Blog #4: Final Scaffolding Project

Introduction 

Memoir writing is a form of personal narrative, told from a particular person’s memory, about an important part of that person's life. It is similar to autobiography in that it is factually told from one person’s real experience, but rather than retelling their whole life, memoir focuses on narrower important events. Though told from a real-life perspective, memoir writers may have more flexibility in how to tell their story and which details to include, as memoir is crucially only representing what that person remembers; it is more subjective than nonfiction writing, which might be a more researched and impersonal narrative. 

The 10th graders I work with have a large unit at the end of their first term of their ELA class that focuses on memoir and autobiography. The lesson outlined here is part of the introduction to the concept, and is particularly meant to help students consider that memoirs can take a variety of formats to best reflect different life experiences and approaches to sharing those true stories. This lesson asks students to consider an unusual version of memoir in light of a more traditional text about memoir writing and their own views on what the form encompasses. My ELA department consulted me about this lesson in hopes that we could build a stronger critical literacy component into this unit, with different "windows" provided as a basis to understand this form of writing. Likewise, as David Denby suggests in "Do Teens Read Seriously Anymore?", the pleasure in reading is vital to understanding, and these different formats we explore offer students a variety of tastes that may help them understand the appeal of this form before they are asked to dive into text selection later in the unit.

The text Everything Sad is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri is, despite being written for an audience and reading level slightly below 10th grade, a challenging text for some readers because of its qualitative aspects. Nayeri's Printz-winning work is a memoir in fiction; he tells his life story as if from his 8th grade perspective, narrating as if standing in front of a hostile class of his American classmates who see him as an outsider who cannot be trusted. Nayeri uses fiction writing structures from his culture, particularly elements borrowed from and stories from his known myths throughout this book. There is certainly room to argue and disagree as to whether this book can be called a memoir. We ask them to consider that question in light of William Zinsser's article "How To Write a Memoir", and our reading strategies for these two texts are meant to help them talk to one another and our students. 

Our ultimate objective for this particular lesson will ask students to reflect on what they know about memoirs to write short memoir pieces of their own using a RAFT activity, but this is meant to act as a bridge between earlier introduction of memoir writing to a larger project that asks students to each read a book-length memoir and delve deeper into features of that memoir. Before this lesson, students will be introduced to several other formats, including verse memoir and graphic memoir examples, and will have discussed qualities of memoir writing. After trying their hands at the RAFT activity, students will select their longer memoirs. These earlier choices that examine different formats and qualities of memoir writing should better prepare students to discuss choices of voice, tone, and other literary qualities when reading the longer work.

In order to best understand both these texts, some work through the vocabulary demands will be necessary. Will 10th graders necessarily understand when Nayeri talks about eating fesenjoon, or when Zinsser talks about thelassitudeof his relative? Not without some discussion, likely. Some of the frontloading of this activity will necessarily need some work with the more challenging words, especially in light of trying to tie this lesson together with a RAFT exercise which uses those word wall examples. Since Larson, Dixon and Townsend note that "Corson (1997) tells us that "words are only fully learned when they are available for active use" (p.699)" (p.16), our reading activities will involve both pre-reading word-wall strategies to introduce these words but also activities that will ask students to use this vocabulary in their own writing to better comprehend it.  

Outline of Activities

 

Because of some difficulties with this blog, my text chart can be found HERE.  

Rationale

 In his book, Daniel Nayeri claims that "Memories are always partly untrue." (2020) It's a fine and interesting introduction to how our 10th graders should begin discussing these two pieces together, as Zinsser's article speaks vividly about taking ownership of voice and claiming one's story and not what belongs to others, while Nayeri employs fictional structure and techniques to tell what is essentially a very truthful story about his life. Our students already have seen examples of different techniques, and before we ask them to write a memoir piece of their own, we want to use this lesson to prompt them to think about where the lines exist -- or if the lines exist at all. This lesson is structured to support the RAFT writing technique, which I selected because its structural choices -- giving students a bank of different elements from which they can choose what to write -- help limit and shape what could otherwise be a daunting place to start. What builds to that assessment is my exercise in backward design, trying to make choices that will support that ending. To reach that goal, specific pre-reading, during reading, and post-reading strategies are in place. 

