I am concluding the unit with the very short story “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid from her collection titled At the Bottom of the River. This story is a letter in which a mother gives to a young woman a detailed list of rules to instruct her in how to act now that she is no longer a child. While this letter is, with its many details, specific to growing up in the West Indies where Kinkaid was raised, it is also universal in its advice to young women. The parent or elder woman writing the letter conveys the kind of person she wants the young woman to be.
It would be an engaging activity to ask the students, after looking at some of the specific advice, just what kind of woman the mother or elder woman wants the young woman to be. The advice ranges from the highly practical and literal, regarding the washing of clothes, to the rather abstract, how to love a man, and when to give up on loving a man.
Of course from reading the letter, the reader learns a great deal about the hierarchy of values held by the mother or elder woman writing the letter. One way to manage the density of the rules is to have the students, working in small groups, first make lists of rules and then to try to put them in categories. Once they have completed this process, categories could be listed on the black board and each group could recommend which rules go into which categories. This should make for a lively discussion, as, no doubt, there will be some differences.
Once they have read and discussed the letter that makes up “Girl,” students could write a letter, now that they are no longer children, that they think their mothers or women, (or their fathers for that matter), who have raised them would write to them with its set of rules. Students who have children of their own could actually write a letter to their young children with rules by which to grow up, or, pretending that these children are grown and are about go out into the world, write a letter to them containing important advice for life.. rules to live by. Students who don’t have children could imagine themselves as parents and write rules to an imaginary child of their own. These activities are developed into Lesson Plan III.