Masaryk university Faculty of Education Department of English Language and Literature
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- Facing It
- Před zdí
- Tu Do Street
- 5 questionnaire
- 6 Conclusion
4.6.4 Suggestions To facilitate student’s comprehesion, imagination and understanding, I suggest speaking with class briefly about the Vietnam conflict and let the students watch a very short part of a film on Vietnam War (e.g. Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal jacket). The historical background could be taught by students themselves as they would be encouraged to search for the information to present it coherently to the class in a form of presentation. Details are listed in the following section. Preparation Students form groups of four. Each group will make research on one of the following topics. After having done the research, groups prepare a presentation of the findings and deliver it the class. One week time for research is suggested, one or two weeks for preparing the presentation, which means that presentations should not be performed earlier than three weeks after the announcement of topics. Teacher will propose available sources. Time limit for presentations can be 10-20 minutes per each group, students can use materials for demonstration, but they are strongly advised not to simply read text.
Sources available for research:
Reading
Students read poems two or three times, they have both the English and the Czech text. Difficult words are explained by teacher if necessary. Students then listen to reading aloud. A record of the author’s reading, which is available on-line, is highly reccomended to use parallelly with the reading, for the rhytm and changes of pace are marked and very interesting. Follow up
Facing It1
Homework
Write a poem about "reflection" in which you "face" something difficult to face. Tu Do Street
Extension In the beginning, as teacher announces the new topic, research, etc., students are also informed about a final output of the topic – their own group project – a portfolio on the Vietnam War. They can focus on any aspect they wish (history, movies, poetry, anti-war movements, veterans, link to the present world conflicts, etc.), unless it is justificated and fit into the covering label of Vietnam War. The form can be discussed with students, project may include literary as well as art works by respected writers and artists, or by students themselves, or both. Introduction and conclusion should be, however, done in words. The projects should be then displayed in school so that everyone could enjoy the students’ effort and results. More pragmatically, the fact that there is a task to do after his or her group presentation should force the student to pay attention and make remarks during other group presentations, for he or she may need the information afterwards. The project should also encourage students to ask questions if they do not understand or need reexplanation.
Walter Mosley was born in a section of Los Angeles called South Central, where he later attended public schools. Mosley’s family background was linked to school, for his mother was a Jewish schoolteacher and his father worked as a school custodian. Mosley owes his narrative and litterary succes to his father, who as a gifted storyteller attracted young Mosley to both the language and the tales from his growing up in south Texas and Louisiana. The personality of Walter Mosley’s father can be traced in the main character of most of Mosley’s stories – Easy Rawlins.1 4.7.2 Work The character of Easy (Ezekiel) Rawlins is obviously the central link in Mosley’s An Easy Rawlins Mystery series. Most of his stories are situated in afterwar Los Angeles. Easy is a black man who can have any occupation but he always starts acting like a detective. He is uncompromising, extremely intelligent and good-hearted. Simply, the character of Easy is seen as a continuing in the tradition of a “hard-boiled” detective, the term that was firstly introduced by Raymond Chandler through the character of his detective Phil Marlowe. Another predecessor of Mosley work can be an African American author Chester B. Himes with his characters of Coffin Ed and Gravedigge Jones. Some of Mosley’s published titles: Gone Fishin’ (written in 1980s but published after succes of following titles in 1996 ), Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), A Red Death (1991), White Butterfly (1992), Black Betty (1994), and A Little Yellow Dog (1996). All of the books were highly succesful. In 1995, Mosley also published R. L.’s Dreams, his first book that do not feature Easy and stands out of the Mystery line.
Objectives
A Little Yellow Dog (1996), as it is obvious from the list of Mosley’s works, belongs to the series of Easy Rawlins. In the present book, Easy is a head custodian in one of the Los Angeles schools for black students in 1960s. He helps one of teachers who is in troubles by looking after her little dog. However, this goodwill draws Easy in big problems. To get out of the mess and police suspiction, he tries to solve on his own the mystery of a murdered man in the school yard. Easy has gained a new life by being appointed to his present position but the investigation leads him back to streets and makes him use former skills and meet his old friends and enemies. As Easy traces back what has happened to the murdered man, he faces predjudice and suspicions because of his colour of skin, nevertheless he always knows what to do and deals with the situation with a great skill. The exctract is a compiled set of short parts from the first chapters of the book. I wanted to catch the beginning of the story along with a few situatitons that reveal more the Easy’s character, the background and which are at some point funny. This may appeal students.
