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Food For Thought by Elisha Boggs

1/23/2022

Today's Monday Motivation is authored by Elisha Boggs. Elisha teaches ninth grade English and Journalism at Tallulah Falls School in North Georgia. She has a tremendous amount of energy for life, which is funneled into being an educator, a mother of four, a marathon runner, and the wife of a homesteading farmer. When she has enough time, she tries to chronicle her wild adventure here. One of the great things today's motivation post does is connect a classic with contemporary YA.

The timeless classic, To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, meets students in nearly every high school as part of their first experience with literature in a classroom setting. English teachers are familiar with lessons working through the delightful yet harrowing coming of age story of a young girl named Scout. Scout shares details of her life as she navigates the painful prejudices buried deep within her southern hometown of Maycomb, Alabama. Throughout the novel students meet several characters that impact Scout’s life.

One character that opens up a tremendous opportunity for my students to interact and connect with the text is Miss Maudie and her Lane cake. After reading the novel, students revisited passages where Miss Maudie and her Lane cake appear. Here is just one of several examples:

“There was a big cake and two little ones on Miss Maudie’s kitchen table. There should have been three little ones. It was not like Miss Maudie to forget Dill, and we must have shown it. But we understood when she cut from the big cake and gave the slice to Jem. As we ate, we sensed that this was Miss Maudie’s way of saying that as far as she was concerned, nothing had changed. She sat quietly in a kitchen chair watching us.”

This Lane cake and Miss Maudie emerge at pivotal points throughout the novel. The cake appears to bring comfort, to show thanks, to celebrate, and to provide togetherness. Scout is able to observe this simple service and see that the cake symbolizes Miss Maudie’s ability to rise above the judgements that run deep in the community, that she is a linchpin for this community, and that she is, for Scout, a safe place to experience moving and growing through her childhood.

Pose the following questions to students for discussion:

What role does the cake play in this passage? What about other passages where the cake appears?
This cake keeps popping up, what sorts of meaning can we make about the recurrence of Ms. Maudie’s cake.
What words or phrases in the text show how Scout is relating to her experience with Ms. Maudie and the cake?

After discussing the importance of this cake in Scout’s life, I open up a discussion about food in students' lives. From special cakes to shrimp dip, we discover that food tells a story and food connects. One particular day, several of my students in different classes declared classmate Jessi Cramer’s grandmother’s mashed potatoes to be the best food in the world. Another student shared a recipe about a cold savory cake from her home in Serbia, and a Chinese student called his family's chef in China to get the recipe for his sweet and sour chicken only to discover that the main ingredient was Coke! Another student discovered that her grandfather fell in love with her grandmother when she served him banana pudding!

Every culture at any time in history has food as a center and a focus. For students, it is easy for them to see that food connects us. I prompt students to find a recipe for some food that they love or that is special to them, and to gather the story behind it. I encourage them to reach out to an aunt, a grandma, an uncle, a neighbor, etc. This assignment gives students the opportunity to practice presentation creation, storytelling, concept development, and content creation.
The project culminates with a class cookbook that we call The Lane Cookbook.

Student examples from The Lane Cookbook:

If time is short, students write poems about food memories. We begin by examining Langston Hughes' quote: “Poetry is the human soul entire, squeezed like a lemon or a lime, drop by drop into atomic words” (Rampersad, 1995). We brainstorm atomic words and how to utilize them before writing.

Student examples:

Clementine
I’ve grabbed a clementine.
Juicy and Delicious
All to myself with no one interfering,
Until I tossed a piece upon the ceiling.
It went everywhere, including someone's hair.
I decided to throw another one because -- why not?
My target is locked and I started
Winding my arm back until I was ready to fire.
Whoosh! It traversed the room and landed on a window.
Juices flying and people crying because I have made a mess.
It was fun.
I'm not upset.

Carrot Cake
Tiny cake slash! in half.
C r U m B l e S the inside, carrots coming off.
Slap! the icing to the middle.
S p r e a d it around.
Bre ∫ ak! the cake and glue it.
S i g h. I give up and put the top half on.
Smush more icing on top and sides.
“Poor lonely cake
By itself with no cinnamon inside.”
But I am happy! to have that tasty cake.

While we are reading To Kill A Mockingbird, students read a fiction piece of their choosing. They keep track of places where food plays a role in the story. There are examples in timeless classics and in their own favorite fiction pieces.

The Hate You Give by Angie Thomas: The main character, Starr, eats peanut butter on graham crackers at her Uncle Carlos’ house. This is just one example in the text where specific foods play an important role in Starr’s connection with her world.
Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys: The main character, Lina, deals with starvation in a work camp in Lithuania. Sepetys writes descriptively about Lina’s fight for food and how it shows both division and connection between characters.
Daughter of the Mountain by Louise Rankin takes little Momo on a journey through the mountains of Tibet to find her missing dog. Along her journey, she is fed by strangers that introduce the reader to unique Tibetan foods.
The Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis, Edmond falls under the White Witch’s spell after she lures him into her world with Turkish Delights.

Bon appetit!
Elisha

Rampersad, Arnold (ed.). The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Vintage Classics, 1995.

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Beginnings

1/10/2022

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Welcome to the first Monday Motivator of 2022! As teachers, we are excited about the role that young adult literature has played in our middle school, high school, and college classrooms. In a recent conversation with three middle school teachers and two high school teachers, one of them said, “My students were really struggling with interesting openings to their writing so we looked at the opening passages of several YA novels.” The other teachers nodded. Another said, “I love how excited kids get when they notice something in a book and then try it out in their own writing.” These teachers focused on how young adult literature could be used as mentor texts to build students’ writing skills while also helping students grow as readers.

