Rationale
My school is located in Southwest Philadelphia. It is 92% African American, 3% white, 2% Asian, and 1% Latino, and as I said above, it does not escape the problems which beset most city schools around the nation. My students are tenth-graders - "wise fools" who know it all and delight in displaying their cleverness by "getting over" on the teacher (as the nearest authority figure target) and who do so by trying the same tiresome tricks their predecessors tried. My trick will be to focus all that self-proclaimed cleverness on the solving of a crime along with Walt Longmire and his partner, Henry Standing Bear, who are protagonists in a mystery entitled Kindness Goes Unpunished by Craig Johnson.
Puzzle-solving is a very satisfying activity. It challenges us to use our thinking skills to find a solution. Detective fiction is a puzzle in prose. ". . . as Wright proposes, the detective story is not fiction in the normal sense, but is rather a complicated and extended puzzle. . .. Both the crossword puzzle and the detective novel are free of stress, each offers the reader a task or set of related tasks, both are shaped by convention, and neither has any goal beyond itself" (Dove 3). I think my students will not be able to resist the opportunity to pit their problem-solving skills against those of our protagonists, especially when the problem (crime) occurs on their own home turf of Philadelphia. So my problem with student apathy is solved, and I can devote more energy to teaching literary elements and higher -level thinking.
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