentence structure. We choose short stories because high school students who have not made friends with books usually approach the experience of reading with fear, distrust, and lack of interest. They often check the length and refuse to begin a story if it is more than five to ten pages long, particularly at the beginning of the year when many of their attitudes are shaped by past failure.
Even more important is the vocabulary and sentence structure. Stories should contain words likely to be in students’ sight and spoken vocabulary and should have fairly simple, straightforward sentence structure. If a story is filled with words and syntax which are highly unfamiliar it may be seen as a challenge for several paragraphs, but it soon becomes merely tedious. Reading for enjoyment should not be similar to translating a foreign language.
Subject Matter
Because we believe that reading skills are developed as a result of interest in what is written as well as the awareness of ability to succeed, we also give close attention to the subject matter of stories. The content of the stories we choose relates in fairly direct ways to the conscious concerns, experiences, and emotional development of our students. They are adolescents going through the transition from childhood to adulthood, and this involves changing and redefining one’s self-concept and social relationships. The themes which emerge are dependence versus independence, failure and success, and the criteria and boundaries for accepting and rejecting oneself and other people. In addition, because most of our students are poor, the issue of survival—what kind and at what cost—is an overriding one.
At the beginning o£ the year we use almost exclusively the series of readers called Directions 1, 2, 3, and 4. Most of the stories in this series are about young people — older teenagers who have lives similar to those of the students in the class. The characters are mainly from poor or working-class backgrounds and a variety of ethnic groups. Unlike many books and stories written specifically for adolescents, they do not promote the view that if you try hard you always succeed in life. Rather, they focus on survival, personal decision-making, and emotional growth. Life is seen as process.
An excellent example of the stories in this series is “The Kite and the Pillow,” a successful black man’s remembrances of his parents -the mother (the pillow) who raised him and his brothers in great hardship and who finally withered and collapsed, and the father (the kite) who visited the home only in his brief moments of success in order to give his sons an attractive role model. The narrator, upon reflection, feels that he owes his success to his father! We or our students may disagree with his conclusion, but the situation is familiar and the issues real.
Another story tells of a teenage boy who comes to live in a foster home on an Iowa farm. The scene is a hunting expedition on a fall day. The farmer desperately wishes for a hunting companion like his son, who has died. The boy, who has seen his father shot dead, resolves to leave rather than fire a rifle. The issues are communication, pride, and human need.
Each Directions book is divided loosely into sections around themes such as emotions’ growing, families, heroes, etc. In the two more advanced ones, Directions 3 and 4 there are sections on issues such as Folk Tales from Other Cultures. We have used selections from all of these, but find that the most successful are those which reflect our general approach to working with the students, stories which make literature of the real concerns and issues of their lives.
New Stories
The titles listed at the end of this section represent our attempt to go beyond the Directions series to find, within a larger body of American Literature, stories which fulfill the criteria already discussed, i.e., brevity, relative simplicity of vocabulary and syntax, and high interest.
The stories will probably not be discussed in great detail or analyzed in a literary way in the class. However, they do have some common themes which are worth mentioning. With the exception of Erskine Caldwell’s “Daughter,” all the stories have as central characters young people who are in the process of defining themselves in relationship to family, peers, the adult world, class, or race.
Family relationships are particularly important in “Day of the Bullet,” “Half a Gift,” “We are Looking at You, Agnes,” “Indian Camp,” “Jacksonville and After,” and “Daughter.” Other adult/child relationships are explored in “Thank You, Ma’am” and “The Inside Search.”
Peer relationships, and with them the awareness of class and race relationships, are central to “The Fare to Crown Point,” “Daughter,” and “Alien Turf.”
There is also one other obvious way in which these stories may be grouped. “Alien Turf,” “Half a Gift,” and the first three excerpts from Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road are autobiographical. Narrated in the first person, they involve the writer as main character and clearly affirm personal experience as a valid subject matter. Since this reflects the focus of most of our writing assignments in the class and since we often ask students to organize and assemble some of their writing into an autobiography during the last weeks of the class, we will probably use these autobiographical stories first. Some students may see them as a model or inspiration. Other students will choose not to make that connection.
One story, “We Are Looking at You, Agnes,” is unique in that it is written as a stream of consciousness. The use of this technique usually makes a story very difficult for poor readers because comprehension cannot be based on following a sequence of actions. However, this particular story is extremely simple in terms of syntax and vocabulary; it is highly repetitive and emotionally charged. We think it will offer an excellent introduction to a technique of writing which our students may begin to understand and even choose to use in their own writing if they are adventuresome.
