Daily Lesson Plan:

Ambiguity is the Diet of Literature

Grade 10

 Focus:   This lesson will address how ambiguous literature lends itself to various interpretations.

 Objectives:       

§         Students will actively participate in class discussion.

• Students will identify with a character in the short story.
• Students will exercise creativity by composing an interior monologue.
• Students will explain how ambiguity affects a story.

Materials:            Handout of Raymond Carvers short story “Popular Mechanics”

Strategies:        

• Writing monologues to show how ambiguous literature can be interp.
• Group reading
• Group discussion
• Presenting students monologues

Procedure:

§         To start the lesson we will have someone from the class read Raymond Carver’s Popular Mechanics.

§         We will then ask a few general questions to start the students thinking about the story and we will describe to them what it means to write an interior monologue based on what we just read.  Some questions asked will be:

What could have been going on before this scene?

What happened after?

Why did it happen?

What kind of feelings do the characters have toward the baby?

How do they see the baby?

What struck you most about this story?

§         After giving the students about ten minutes to write their monologues we will have them share with the entire class.  We will encourage them to tell us what in the text made them write what they did.  We will also encourage class discussion about each monologue.

§         After everyone has read their monologue we will then ask the class more questions about their writings.

                                                How did the intro affect your monologue, or did it?

                                                What’s the authors’ attitude; did this affect your monologue?

                                                What in his writing style gives you these impressions?

                                                How does the title contribute to the meaning?

                                                What is the issue that has been decided?

Evaluation:        We will evaluate each student based on his or her participation by noting who participates in the discussion and who does not.  We will also evaluate their understanding of the story by the interior monologues they write, their use of creativity, and their comprehension of the events that occur in the story.  We will evaluate their understanding of ambiguity by their interpretations of the characters and their responses to our questions.

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