As teachers, we know that young adult literature (YA) can serve as a mentor text for students. We know that we need to think about how we are going to have students work with these texts. Before we ask students to notice what the writers do in their texts to create the stories, we ask them first to just read–for themselves, for discussions, for themes and connections. Students engage with the novels as readers when they work to make sense of the text, identify connections to their lives and other texts, and discuss key ideas with other students. Once we have explored the text as readers, we begin to look at it as writers.

When students begin to look at the YA novel as a mentor text and begin to notice not just the story but what the writer is doing to tell the story, they begin to read like a writer. We ask, “What do you notice in the text?” Beginning by asking what they notice is a way to get them to look at the text without the pressure of asking them to identify specific literary terms or sentence patterns. Asking them to notice is more complicated than it initially sounds–we are asking them to find something that stands out to them because of the way they respond to it as readers.

An Affair of Poisons by Addie Thorley (2019) is a historical fantasy novel centered on Mirabelle Movoisin, a seventeen year old alchemist who unwittingly helps the Shadow Society poison King Louis XIV. She partners with Josse De Bourbon, the bastard son of the king, to protect his siblings, unite the country, and defeat the Shadow Society. The opening passage provides an opportunity for students to think about strong verbs and specific adjectives. It also offers a strong hook to pull the reader into the story.
My laboratory reeks of death. Not of blood and flesh and decay, but the garlicky bit of arsenic, the musty essence of hemlock, and the sweet smell of oleander—like rose water and citrus. The lethal perfume tickles my nose as I rush about the hearth, stoking the fire and whisking the steaming concoction in my cast-iron kettle.
Today I will kill a man. (1)

When we examined this hook with students, they noticed that the verbs–reek, tickles, rush, etc.–are strong verbs that add to the description in the passage. Students also noticed that the adjectives used–garlicky, musty, sweet, etc.– did not overwhelm the description. One student said, “The author didn’t use three or four adjectives in a row. She only used one so it made it really stand out.” Much to the students' surprise, they noticed that the second sentence was actually a fragment and that it started with “not,” which made the contrast of smells really stand out. We also discussed power in the line, “Today I will kill a man.”

After examination, we asked the students to think of something from their own lives they could describe and to try out some/all of the same craft elements that Thorley used.

Student example:
The back room is suffused with a smell like no other. Not of books, as one may expect from the staff room of a library, but of the steel tang of sorting carts, the musty dampness of paper dust, and the greasy odor
  emanating from the lone microwave in the corner—like a haphazard olfactory representation of all the tasks
  that occur in the place. The unique mixture resides in my nose as I go about my duties, scanning in incoming
  books, sorting them onto the unordained shelves, and getting them ready for the general public to read.
Today I will keep the library running.

This is one of so many examples that students can examine and practice different writing styles from. As teachers, we look for examples of strong writer’s craft while we are reading. When you read a text today, look for interesting sentences, short passages, and craft techniques that you can bring to your students to enhance their writing.
After the students’ work with the opening passage of An Affair of Poisons, they began to look at other YA books to see how those texts opened. They noticed that three of the books they were reading for different literature circles had similar themes.
Jewell Parker Rhodes’s Black Brother, Black Brother opens with
I wish I were invisible. Wearing Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak or Frogo Baggins’s Elvish ring. Whether shrouded in
  fabric or slipping on gold, it wouldn’t matter to me. I’d be gone. Disappeared. (3)

Tae Keller’s When You Trap a Tiger opens with
  I can turn invisible.
It’s a superpower, or at least a secret power. But it’s not like in the movies, and I’m not a superhero, so don’t
  start thinking that. Heroes are the stars who save the day. I just–disappear. (1)

And, Sarah Prineas’s The Magic Thief opens with
A thief is a lot like a wizard. I have quick hands. And I can make things disappear. But then, I stole the magician’s locus magicalicus and almost disappeared myself forever. (1).

Students noticed that the way that disappear and invisible were used in the opening lines played with the way that we used the words. For example, one student said, “In The Magic Thief, things disappeared meaning that they were stolen and gone but in Black Brother, Black Brother, disappeared means that he wants to be invisible, not gone but just not visible.” Students discussed the challenges of defining invisible and disappear, and how authors used the differences in meaning to create different feelings in the reader. A student argued, “Invisible is something that superheroes play around with but do you really wanna be invisible in your real life?” Students focused on when it was good to be invisible and when it was not. They also discussed the different genres of books and what the words meant in the context of the books. Then, they wrote their own versions.

Student Example:
I’m always the new kid and both visible and invisible at the same time. It isn’t something I can turn on and off
  exactly. I’m invisible when people talk about things they did last year or last month and very visible when I have to
stand in the front and announce where I’m from. I’d like to disappear on command. I’d like to be invisible by my
  choice and not by your actions.

Over the years, we have become adept at reading like writers; now, it is time to teach our students to do the same. We use a literature circle role called Reading-Writing Connector, which requires students to read and take note of interesting sentences and writing strategies that authors use to make their writings more powerful and/or more easily understood by readers.

Student example of connecting reading and writing:

Happy Reading (and Writing)!
Melanie and Emily

Books referenced:
Keller, T. (2020). When you trap a tiger. New York: Random House.
Prineas, S. (2009). The magic thief. New York: Harper Collins.
Rhodes, J. P. (2020). Black brother, black brother. New York: Little, Brown, and Company.
Thorley, A. (2019). An affair of poisons. Salem, MA: Page Street Publishing Company.
Weeks, S. & Varadarajan, G. (2016). Save Me a Seat. New York: Scholastic.

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Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday's
Monday Motivators

Food For Thought by Elisha Boggs

Beginnings

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Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday's Monday Motivators

Food For Thought by Elisha Boggs

Beginnings

Curators

Archives

Categories

Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday's
Monday Motivators