Why Literature Matters

Classroom Activities

When considering how exactly to encourage students to interact with these texts, it is helpful of course to consider your students themselves. What would work best with any given student or class? How best might we differentiate the material? The following are suggestions for activities and products for learning accountability, proof that objectives have been accomplished, and, hopefully, a lively way for students to converse with the texts and each other. For each of the texts in this curricular unit, exploration can be done with students using the chart mentioned in the “Rationale” section of this unit, mapping the text’s relation to the reader, author and the world, through which each can also be connected to each respective other (e.g., we as readers can connect with the world or the author through the text). An image of this chart can be found in the “Teacher Resources” section.  

Warm-ups, Journal Entries, and Homework Activities Using Poetry

There are obvious applications to warm-up and journal activities with visual art and poetry: student reactions. How does it make them feel? What is going on in this painting or poem? However, there are also more interactive ways to synthesize the meaning of the works mentioned in this curricular unit.

For responding to any image of a Jacob Lawrence painting (many can be found with a simple Google Image search), why not have students respond with an original poem? I have done this in the past to magnificent results (e.g., one of the few homework assignments that sees 100% class completion).

After standard explication and response to Hughes’ poems, have students use classroom computers or even find an academic use for their “third hands” (what I call their smart phones) and research some other poems by Hughes or from the Harlem Renaissance. Then, conversely to the above activity, draw or paint a picture in reaction to it. These creative ways of interacting with the text in introduction to this unit are good ways for them to ease into more complex text and immersive, analytical activities. But remember, the purpose of this unit is for them to enjoy the text.

Passing, Passing, and Passing – An Exercise in the Importance of Writing, Homework, and Knowing Oneself

Nella Larsen’s novel is the most explicit study in this unit of identity. Clare becomes someone else and then struggles with how to integrate herself back into who she used to be. Irene begins proud of who she is, but that pride wavers after reconnecting with Clare. Irene becomes militant, even violent, about preserving who she is and what she has in the face of losing it. “Passing” is a powerful word with many different meanings. Students should explore these different meanings. Of course most overt in the novel is the implication of passing as another race. However a deeper meaning is passing for who we think we are – if we are content, are we just “passing”? Are there desires that we repress because we don’t actually have the opportunity or motivation to achieve said desires or goals? This brings into play the fear of failure – how can that apply to students? This is a good section of this unit in which to use the Text Connection Triangle (see “Teacher Resources”). How can we connect with Larsen and African-Americans of the 1920’s through this text? How do these experiences mirror our own or what is happening in the world right now?

Further meanings of the word “passing”: status in relation to attaining credit for a class; moving up from grade to grade or graduation from high school, and moving on to college or the military or a career; and, of course, dying. Mortality is the ultimate meaning in literature – everything that is touched upon is in reference to what we do in our limited time on earth. This is a connection of the text to the reader, the author, and indeed the world.

Comparing and Contrasting Powerful Letters

Dr. King’s letter is, as Gaipa described, an example of how to write.¹⁹ Have students write a letter in the same style – plenty of support and examples to prove their points, never argumentative but always firm, referencing scholars and thinkers – about a modern day injustice of their choosing.

Baldwin’s letter can lead to powerful exercises in close reading and journal responses about family, racial or any kind of tension, discomfort, being at odds with what we feel is our place in the world. Close reading can delve into the nature of family and offer teens a chance to talk and think about their own. Baldwin writes, “I have known both of you all your lives, have carried your Daddy in my arms and on my shoulders, kissed and spanked him and watched him learn to walk.”²⁰ Have students had similar experiences of caring for members of their family?

These letters can also be compared and contrasted for lessons in rhetoric, language, vocabulary, sentence structure, tone, and more. However I urge you not to get too technical within this lesson unit. This is, after-all, a unit centered around fostering a love of reading, and too much “messing” with the text can detract from a student’s enjoyment of it.

Culminating Essay Based on “Novel” Study

I earlier mentioned that The Color of Water “reads like a novel.” It is worth a conversation with students about what exactly makes that quality. Is it the ease of the prose? What author’s decisions contributed to it reading so fluidly, make it so entertaining and engaging? This is indeed a good way to open this part of the lesson unit, to introduce the book. Describing it this way may engage certain students right from the beginning.

For a culminating activity, an essay synthesizing the unit objectives is apt. How best can you have students show through writing that they have gained an appreciation and perhaps even an enjoyment of reading, and a better understanding of their place in the world with regards to the other people around them? Consider prompts such as:

1. Can James’s and/or Rachel’s experiences be applied to our own search for meaning and a place in the world?
2. Can the struggles outlined in this book help us begin to think about our futures and the things we want to accomplish?
3. Consider your own family and those you love. What similarities or differences in treatment of one another can you find from the book? How might that affect our perspectives on how to treat others in general?
4. What impact did Rachel have on the world through the way she raised her children? Describe how this may or may not impact others’ hopes and aspirations, including your own.

Allow Them to Enjoy It

I began mentioning above in the “Letters” activities section that we should not force students, at least within this curricular unit, to have too many related assignments and/or activities related to these readings. These works can all stand alone as enjoyable reads, and all but the full-length book (and even that, if you have the time) can be read together with your students in class. First and foremost, allow them to enjoy this book. A teacher, too, can enjoy reading it with them. I know I have. When I first read The Color of Water to students, it was also the first time I had read it. That was transcendentally powerful – experiencing it with them. The fact that students knew that I was reading it for the first time helped spark their engagement – knowing we were all in it together. Obviously I won’t be able to pull that off again with that particular book, but every teacher, for every lesson, can work with a brand new text (although try, if you choose to do this, to get an endorsement from someone else who has read it to make sure it is appropriate, as I did from my Library Media Specialist for The Color of Water). Activities and products are of course necessary for synthesis and accountability, but enough cannot be said for sharing texts with your students while keeping in mind the original purpose of those written words: to be read.