Unit Summary
This short introductory unit serves as the bridge between middle school and high school literature courses. In this unit of study, students will practice skills, habits, and routines that will be used on a regular basis in the high school classroom: vocabulary practice, close reading, annotating text, collaborative conversation, and evidence-based writing. These skills will be developed and honed as students read three masterful works of short fiction. Simultaneously, students will review essential literary skills and concepts they have learned in middle school and apply them to ninth grade-level texts.
The year will begin with the “How to Fight Monsters” chapter from Sherman Alexie’s novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. This chapter follows the protagonist, Junior, through his first day at his new off-reservation school as he struggles to understand the social norms and expectations in this foreign environment. Students will investigate the author’s craft, examining the techniques Alexie uses to characterize Junior and develop the theme of identity.
Students will then work to further develop close reading and annotating skills as they examine St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, a contemporary short story by Karen Russell. The story is structured around a handbook that describes various stages of adapting to a new culture, with powerful advanced vocabulary, and strongly developed young characters who struggle to adapt in this strange new setting. The complex text and thematic treatment of identity make the story particularly appropriate as one of the first high school texts that students encounter. As students read, discuss, and write about the text, they will again examine how the author’s deliberate choices, such as text structure and diction, create character, meaning, and theme. Students will practice taking a thematic topic (like “identity”) and developing it into a theme statement that reveals the author’s message on the thematic topic. (Some of the concepts and questions from this portion of the unit have been adapted from Engage New York Module 9.1.)
Finally, students will read Alice Walker’s powerful short story, Roselily. In this very brief story, Walker creates a complex characterization of the narrator, Roselily, a young woman who jumps into marriage with a man she barely knows, who is of a different faith and who is from a faraway city. Her desperate attempt to abandon her past and start fresh develops the thematic topic of identity that is echoed in all three stories.
At Match, students have a Composition class 4 days per week in addition to English class. Below, we have included Supplementary Composition Projects to reflect the material covered in our Composition course. For teachers who are interested in including these Composition Projects but do not have a separate Composition course, we have included a “Suggested Placement” to note where these projects would most logically fit into the English unit. While the Composition Projects may occasionally include content unrelated to English 9, most have both a skill and content connection to the work students are doing in their English 9 class.
In the literature lessons of this unit, students read several short works of fiction focused on the theme of identity. While not explicitly tied to any of the works of short fiction in the English 9 unit, the supplementary Composition Projects are tied to the theme of identity and develop some of the same skills the students will need to be successful on the writing portion of the Unit 1assessment. All of the Composition Projects in this brief unit are narrative pieces, but the focus on selecting evidence and providing context for that evidence is the same skill students will use in the literary analysis writing in the English 9 unit. While not recorded as an area of focus in the project descriptions below, a focus on using advanced vocabulary could also be very smoothly woven into these projects. The emphasis on analyzing diction and on mastering new and complex vocabulary in the English unit could be reinforced in the Composition Projects by requiring students to use some of the vocabulary in their writing. Words that would be particularly applicable to the writing projects are bewildered, inevitable, assimilation, and latent. The concept of culture shock could also be referenced by students in “The Snare” essay. The writing focus areas of this unit come directly from the “Proficient” column of the Match High School composition rubric rows for Thesis, Evidence, Explanation, and Revision.