West Allegheny School District th 10 Grade Summer Academic Pre-work Promoting Literacy Today a Reader, Summer of 2021 Tomorrow a Leader Dear Rising 10th Grade Student, Please read the assigned materials and make the explained thematic connections as outlined below in preparation for class work during the first weeks of school and to allow for meaningful instruction and involvement from the first day of school. Highlights of High School ELA Summer Pre-work • Students who need assistance acquiring a copy of the novel may request a copy through their school counselor. • Students will receive full credit for turning in ELA assignment on the first day of school. • High school teachers Jennifer Jones ([email protected]) and Lisa Carter ([email protected]) are available for assistance via email throughout the summer. • Both Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Carter will be available at the high school on Monday, August 9th from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. and on Monday, August 16th from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. for additional one on one clarification, if needed. Additional Information *For consistency purposes, the ISBN # has been provided. Any student who has difficulties obtaining the text is responsible for making alternative arrangements by reaching out their school counselor prior to the start of the school year. *New students enrolling with the district on or after Monday, August 9th are only required to complete Task 1. Required Readings Thematic Ideas Anchor Text: • Damages of War: The consequences A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah of war are mental, physical, and ISBN#: 978-0-374-53126-3 emotional. Nonfiction Articles: • Loss of Innocence: Children are ““What Memoir Is, and What It Is Not” - excerpt from Memoir: An Introduction forced to contend with losing their by G. Thomas Couser childhood as a result of war. “Declaration of Human Rights” - The Universal Declaration of Human Rights • Memories: Memoirs are a form of (Preamble) - UN General Assembly writing that rely on the specific “Children under attack:Six Grave Violations” - Office of the Special memories of meaningful events that Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict have occurred in an individual’s life. Tasks: 1) Read the nonfiction articles and annotate for comprehension. You may use sticky notes as you read to annotate and identify relevant connections. 2) Read the anchor text. As you read, look for connections between the book and the nonfiction articles read in step one in terms of the thematic ideas. 3) Using the chart on the following page, organize your connections. For each connection you make, be sure to include the line or section of the text as well as the article, the thematic idea the connection is related to, and an explanation of the connection. A minimum of 10 connections must be identified with each theme being included at least twice. *Charts will be collected on the first day of school and will be worth 15 points. 1 “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go!” Dr. Seuss Name Thematic Idea Evidence from the Book Evidence from Article Connection Explanation This should be one of the three thematic ideas This should consist of direct quotes from the text This should consist of direct quotes from the article How does the evidence from the article relate to identified above. and include page numbers. and include a page number and line. what I read in the novel in terms of the identified thematic idea? 2 WHAT MEMOIR IS, AND WHAT IT IS NOT excerpt from Memoir: An Introduction by G.T. Couser Saying what memoir is would seem to be the obvious place to begin this book, but that’s not as easy as it might seem. For one thing, the term is used in significantly different ways in different contexts. For another, it has an inherent ambiguity at its core. More about that later. It may be more helpful to begin by saying what memoir is not. Memoir is not fiction. Memoirs are not novels. As a nonfiction genre, memoir depicts the lives of real, not imagined, individuals. Granted, in the West, memoir developed in tandem with the novel; in English, at least, the two genres have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship for some two hundred years. And they remain intertwined. Today, memoirs often incorporate invented or enhanced material, and they often use novelistic techniques. Indeed, they are themselves a form of literary art, and their artifactuality—the sometimes uneasy relation between their artfulness and their presumed factuality—sometimes gets their authors into trouble. Conversely, realistic novels often take the form of memoirs. In practice, it’s not always easy to tell whether a particular narrative is one or the other; there is no bright line between them. And of course, sometimes fiction masquerades as—pretends to be—nonfiction. Loosely speaking, both the novel and the memoir are “mimetic.” That is, they imitate life in the sense that art is said to imitate nature. Nevertheless, an important conceptual distinction obtains: memoir presents itself, and is therefore read, as a nonfictional record or re-presentation of actual humans’ experience. Fiction does not; it creates its own lifelike reality. And that makes all the difference. Memoir’s commitment to the real doesn’t just limit its content (what it can be about), it also limits its narrative techniques (how the content can be presented), as we’ll see in the next chapter. This special relation to the real affects what memoir can do, too, not just what it is. In short, this distinction is fundamental both for how memoir works (the craft of it) and for the work it does—its impact on the world. For all the publicity and readership that memoir has gained during the memoir boom, the fundamental difference between the memoir and the novel is not widely nor well understood. At least, that is the impression I get from many of my students. Increasingly, they arrive in my classes having some prior acquaintance with memoir. They may have read a best seller like Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes for pleasure, or they may have been assigned a book like Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior in high school. Nevertheless, a surprising number of them will refer to such texts as novels. They do so with such persistence that I cannot be sure whether they misunderstand the term novel to refer to any long prose narrative, fictional or not, or whether they don’t grasp the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. I think the former, but the uncertainty is troubling. It doesn’t help that graphic novel has come to be the accepted term for any narrative, fictional or not, that is drawn in the manner of a comic book. To my dismay, even the Modern Language Association has adopted this misleading usage for the title of a volume of essays on Teaching the Graphic Novel. Several of the narratives in question—such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s 3 Persepolis—are better thought of as graphic memoirs, because they concern real people and historical events. Classes in creative nonfiction may also blur the distinction between memoir and novel: at some point the creative impulse may compromise, or even negate, a narrative’s nonfiction status. But, as was demonstrated by the great success, followed by the harsh exposure, in 2005, of James Frey’s “memoir,” A Million Little Pieces, this distinction is not an academic one. Ignoring it can have significant consequences in the real world. Frey’s book tells the story of his substance abuse and his recovery; the book’s sales took off after Oprah Winfrey endorsed it. But its meteoric success attracted scrutiny, and the online investigative journalism Web site The Smoking Gun uncovered some serious distortions of fact. Among Frey’s many “embellishments” of his story of life on and off drugs was his inflation of a few hours in the clink into a period of three months—hardly a rounding error! More egregious was his claim that a girl from his town who died in a tragic train accident was his only high school friend. In fact, she was three years older than he, and her parents deny they had a close relationship. Oprah stood by Frey initially, but many of her fans did not, and eventually she withdrew her endorsement. Not only that, she had Frey on her show and berated him and his editor (Nan Talese) for knowingly mis-leading the public. It was revealed that Frey had shopped his manuscript around as a novel without success, only to land a lucrative contract when he relabeled it a memoir. Furthermore, the manuscript was subjected to little, if any, fact-checking in press. No wonder a minor scandal erupted, with many journalists, pundits, and professional writers expressing outrage. In the immediate aftermath, Frey lost a literary agent and a con-tract for additional books. The Frey episode illustrates two important things about memoir today. First, the fact that Frey got a publishing contract only when he presented his story as memoir illustrates the genre’s current value as literary property. Publishers are much more willing to invest in certain kinds of stories if they are presented as fact rather than as fiction. At the same time, the outcry over Frey’s “embellishments” demonstrates that readers read memoirs differently than they read novels. Because the memoir is not supposed to require fiction’s willing suspension of disbelief, readers invest in it differently. First, they buy the book, then they buy into the story.