4.7.4 Suggestions Preteaching Let students figure out what the terms Junior and Senior High School mean and give them short inlook into the U.S. educational system. Explain K-12 system and let them compare it to the system they know from the Czech Republic.
Tell students to imagine the following situation: It is early morning and there is a dead cat found in front of the school door. It was a cat that belonged to one of the unpopular teachers... What do you think will follow? Work in groups of 3-4, you have three minutes. This short activity should get students prepared for the detective genre. If students seem to be puzzled, give them a few supportive questions, for example, will the teacher start lesson as usual? Will he/she accuse somebody? Who did it? Was the cat poisoned or shot? Etc. Groups then present their ideas to the class.
Questions on the text – answer and be as specific as possible
Further questions
A short language exercise is designed in order to facilitate students’ comprehension of the text with which they are going to work. Match pairs that go together and then translate the word to Czech.
Writing
Choose one of the short extracts, use it as the beginning or the end of a story you will make up. Work in groups of two or three and write it down. Approximate lenght is 100 to 150 words. Work can be done at school, or started there and finished at home. Teacher can consider collecting stories and evaluating them. The evaluation should focus on coherency and continuity of the story rather than on grammatical features. Originality values, too. Optional writing or drawing. Write a paragraph or more, or draw a picture that will express Easy’s personality and character. Reinvest your asnwers on the questions. Role play Ask the class to brainstorm everything that they would change in their classroom, corridors and school. Each pair of students then choses from the list two items that appeal to them the most. Consequently, students toss a coin and one each pair then becomes the director of the school and the other becomes the self-confident student who wants to iniciate one of the chosen changes. Both the two in each pair have one or two minutes to prepare their arguments, then five minutes for the preparation of their role play. Students then perform their role play to class. Note: Funny ideas and fierce argumentation on both sides are reccomended. Other students may wish to support “the self-confident student” actively.
Gloria Naylor was born in New York City. From her early childhood she has borne a respect for education and written word. It was passed on her by her mother, a dedicated reader, who decided to remove the family from Mississippi, where black were not allowed to enter libraries. After graduating from high school, Naylor joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses and became a missionary. From 1968 to 1975 she served in New York, North Carolina, and Florida. When Naylor disbanded with the Witnesses, she enrolled in Brooklyn College where she gainded her B. A. in English and continued her studies at Yale, where she gained a master’s degree. 4.8.2 Work Naylor’s first novel The Women of Brewster Place (1982) became immensely succesful, it won American Book Award in 1983. Three other Naylor’s titles then followed: Linden Hills (1985), Mama Day (1988), Bailey’s Cafe (1992), and The Men of Brewster Place (1998). All these novels draw on Western sources as well as they reflect the author’s African American female experience.1 4.8.3 Reading Objectives
From The Women of Brewster Place, “The Two”
The novel could be seen as one in the line of books that tend to portrait black men in negative light. After appereance of the character of Cholly in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye or Mr. Freeman in Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; Naylor comes with a novel that portrays lives of black women in a city in the Northern part of the United States. The women all have in common one thing – searching for a home, for they came to Brewster from many different corners of the counry. In “The Two”, Naylor tells a narrative of two nice lesbians, Lorraine and Tee, who unwillingly move to Brewster having lost better housing nearer to the city. The story though features a band of about five youngsters. These young boys wait one evening when a fragile girl returns home and rape her one after another, just because she is lesbian. When she wakes up after a few hours from agony, Lorraine goes up the street lunatic and perplexed; she kills old Ben, a friend of her with a large brick. Naylor seems to stress the importance of relationship within a community. As “the two” move in, skinny and light-skinned Lorraine would like to fit in with other women but she is rejected and feels sorry. Self confident Theresa, on the other hand, does not care about other people or neighbourghs. However, both of them have to bear the predjudice and condemnation because of their sexuality from people they daily meet or live next door. These are also the reasons why Lorraine and Tee have had to move more times already.
