Here’s something I wasn’t expecting.
Last year, I decided to change one of my class texts, from short stories (Poe, Bradbury, Vonnegut, Thurber) to The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. I changed the text for two major reasons. One, I thought Mango would be a more accessible first book of the year for seventh graders. Short as they are, some of those stories were rough reading for kids barely out of sixth grade. Two, I thought writing vignettes about their lives would be a more interesting and personally relevant assignment than writing stories modeled after Poe’s or Vonnegut’s. For sure, the previous class had fun writing horror and sci-fi, but I wanted my students to have a chance to express who they were, to use their writing to bring people and places and objects and moments and questions to school that they were used to leaving at home. That was the goal, at least.
For more than a few of my students, writing vignettes was a highlight of the course. The assignment was simple: turn in a collection of at least three vignettes connected by a common theme. (We’d also been talking about the difference between topic and theme.) One girl wrote about her trip to see the orphanage she’d been adopted from in
Given the quality and investment in the vignettes, and given that I’d chosen Mango because it’s approachable and lends itself to personal writing about identity, I was stunned to see how few students liked the book. On my course evaluation, of the 62 students who responded, 7 said they loved it, 17 said they liked it, 33 said it was OK, and 5 said they hated it. So, only 24 liked or loved it, and 38 thought it was OK or hated it. By contrast, for A Raisin in the Sun, 39 liked or loved it and 23 thought it was OK or hated it; for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 55 liked or loved it and 7 thought it was OK or hated it. What’s going on that my students like (or love) Shakespeare—ancient, incomprehensible Shakespeare—more than contemporary (well, OK, 25 years old, but that’s the most recently-written text they read, which is itself problematic), early-teenager-friendly Cisneros?
I’m going to start with the assumption that I made the right decision last year when I switched the text. Maybe that’s wrong, but I had some pretty convincing reasons for making the change then, and I’m still convinced now. So under that assumption—that Mango is a good book for my students to begin 7th grade English reading together and writing off of—I figure something in the way I presented the book turned students cold, or lukewarm, to Mango. (Lukewarm is even worse than cold, isn’t it?) This year, I’m going to have to make some revisions. But what?
Whatever I change, I want to keep the vignette-writing assignment mostly the same. That was a successful part of the unit, so I’ll just tinker a little to get from silver to gold. But the reading bit—the discussion topics and structures—need to change. I think last year might have been a little too scattershot; with a book of vignettes, it’s hard not to be. I need an essential question to stick to. I also think I was a little too heavy-handed in introducing the identity themes in the book. The Big 8 do not have to be force-fed to them the first month of school. And finally, as much as the students need to learn about literary devices, I’m no longer willing to scrap writing time. The House on Mango Street will be, first and foremost, a model of how to write. Along the way, we’ll look at what Cisneros does to make her writing so cool. We’ll do some discovery and interpretation of the devices, and some using of these techniques.
Here’s how I want it to play out.
About half of our class time will be devoted to writing vignettes. Maybe 20 minutes of each class. I want those little buggernuts writing. A lot. That’ll give them even more material to go on when they compile their final collection. I’d also like to have them spend more time doing meaningful peer review and revision.
In that vein, I’m going to give writing prompts related to each vignette. After reading a bunch of them for homework, the kids can choose a prompt based on one vignette they want to write about. Last year, I think I gave too much freedom of choice, overwhelming some of them and leaving others feeling uncertain if what they were doing was “right.” The vignettes in Mango are about things, moments, relationships that make Esperanza who she is, so if the prompts ask the students to write on the topics in the Mango, the students will be writing about who they are. That should tease out the personal stories that make them who they are much better than discussing the Big 8 social identifiers.
As for reading/discussing/analyzing the text itself, I’d like to focus on what Cisneros does that makes the writing work so well. I think the essential question is going to be, “What do authors do when they’re writing for adults?” because to date, most of what they’ve read has been young adult fiction. Mango is a nice crossover book, not quite YA and not quite adult. The kids can see how Cisneros uses motifs, symbolism, irony, foil characters, foreshadowing, unreliable narrator—and that’ll pave the way for the Steinbeck unit. I want to take my students to MoMA to see how some of those literary devices come up in art too (and maybe to use art as a way into more vignette writing). Then, when they’re writing their paragraphs on literary devices, they’ll have points of comparison.
It also wouldn’t hurt to have them do a cool project, like maybe a video interpretation, or artwork inspired by one of the passages. I’ll have to make time.
What made me love The House on Mango Street was how Cisneros used vignettes to tell a story without telling it. How she honored the importance of small things and events—a bike ride with friends, a pair of ugly shoes, a name—and used them to reveal her characters. How she didn’t feel the need to write in grammatically-correct sentences, and her text was all the more powerful for it. If I chose this book for its excellent writing, I should use it to help students see what makes writing excellent so they can do excellent writing too. If I chose it because it’s relatable, then I want to reach the parts of students that relate to it. I want my classroom to be a place where students can bring their whole selves. If The House on Mango Street shows them a way to do that, then maybe it doesn’t matter if they love, like, or hate the book itself.
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