Chap. 12, Additional Materials

1. Student Essays Blending Literary Analysis with Personal Connection (from teacher Courtney Cook)

• Courtney's assignment
• Bennett Capozzi
• Emily Stabnick

2. Exploring Real and Fictional Selves: Creating Characters
This activity provides a good method for combining writing with some low-stress vocabulary building. Provide students with a decent list of personality adjectives. These should be words that are fairly common but still challenging (like those in the table below). Working in pairs, students each choose an adjective that applies to their own self-image and construct a fictional character around this general trait. These characters can be realistic or fantastic, but they should come with a name, description, backstory, and dramatic role. Students are free to create the world in which their character exists, but they are also free to pull from established television, film, gaming, and other media contexts. Ideally, students would even have time to create artwork accompanying their writing before sharing with the class.

Sample Character Trait Vocabulary Words

We often build on this introduction with more sustained thinking and writing about words and their connotations. Students may incorporate an opposite quality into their fictional characters as a complexity or hidden quality:  A character that is meticulous at work might have a secret slovenly streak at home. Talking about how the qualities connoted and denoted in these words exist on a spectrum helps writers develop a sense of appropriate word selection and its importance in communicating with an audience. For instance, what differentiates a frugal person from someone who is thrifty, parsimonious, or cheap, and how is a skinflint different from a miser or a cheapskate?

2. Border-Crossers, Hybrids, and Remixers
Much of adolescent social life is about being put into a box by others, and this is often reflected in literature. As a class, create a list of teen stereotypes that students identify as existing in school and in general social life. Next, ask students to identify and write about categories into which they’ve been placed or in which they’ve placed themselves. What were the benefits of being characterized in this way?  What were the downfalls?
Then challenge student writers to re-see themselves, this time as boundary-breakers. How do they challenge stereotypes by messing with expectations? What interests do they share that cross into other territories? How do they complicate the labels that others might apply to them? How might they be hybrids of several areas? And if they are stereotyped (as a nerd, jock, band geek, or whatever) how do they play around with (or “remix”) the conventional label in order to own it and claim its power?