a)
b)
4.8.4 Suggestions Follow up for a) A rumour:
Other questions
Follow up for b) Possible questions and tasks
Playing the dozens1
Thinking
Have you ever been addressed in a street like Lorraine? How did you react? What do you do if a stranger wants to start talking to you and he/she is not nice? Do you scream, flee, call for help, ignore the stranger, start conversation, ...? What is the best way to act in such a situation? 4.9 Rita Dove (b. 1952) 4.9.1 Biography Dove was born in Akron, Ohio, in a family where education was greatly valued. Dove displayed interest in literature by writing plays and stories at an early age. Supported by her high school teacher, Dove then became interested in professional writing. She did well in her studies, in 1970 she was among the top one hundred U.S. high school seniors. Dove enrolled at Miami University in Oxford and graduated in 1973. The same year she received a Fulbright scholarship to study at Tubingen University in West Germany. She travelled in Europe, northern Africa, and Israel; the influence of different cultures is reflected in her works. Dove taught creative writing at Arizona State University and from 1989 she has been teaching at the University of Virginia. She was awarded Pulitzer Prize in 1987, was elected first black and the youngest Poet Laureate of the United States (1993-1995), served as a Consultant to the Library of Congress, has received a Guggenheim, a Lavan Younger Poets award, and a Walt Whitman award. Dove is married and with her husband, a German-born writer, and their daughter they live in Charlottesville, Virginia. 4.9.2 Work Dove’s first poems were published in major periodicals only a year after her graduation from Miami University. Her first volumes were Ten Poems (1977) and The Only Dark Spot in the Sky (1980) were published as chapbooks and were later reprinted in The Yellow House on the Corner (1980). Although judged to be too personal, The Yellow house is appreciated for discipline in the form and for the way author combines historical images with private ones. Dove’s experience from travelling abroad is reflected in her second major volume, Museum (1983) where she performes interest in other cultures. The next poetry volume, Thomas and Beulah (1986) is vaguely based on her grandparent’s lives. Dove divided this collection in two parts, one contains events from her grandfather Thomas’s perspective, the other section deals with the same events but from her grandmother Beulah’s perspective. Interesting is that the author mentiones historical events together with the private stories in the chronological order to provide the reader a time path. Dove is celebrated for the economy of her style which she exhibited in Thomas and Beulah as well in The Other Side of the House (1988) and in Grace Notes (1989). Dove also published a book of short stories Fifth Sunday (1985) and a novel, Through the Ivory Gate (1992). Her following collection of poems, Mother Love (1995), is focused on mother-daughter relationship performed by characters of Greek Myths, Demeter and Persephone. Next title, On the Bus with Rosa, was published in 1999. Dove’s most recent book of poetry, American Smooth, was published in 2004. 4.9.3 Reading Objectives
I selected three poems by Rita Dove. The first one, “Demeter’s Prayer to Hades” refers to Greek Mythology. Students may not guess that the author is an African American and can be surprised. The link to Greek Creation Myths should also refresh students’ knowledge from Czech lessons where Greek myths are usually discussed during the first year of secondary school. However, students may also need some information about the writer’s private life to decode the message. Dove has a daughter and by the time Dove was writing Mother Love, her daughter left home and stayed on her own will abroad in uncomfortable conditions; Dove expresses feeling of losing her daughter in most of the poems in Mother Love. The second and the third poem, “Exit” and “Wiring home” are, I believe, not difficult to understand and appealing to students; they refer to feelings adolescents could have experienced, leaving and coming home after a longer period of time. The poems succeed in natural order, one has to leave sadly to come back happy and satisfied.
4.9.4 Suggestions Prereading “Demeter’s Prayer to Hades” Students are told a week before reading this poem, to look in their old copybooks or brows <www.pantheon.org> to remember Greek Creation Myths. As there is a large number of Greek Gods, teacher may suggest focusing on Demeter and her daughter. Then, one lesson before starting poems by Rita Dove, students share what they found out. I recommend a chain story to narrate Demeter’s and Persephone’s lives; first student says one sentence and the second says also one sentence which must fit as continuing of the first one, etc., till the whole story is told. After this lesson, a copy of the poem is handed to each student so that they can find words they do not know. Follow up “Demeter’s Prayer to Hades” What are your reactions to the poem? Who is the speaker? Who does he or she address? What feelings/emotions can you see in the poem? Where?
The selected Dove’s poems deal with home and parental love. I suggest playing a calm song about home, or plain comfortable music. Students are kindly told to think about their home, parents, and brothers or sisters. After listening, students can discuss a few questions to get prepared for this topics. Students work in small groups of 2-3. The last task is to write a short poem on the topic; students reinvest the previous discussion. Volunteers are encouraged to read their poem aloud to class. Possible questions:
Follow up “Exit” and “Wiring home”
Note
The theme of home and parental love is sensitive for a student who has lost one or both of his or her parents or who was raised in children’s home. Teacher must be aware of this situation and consider fixing questions or take thought whether to bring the present topic to the class at all. 3. 10 Introduction to poetry The overwhelming majority of students usually dislike poems. In spite of that, or because of that I chose to include four poets in the present work. However, a special activity may be useful for a good start. The activity can start by conversation based on question ‘What is poetry?’ and on task to invent the definition. While students work, teacher may hand out three different examples of poems to deepen student’s thoughts. Examples should be of a great variety; a prose poem, a sonnet, lyrics to a song, an example of a free verse, and a traditional narrative poem so that students could discuss their similarities and differences. Students then formulate their definition which can be put down on a blackboard together with definition of poets themselves. Class may then vote for the best definition.
