gatsby

[Carol Azizian]

I am just starting Gatsby and looking into some creative lesson plans. 

Thanks everyone!

[camille napier bernstein]

Hi, Carol,

What direction do you want to go in?  Cultural context?  American Dream?  Romantic hero?  Class?

Happy to help with some more direction so I don't overwhelm you!  :)

My students just finished Annotated Bibliographies on the novel, but I've taught it any number of ways over the years.

Camille

[Carol Azizian]

good questions....definitely american dream...romantic hero is good too...

will mention class differences

and will show background on 20s▼ Reply

[Dana Huff]

Carol, I am linking to my Diigo bookmarks with the tag "Gatsby." I recently came across a lot of cool links because lots of folks seem to be teaching it right now.

http://www.diigo.com/user/danahuff/gatsby

Especially check out Nick Provenzano's Twitter feed of the book (the Nerdy Teacher), which is in the collection of bookmarks.

I usually have introduced it in the past with this webquest that I adapted from Valerie Arbizu: http://www.huffenglish.com/gatsby/gatsbyhunt.html

[Carol Azizian]

appreciate it

[Melissa L]

There is a lot out there now about how the American Dream is changing.  How our future generations will no longer be able to afford their own homes....Something to think about.

 

I am doing the webquest this Thursday and Friday.  I will let you know how it goes.

[Carol Azizian]

thanks!

[Brenda Larabee]

We did a re-enactment of a 20s party including dancing to the Charleston, smoking "fake" cigarettes, eating foods listed in the novel.  It was entirely student led - they decorated, found the music, gathered the items, and we had the party on the school stage for a class period.  It was great fun and a nice way to evaluate learning without having to grade a test.

[Carol Azizian]

that sounds fun!

[camille napier bernstein]

Some ideas

1) Students write scenes we don't see: G/D's last goodbye, the conversation between T/D after wreck, Gatsby's leaving his parents, etc...

2)Students rewrite, keeping exact syntax, two of Fitzgerald's sentences -- use any topic, but structure the exact same (participle, prep phrase, plural subject, appositive, past tense verb, etc).  They need not know the parts of speech or syntactical words.

3) Find and explicate song that would fit.  I have attached my example for Counting Crows "Mrs. Potter's Lullaby."

4) After studying Romanticism, my students read Into the Wild and Gatsbyand wrote a short paper on what kind of hero main characters were using these sources:

•  Furst, Lilian R. “The Romantic Hero, Or is He an Anti-Hero?” Studies in the Literary

Imagination 9.1 (1976): 53. Print. and

•  Norman, Vera. “Four Conceptions of the Heroic.” Fellowship of Reason Community. 2003. Web. 12 May 2011.

Resources:

Some links to NYT: http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/teaching-the-great-gat...

Yale Open Course lectures on Gatsby: http://oyc.yale.edu/american-studies/amst-246#sessions

Video about newly coined term: The Gatsby Curve, describing the "inheritance" of former generation's social mobility/elasticity: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/EconomicIne&start=1334

Creative hacking by one of my students opened up a whole set of literary critiques about the book: http://fitzgerald.narod.ru/icritic.html

Inspired by this ning, I also adapted Ryan's mathematical expressions ideas and had kids do two for Gatsby.  Attached.

[Carol Azizian]

thanks a lot!!!!

[Melissa L]

My students just finished Gatsby and their final assignment was to listen to this interview on NPR.  They really loved it!

 

http://www.npr.org/2012/05/08/152272250/the-secret-life-of-the-othe...

 

I would love to hear how people would use this in the classroom.  The funny thing is that I had juniors asking me, "How do you take notes on this?"  I think I assumed by 11th grade that students would have a decent grasp on notetaking in different situations.  Apparently, I was very wrong!