The integration of fiction into this unit provides students with an entirely different view of the same subject. Approaching material using a variety of strategies and materials not only provides a richer experience but also lays down more neuron pathways. This enables students to make complementary connections that improve comprehension. The last 10 minutes of every lesson will be a shared reading of
Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key
. This is a book about a boy with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and provides a heart-wrenching look at children who learn differently. In first person the main character describes how he feels when his "meds wear off" and the thinking behind his outrageous behavior. This book has allowed many adults to sympathize with struggling children and given students courage to understand their differences. Reading his story, the question posed will be: How could the information we have just learned apply to Joey?
The fictional aspect of this unit reminds us that we are human and that this bunch of wires has created some amazing experiences. The first line in
Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key
is, "At school they say I'm wired bad, or wired mad, or wired sad, or wired glad, depending on my mood and what teacher has ended up with me. But there is no doubt about it, I'm
wired
." Fiction will allow us to explore the emotional side of our relationship with our brain. Most of the students in my class have been told they have some sort of learning disability and that whatever cognitive skills they have is not enough. The addition of fiction, primarily Joey Pigza Swallowed a Key, will give us a chance to discuss what it is like to be frustrated with how this organ works.
Fiction will also allow us to take a lighthearted look at our brains and learn how other people have dealt with this complex thing between our ears.
Joey Pigza Swallowed a Key
starts off with main character describing how he came to be imitating a Tasmanian Devil, in the hallway, outside of his class. It allows the reader to experience the thought processes that motivate a child with hyperactivity. After being emotionally abused by his grandmother, Joey's mother comes back to try and pull both Joey's and her own lives together. Joey goes to many more doctors and then changes schools on an emotional roller coaster, on and off different kinds of medications. We learn how painful the question, "why" is when you have little control of your thoughts. Joey says that, "Someday all that asking me 'why?' is going to wear my brain down so that it is as smooth as a boiled egg." We learn why he swallows his house key (it is attached to a string and he wants to pull up some spaghetti from lunch), stuck his finger in the pencil sharpener (his mom said he needed to file his nails and he wanted to be a vampire) and use an entire box of Band-Aids to make a dog face on his stomach (to remind his mother he wanted a Chihuahua.) After many tests, Joey is finally put on medicine that does allow him to focus just enough to learn how to deal with his problems and learn how to live with a brain that is wired differently from others. In the end, he advises the reader to make their problems the, "smallest part of who they are."
The new common core standards call for at least 70% of the text we present to our students be nonfiction. I do agree that incorporating more science and social studies text in language arts will help the two subjects that sometimes, in our zeal to improve test scores, take a backseat to English and math. The coordination would also provide students with a continuity of foci. However, a recent
New York Times
article "Your Brain on Fiction" byAnnie Murphy Paul, spoke out against this trend. Researchers using fMRI imaging are proving the validity of teaching fiction, as well as nonfiction. Reading narratives not only activates the Boca Area, a part of the brain that interprets the written word it actives areas of the brain that are needed for single words or ideas. For example, the word "pizza" or the idea of fresh baking bread also activates the primary olfactory cortex. The same is true for words and phrases that deal with physical activity. Metaphors can also provoke the brain into using more of itself. "Slippery as an eel" evokes a response in areas of the brain that deal with tactile stimulation.
Research is also finding that the brain does not distinguish between thought and reality as one might suppose. Reading provides our brains with practice in dealing with a variety of circumstances. When we read fiction, we follow how a character deals with emotions and conflict. Reading
To Kill a Mockingbird
requires the brain to spend hours examining the ideal of justice. Students' brains will have developed more connections in the areas of the brain concerned with more abstract principles. Just as we can learn about our world from nonfiction, we can learn about how to live in the world by reading fiction. In a chapter of
Cognitive Literary Studies Current Themes and New Directions
, Keith Oatley writes:
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One of the virtues of taking up this idea from cognitive science is that we can think that, just as if we were to learn to pilot an airplane we could benefit from spending time in a flight simulator, so if we were to seek to understand better ourselves and others in the social world, we could benefit from spending time with the simulations of fiction in which we can enter many kinds of social worlds, and be affected by the characters we meet there.
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The human brain thrives on reading both fiction and nonfiction.
