miscue stuff

elisha, you're stealing me idea for the graphic novels!!! idea stealer...but alas, it proved to be a very interesting experience...last week i did all four sessions with my little kiddo down at northridge, and let me tell you, she's a sharp cookie...i did find, though, that when recalling the events of the story, she was describing, essentially, the illustrations: as if to suggest that the pictures, believe it or not, actually HELPED her understanding of the story itself! obviously there was more to the entire process, but i found her vivid recalling of the pictures as well as the prose to be an interesting by product...as far as YA goes; i have yet to read the novel for next week, but have loved the past alexie novels i've read and definitely think they have a place in the classroom. aside from their sheer pedagogical merit of being about a foreign (to most) culture, i think he's an adult writer who speaks to children as opposed to a hacky children't writer who tries to make novels sound grown-up...if that makes sense...i think it's interesting that most people say the book necessarily is "relatable" to teenagers because the characters themselves are teenagers...for those of you (leo?) who know about the work i did in grad school, you know that i have issues with the homogenizing of the teenage world: in other words, just because two people are 14 doesn't make automatically make them any more similar than someone who is 14 and someone who is 40...it makes sense to think so, but we have to be careful not to lump everyone into the same circumstance...one of my former students said it best one time....he was a black student from the inner cities of chicago. in our unit on diversity (or lack thereof) at purdue, he says to the class, "shit, i'm more like the white boy over there from new york than i am to the brother over there from evansville!" his point was well taken. as with age, we tend to be somewhat racist in our depiction of diversity. we ignore the implication that ALL BLACK people must have shared experiences merely because their black...with age, though, our ignorance is much more subdued...i think as teachers, all of us, for one reason or another, need to believe that ALL TEENAGERS share experiences merely because they're the same age...after all, how would we teach in a world where everyone is as diverse as some schools makes it appear?