Activities: Vocabulary Study
Although we try to choose stories that are potentially high- interest and easy to read, the stories frequently have some difficult words. The challenge may be that 1) most students do not know the meaning of a word even though they can decode it (read it with correct pronunciation) or that 2) students cannot decode the word without help, and when they do it may or may not be in their spoken vocabulary. Words which fall into either of these categories, especially if they are essential to understanding the story, are chosen to form a vocabulary list. We add to them some words which most students cannot spell, although they can read and understand them. There are always many of these, but we choose those most important to understanding the story.
For the purpose of illustration, the following words, which could form the vocabulary/spelling list for “We Are Looking at You, Agnes,” can be divided into the three categories listed above:
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Meaning
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Meaning and/or-Pronunciation
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Spelling
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parlor
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stenographer
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amount
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scald
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manicurist
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business
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frock
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canal
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salary
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alcohol
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comfortable
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Birmingham
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collar
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Nashville
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New Orleans
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There is some overlap, but the majority of the words are challenging in a limited number of ways. Only stenographer and manicurist are likely to be new to most students in the three areas of spelling, meaning, and reading decoding. Some of the vocabulary lists are much more heavily weighted with words which are new in meaning and pronunciation, but as a general rule we find that 15-20 words is the maximum which can be successfully introduced at one time and that the experience is much more productive if the list is reasonably well-balanced. If, in choosing the words for a five- or six-page story, we discover that there are many more than 25 words, we begin to suspect that the story will be difficult and require extensive preparation or that it should be discarded or saved for later.
In introducing the vocabulary words, we generally list them one at a time on the board in the order in which they appear in the story. We then take time to decode the pronunciation, using comparisons with other words which students may know. We discuss the meaning of each word, point out difficulties in its spelling, and make sentences orally. Written activities using the vocabulary always follow; several are suggested in the lesson plans at the end of the section.
Once the vocabulary of a story is familiar we then assign the story and hand out a questionnaire. The questions, usually no more than 10, cover factual content (what, who, when, where?), simple inference (why?), sequence, and finally personal reactions of the reader (What do you think happens next? What, who did you like, dislike and why? If you were in a similar situation what would you have done?).
If the story or vocabulary has been difficult for a significant number of students, we may correct any of these papers together, but more often we look at students’ work as it is being done to make sure that they know what they are doing; then we examine the papers more closely outside of class.
The lesson plans which come after the list of titles deal with two of the stories and provide more specific examples of the exercises discussed above. They are presented as a series of sheets which might be handed out in ditto form since the group activities have already been outlined in some detail.
New Stories with Annotations
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1. “Daughter,” by Erskine Caldwell. A white sharecropper, who has killed his eight-year old daughter, is freed from jail by his neighbors after they decide that he is not the criminal in the murder.
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2. “We Are Looking at You, Agnes,” by Erskine Caldwell. This is the painful, unspoken monologue of a girl sitting in the parlor of her parents’ home; she silently begs her family to ask her questions which will allow her to admit the scandal of her life in the city.
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3. “The Day of the Bullet,” by Stanley Ellin. In one fateful experience involving the mob, the police, and his father, a boy discovers that the world is run by those who are strong rather than those who are just.
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4. “Indian Camp,” by Ernest Hemingway. A boy goes with his father, a doctor, to deliver an Indian woman’s baby. He learns about how people react to pain both from his father, an outsider, and from the woman’s husband.
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5. “Thank You, Ma’am,” by Langston Hughes. A young teenage boy receives care and compassion from a woman whose purse he has tried to snatch on the street.
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Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston.
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6. Chapter III, “I Get Born” pp. 27- 32.
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7. Chapter IV, “The Inside Search” pp. 39- 45.
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8. Chapter V, “Figure and Fancy” pp. 71-78, line 5.
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The book is an autobiography. The first of these excerpts recounts the author’s birth, the second her relationship with a white man who helped deliver her, and the third her adventures in the world of her imagination.
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9. Chapter VIII, “Jacksonville and After,” pp. 97- 100.
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This excerpt tells of the relationship between the author’s father and her oldest sister and how a beating changed that relationship and both their lives.
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10. “The Fare to Crown Point,” by Walter Myers. A young black junkie finds himself momentarily fascinated and softened by the plight of a lonely white girl and her illegitimate baby.
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11. “Alien Turf,” by Piri Thomas. A Puerto Rican boy moves into an Italian neighborhood, finally decides to stand up for himself, and learns how street kids define fair play.
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12. “Half a Gift,” by Robert Zacks. A boy learns about thoughtfulness and loyalty through the experience of choosing and giving a Mother’s Day gift with his brother.
