Becoming (Other)Wise: Enhancing Critical Reading Perspectives

"Becoming (Other)Wise: Enhancing Critical Reading Perspectives" is that rare book on teaching--a work that manages to combine a discussion of pedagogy seamlessly with sensible, practical methodology that the teacher of English can take right into the classroom.

I am a student of Erick Gordon (one of the co-authors of Becoming (Other)wise) at the New York City Lab School. I just wanted to say that the curriculum of the Mockingbird Monologues, based on To Kill a Mockingbird and written by eighth graders is ingenius. The Mockingbird Monologues are a culmination of a year's worth of work which began with reading the book, Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes and then later, reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey. While reading these two books, we focused on the idea of empathy- really understanding where a character was coming from- by doing various writing exercises. We also looked at culture now, including advertising and how everything effects everyone by what it is saying and how it is written. We read To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee which welcomed the grade into the official Mockingbird Monologues project. Since then, we have kept an extensive portfolio with twenty or so entries which helped us get into the voice of our randomly assigned character. The portfolio includes work which we have done in English, history, math and music classes, showing how literature can be incorporated into many aspects of life and our education. In history, we read and listened to oral histories from the South after the Civil War and then wrote oral histories in the voice of our individual character as one of our portfolio entries, to get into the voice of our character prior to writing our monologue in the voice of the character. Once everyone had a first draft of their monologue written, we all had a chance to read our piece aloud to our class to get feedback to improve upon our writing. After more individual revising, final drafts were handed in and we got to work forming thirty monologues into a play. The sequencing of our play shadows the style used by Anna Deavere Smith in the play of monologues, Fires in the Mirror, about the Crown Heights riots in August of 1991. Our monologues are in an order based upon how they fit in leading up to and following the trial of a black man for raping a white girl. Some monologues give background about Maycomb, the fictional Alabama town where the book is set, some monologues show the racial tensions in the South and other monologues face the inequalities that make life interesting. The Mockingbird Monologues showcase the techniques that we have learned throughout the year to become a character and then capture an audience as that character. If you choose to interpret this idea into your curriculum, you will see immediate results. Your students will begin to feel empathy for characters and peers, build skills to write for a specific audience and will forever remember you as an amazing teacher.