Penny Kittle suggests in When Kids Can't Read that skilled readers can form thoughts and predictions about what a text is about. The use of guided questions as an anticipation guide and the text graffiti exercise that follows are meant both to gauge and enact some of the prior knowledge of previous memoir-themed readings, as well as to prompt some anticipation of the two readings that will talk to one another in this lesson. As an ongoing project, our 10th grade class uses a word wall for vocabulary improvement and review, and the instructor in this project will help frontload its use in the overall lesson by providing some examples and asking students as they flag items as they read to add their own examples. 

Nayeri's book is far too long for one lesson, but because it is structured like Scheherezade's tales, there are many story segments within it that make amazing cuttings for students to experience. Because our class makeup almost always has students who benefit from read-aloud material, we've chosen to bridge into the during-reading section of our activities by reading aloud one of the pertinent cuttings from Nayeri's book. This could be the playing of an audio, or read-aloud in class, depending on what serves the instructors better. 

This class often uses post-its or other annotations for close reading and reading questions in class settings. Our During Reading Strategies to Try in Your Classes article emphasizes that techniques like these must be modeled effectively in order to be employed, and since this method of reading to highlight answers to questions as well as points of confusion is one these students will have practiced, their use seems warranted to effectively approach these two readings. Students will be offered prompts to inform these readings and to help guide later discussion. We want them to examine what Zinsser thinks about memoirs and how to approach writing them, as well as to highlight anything in Nayeri that seems fictional versus nonfictional, and their thinking on why Nayeri chose this approach. 

 The most important thinking we want students to get from these readings is examining what Zinsser says about voice and point of view in memoir, and his advice for such writers. A re-reading strategy employed with the whole group sharing Zinsser's thinking, especially using the scaffolding method in Six Scaffolding Methods to Use with Your Students in which the students will share these ideas and the instructor will pause and pose strategic questions alongside this reading. This should help students especially get at the idea of what "think small" looks like -- and likely make the connection to Nayeri's memoir more salient, as its great strength as a text is to use small incident to build something powerful and universal. This should lead to a productive think-pair-share exercise that highlights both analysis of Nayeri in light of the companion article, but also asks students to find one vocabulary word for their word wall and ultimate assignment. 

For our post-reading activities, we want to circle back to some of our first questions, echoing our anticipation guide. In light of these readings, we want students to consider their prior positions on fiction in memoir. Students should be able to defend their thinking as to whether Zinsser's take on memoir would include what Nayeri does; having talked out elements in the during-reading portion, including in their smaller pairs to deliberate as to the connections between the two texts, they should be able to articulate their thinking. Likewise, in asking them to highlight and choose vocabulary to emphasize on the word wall, they can be engaged in choices for their final activity, the RAFT assignment. 

I will note something about this particular class and assignment: because this group of 10th graders is not only trying something very new with this introduction to memoir, but these lessons will be taught in an all-new format due to class schedules, it's important to note that while the RAFT writing will be introduced at the end of this lesson, it is not at all meant to take place as a part of this lesson, but outlined for future work. The 90-minute block outlined here will almost certainly need the focus on the two texts, but the vocabulary emphasis and the placement following other less complicated examples of memoir writing means that this should effectively bridge from first explorations to the more challenging objectives later in the unit. Students having identified the vocabulary and elements in these lessons should have a good foundation and examples of thinking to create their own examples. 

Bibliography

 Alber, R. (2011) Six scaffolding strategies to use with your students. 

Denby, D. (2016, February 23). “Books smell like old people”: Do teens read seriously anymore? The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/books-smell-like-old-people-the-decline-of-teen-reading

Lattimer, H. (2010). Reading for learning: Using discipline-based texts to build content knowledge. National Council of Teachers of English. 

Nayeri, D. (2023). Everything sad is untrue: (a true story). Levine Querido. 

Sonnenberg, B. During reading strategies to try in your class. 

YouTube. (2017, November 7). Text graffiti: a pre-reading strategy. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L11UwpnoSUk 

Zinsser, W. (2019, December 12). How to write A memoir. The American Scholar. https://theamericanscholar.org/how-to-write-a-memoir/