Absolutely True Diary....

[Lindsay Lombardi]

hello,

I'm considering using the novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie  for my tenth grade class that is all boys.


Does anyone have experience teaching this text...student response ideas etc?

thanks

-Lindsay

[Lisa Fink]

ReadWriteThink has a calendar entry with resources on Alexie that may help: http://204.232.153.97/classroom-resources/calendar-activities/sherm....

There is also some information about the text you are looking for in this podcast: http://www.readwritethink.org/parent-afterschool-resources/podcast-....

Good luck!

[Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides]

I teach the novel to secondary English teachers and created this lesson plan for focusing on the way Arnold's drawings relate to his written text.

In the novel, Arnold says, “I draw cartoons…I take them seriously. I use them to understand the world. I use them to make fun of the world. To make fun of people. And sometimes I draw people because they’re my friends and family. And I want to honor them” (95). I use this as the hook to ask the class how images work in relation to words in the novel. Do they work the way Arnold says, or differently?

To deepen our vocabulary of images, I use an excerpt from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics that focuses on the relationship between words and images and draw from the categories he lists to invite analysis of True Diary. I pre-select ten pages of the novel with images and ask students to look carefully at the images and then the text that surrounds it to see how they work in relation to each other. As the groups jigsaw to compare and complicate each other's ideas, I then get all this on the board to help students see how they could build an argument, for a paper say, on how images speak in the novel.

I've atached my lesson with the pages from McCloud and the images I used in Alexie. The (adult) students really enjoyed it. I'd love to hear how secondary students might respond.

Sophia

[Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides]

And here are a couple short ancillary texts to consider including in your unit, all written by Native American writers about stereotypes, copies of which I've attached below.

Rita Pyrillis', "Sorry for not being a stereotype", in the April 24, 2004 Chicago Sun-Times.
Jo Whitehorse Cochran's, "Halfbreed Girl in the City School."

I also like to consider Alexie's poem, "How to Write the Great American Indian Novel" and ask students if True Diary meets his criteria.

Sophia

[Lindsay Lombardi]

Thank you for these resources - they are great.

I really appreciate it.

-Lindsay

[Mary Rapp]

This is book I am teaching to striving 9th grade readers and almost all of them love it and cann't put it down.