In my internship class, we have just finished reading Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. One of the interesting things about this is book is that O'Brien explicitly states that some stories have true bases but fictional tellings. He discusses, just underneath the surface, that his book is about how and why we tell stories.
My students seem to struggle with the concept that books can have true aspects intermingled with fictional details. So I have decided to make that my culminating project for the Heroes unit I taught. We have discussed the nature of heroism and how literature portrays heroes.
In this project, I have provided them with a guideline of a PowerPoint project that I'm assigning them to work on. They will choose nine stories from different chapters and discuss how those stories serve a purpose or are important to the narrator, author, or reader. Through this, I am forcing them to work look at the fictional details O'Brien uses and think at length about how those serve narrative and authorial purposes.
This is also my final observed lesson (today 11/8/2017). I'll make sure to update you all on how this lesson is received!
1 comment:
The update?!
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