The questionnaire was made up in reason to confirm or disprove my presumption of students’ will to work with literature written in English during their English language lessons; students’ awareness of events in history of the United States; and students’ attitude towards reading as such. For reasons of avoiding student’s misunderstanding and usually shy expression in English, I choosed to distribute the questionnaire in students’ mother tongue – Czech. Instructions were clearly given at the beginning. Students had enough time to think over and answer the questions. It took them about fifteen minutes in average to answer the questionnaire.
5.2 Commentary Re 1-3
First three questions were for warming up. It is possible to say (ith one or two exceptions from the total number) that students like reading, however, they tend to read only daily press or magazines. Many students complained of the lack of time for reading a book. It was interesting to note that the lack of time bothers more third year students than those at the fourth year heading to their school leaving examination. In the third question answers varied, nevertheless detective stories, short stories, and science fiction prevailed; a book of poetry was mentioned altogether once. Re 4 & 5
The fourth question implied consciousness of the formative effect of literature. Answers varied on the whole scale. Four students answered that a book could never change their mind. One third of the students was assured about the power of the book, the other third thought that book could change their mind, under the condition that it is a special/professional book; the rest suggested “maybe”. The answers in the fifth question varied. One fifth of students, approximetely, had no favourite writer, the others named at least one. The diversity of writer’s names and nationalities was great. Re 6
Both the third and fourth year students coped well with the sixth question. Names probably reflected authors mentioned in lesson, as Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, and Mark Twain figured on almost every sheet of paper. A few students named also Walt Whitman, and Stephen King. Mostly fourth year students were also able to name some others – authors like Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Saroyan, and Tenessee Williams were mentioned, too. Re 7
The seventh question drew mainly to the present knowledge of famous people from media. However, all students listed Martin Luther King and nearly all at first place; Louis Armstrong was also mentioned frequently, as well as Whitney Houston and Will Smith. Other names like Jay-Z, Eddie Murphy, James Brown, or Michael Jackson appeared too. Re 8
There was a big difference in the answers to the eight question. While the third year students mostly wrote in appologetic tone “to jsme ještě nebrali”, most of the fourth year students was able to indicate approximate years or decade and knew that the U. S. A. were involved. A few students answered in detail, probably because of their own interest in military history. Re 9
Answering the nineth question, the overwhelming majority identified “Negro” as a pejorative and insulting term. Some students then argued that African American is a black man born or just living in America. Three students rightly identified black as neutral term, three others considered it pejorative. Two students assumed the difference in terms is hidden in the shade of the black skin not specifying it further. Two students did not see any difference between the terms at all. Re 10
Students managed to point at basic facts in history – slavery, oppression, discrimination. They also seem to be aware of present situation: all of them wrote that things had changed; that there was no slavery in today’s America, but on the other hand, racism and discrimination were still likely to be present in the contemporary American society. One student compared the position of black people in the United States to the position of Roma people in Czech Republic, stating that the equality of races is proclaimed only officially. One student believed there was no great difference in the position of black people in 17th and 18th centrury and today, one student did not respond at all. The most striking were answers of two students from the fourth year who presumed there was no difference in the position of blacks at all. Re 11 & 12 Results from the eleventh and the twelfth points were proportionally same in both of the groups (3rd and 4th year students). In general, a half of the students would appreciate learning more about mentioned items, as well as using literature as a means. One quarter of students would like to learn more on the subjects but they would not involve literature in the process. Their main argument was that the literature taught in lessons of Czech covers these topics sufficiently. The rest of the students, 25% approximately was not interested in the proposed topics or literature at all. Re 13
I decided to include one open point to let students express their curiosity by asking questions or making remarks. Nevertheless, this possibility was exploited by five students only. The reason for the low reponse could have been in the written form of questionnaire; students could assume there would not be any time left to their questions so they did not write anything. 