A Patchwork Life

This is my last post this week, truly, but John Updike died, and it made me reread A & P, one of those short stories that just knocks me flat.

This year with our eleventh graders, we have this bump period– usually we have seventy minute class periods on even or odd days on a ten-day schedule, and for this class, once a cycle, we have this forty-minute bump period. Sometimes we use those as work periods, sometimes we look at something like a documentary that ties in with the text we’re reading. And sometimes, we look at literature that complements our ongoing course-work, or even just that I think we can look at and discuss freely in forty minutes. I did it early this year with Hills Like White Elephants, one of my favorite short stories, and I have a cluster of great love poems I like to throw in while we read Gatsby and are talking about all the vagaries of romantic love.

Sometime this spring, I’m going to use A & P. When we do a short story, I like to circle read it, with each student taking a line or paragraph until we’ve gone through it. Then we have a loose discussion– not always focusing on literary devices or our more analytical tools, but just on what they think, what they responded to, what they noticed.

I think it is good for students to do this, in a classroom, without being focused on an assignment, without feeling the pressure of literary vivisection. You’ve got to choose the right piece– Hills worked like a dream, and the students are still bringing it up sometimes. I’d use A Perfect Day for Bananafish if our tenth graders didn’t already read it, and I’d love to use A Jury of Her Peers sometime, but I’m worried it will be a bit too long. Even if I didn’t have a bump period, I think I’d try and build in a regular session like this for the junior year curriculum– after heavy-hitters like Hamlet and Beloved, it’s nice for the students to just experience a work of literature, and maybe even feel the joy I feel when a new work hits home.

A & P doesn’t have the payoff of a big reveal like Bananafish, Peers or Hills, but I think they’ll like it. If you have any favorite short stories you think would work well, I’d love to hear the titles.