Teaching the trial by Susan Bistrican

 In my experience as a reader and teacher, the best part of To Kill a Mockingbird is part 2: the trial. When I say “best” I mean the part of the book that people “like” more. In my opinion, whether or not students like certain books or particular parts of books is entirely relevant to the secondary English classroom. Adolescents should be exposed to many different types of texts—canonical, young adult, and otherwise—but it is also important to recognize the texts that resound more with students. I remember liking the trial scene when I was a ninth grader because it seemed to be that part of the book that had the most action. I hated reading about Scout, Jem, and Dill and their fascination with Boo Radley because I wasn’t a little kid, I was 15! Hello, I was grown (in my mind). Honestly, I didn’t care about their misadventures and I didn’t appreciate Lee’s language and character development at the time. Wow, that makes me sound like an ass. In my defense (so the literature gods don’t strike me down), I started to like literature a lot more a year later when I was a sophomore. My point is that I think teachers should recognize when students take a liking to a text or a portion of a text and enhance that experience by taking time to focus some of the unit around it. What I DON'T or expect teachers to do is fashion a unit solely around whether or not students “like” a book because I think it is important for students to experience different kinds of text. Frankly, I think there are some instances when students should endure a text they don’t like. This may be against a lot of the theory out there supporting student-selection in reading materials in order to foster a love of reading. I support student-selected reading when doing book clubs and lit circles, but there’s a time and a place for that. I don’t think an entire  year of reading should be done in book clubs; I think at least a couple of novels should be read as an entire class, including canonical texts. I think this will prepare students for situations where a curriculum is uniform and there is no opportunity for choice in reading materials (i.e., college literature classes). I know not every student will take lit classes or even go to college at all, but I think it’s good experience for a student to learn how to manage an experience where they have less choice—a situation where students use literacy strategies to get through a text they don’t necessarily “like.”

That being said, I think books like TKAM that have sections that are markedly different are an excellent example of the dynamic nature of literature. Maybe you guys don’t agree that part one is more “boring” than part two, but I can’t ignore my reading experience as a teen as well as my teens' experiences in my internship. When I taught TKAM, I was instructed to teach it as my mentor teacher does. In all the years she’s taught TKAM, she’s set up the classroom to look like a courtroom, moving desks and borrowing a podium from the assembly hall. I think the students really liked this part of the book because they got to move around, dress up if they chose, and speak assigned parts. (An example using drama, as Matthew taught us a few weeks ago!) We asked for volunteers at first and then carefully assigned parts to quieter kids, making sure that they read in order to participate, but sometimes giving them lesser roles if they didn’t like public speaking. We also showed parts of the 1962 film as they completed the scenes. We held discussions before the end of each class, focusing some of the conversation on racial injustice. Like Brianna, I am also curious to know how to teach this topic. I don’t think that we taught it that well in my classroom; the mentor teacher touched on it, but I feel like we could have done more. The school was 98% white, according to the student handbook from 2007 (and duh, just taking a look around the room). I had one black student out of 100, and many of the other students would look at him when we discussed race issues. I could totally tell he didn’t feel odd about the subject matter, just uncomfortable that all of his white peers looked in his direction for his opinion. If I teach TKAM again in the future in my OWN classroom, I will do a better job facilitating discussion surrounding the topic of race and the civil rights era.

As far as my YA book is coming along, it’s...coming along. Admittedly, I’ve been surveying other YA books at the same time, so I haven’t finished the one I selected initially. But in Crazy by Han Nolan, a 15 year-old boy, is dealing with his father’s institutionalization after he tries to kill him. Jason copes by “talking” to 4 people in his head, the reader being the 5^th. I don’t think Jason himself has some sort of schizoaffective disorder, I think it’s merely a coping mechanism. So far, one of his teachers recognizes his odd behavior: he dates his assignments during the time that his mother died, he writes “captain” as “cap’n.” His teacher goes berserk, which is odd because it’s not that big of a deal, and refers him to the school psychologist. There, Jason is included in a group therapy session where he is expected to share his feelings—something Jason isn’t accustomed to doing.