6 ConclusionThe present work pursued contemporary African American literature and dealt with its use in secondary school English teaching. I selected the following writers of the second half of the 20the century: Martin Luther King, Jr., Amiri Baraka, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, Yusef Komunyakaa, Walter Mosley, Gloria Naylor, Rita Dove, and Langston Hughes who is the only exception that does not precisely fit the time limit. Hughes was the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance movement in the 1920s.The aim of the present work was to present selected texts by African Americans of the second half of the 20th century together with suggestions how to use them in English lessons of third or fourth years at Czech grammar schools. The emphasis was put on education towards tolerance and multiculturalism. As the work itself and the following conclusion point out, the assigned aims were succesfully achieved. The first task before starting writing was to choose writers. I worked with The Norton Anthology of African American Literature that gave me general and historical overview, as well as detailed information on writers. There was about twenty authors in the first choice, whose life and work I studied in detail. It was not possible to include all of them so the number was cut to seven but then rose to the final nine.In the meantime, I browsed and studied secondary literature which helped me later to go into the depth of the texts. The next difficult task was the selection of texts from the wide range of African American fiction. A certain compromise had to be achieved in the contents, form, language and topic of the selected text with regard to secondary school audience. Some texts that I decided to include in the present work were printed in the anthologies and therefore not hard to find. Nevertheless, the majority of the texts caused more troubles. I will comment on a few of the ‘problematic’ texts further. Amiri Baraka’s anthologized works were predominantly poems from his rebel years of the 1960s, the period that their author considers closed and finished. I found a poem written in September 2001 which would be interesting and more recent, but I considered it too long for it had seven pages. Finally, I got myself inspired by a web page that suggested a few activities on three of Baraka’s poems. A different problem occured with June Jordan’s works. Her anthologized poems were exactly the text I desired to work with – fierce, self-confident and persuasive poems on current problems – question of human rights of people in Guatemala, Palestine, etc. Yet, their values were the reasons why they had to be finally left out. I do not assume that teenagers are aware of political issues in the Central America or in the Middle East and the preparation of the topic would be therefore very demanding, complicated and probably out of student’s interest. However, I did not wish to abandon Jordan’s work at all. The result was chosing an anthologized essay “A New Politics of Sexuality” with the title presumably appealing to teenager students; the text is again difficult, but a special plan on the essay has been designed to facilitate it. The last commentary is dedicated to Yusef Komunyakaa’s poems. I chose three poems from Očarování, a book of Komunyakaa’s selected poems translated by Prof. Jařab. Two of the three chosen poems were easy to find in English on the internet, but not the third one I wanted to include, “Hanka z Hanoje”/“Hanoi Hannah”. Dr. Pribylova was so kind to contact Prof. Jařab who replied readily by sending a copy of “Hanoi Hannah” by mail. I would like hereby to thank Prof. Jarab for his help. Unfortunately, the poem is finally not included in the present work; “Hanoi Hannah” is attached in the Appendix. The next task, to design the use of the texts in a class, was shaping along with the process of the selection of texts. In spite of the fact that teaching literature is not the aim of the English teacher’s study, it may be useful to know how to work with literary texts. Although there are various books on teaching literature in the library of Faculty of Education, I did not find suitable any of them for the purpose of the present work. The book that did inspire a part of my ideas was Richard W. Beach and James D. Marshall’s Teaching Literature in the Secondary School, that was aimed for American students.The book was clearly organized in chapters dealing with different literary forms and suggested approaches to them. In addition, special chapters on authors of different ethnic groups or on selecting texts were included, too. In consequence to the lack of specific didactic materials on African American literature, I had to create them on my own. The purpose of the present work was to teach thinking, tolerance and empathy by the means of African American literature. The majority of the exercises is therefore based on the open-ended questions that should excite students’ thinking. The following discussion then leads to the development of communicative competence, for students are asked to explain themselves, weigh arguments and listen to the ideas of other classmates. Besides, the discussion should lead to student’s self confidence to express and stand for their opinions. On the other hand, this way of teaching is very demanding for teachers. They have to be well prepared and able to feel the point where discussion loses its purpose and turns to mess. Teachers’ aid can be Penny Ur’s book, Discussions that work : task-centred fluency practice. Teachers may also wish to use some additional activities to support tolerance and respect for the ideas of other people, which is highly desirable. The present work is flexible and does not offer concrete lesson plans. However, most of the topics should be discussed in one or more units of 90 minutes, yet the final time management and the final choice of texts is on the teacher. The questionnaire I distributed to the students of third and fourth years affirmed my assumptions. A similar questionnaire could be handed out to students at the beginning of each school year and the answers would serve as a feedback. The teacher would be able to compare easily whether the number of readers increased or lowered, whether more students are willing to work with poetry, whether the topics and the language level of texts had been selected appropriately. Here is the final summary of discussed writers, topics and relevant literary forms.
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