One Book, One Campus Reading Project: Fall 2016
One Book, One Campus Reading Project: Fall 2016
Composition I Student Study Guide
The Other Wes Moore
Wes Moore
Welcome to the Florida Gulf Coast University One Book, One Campus Reading Project! At FGCU, first year students and many faculty and staff, including your Composition faculty, Orientation Leaders and the Resident Directors and Assistants in Housing, join together to read a common book, along with lots of other faculty, staff, and students across campus. This project is designed to help students join an intellectual community at FGCU, allowing them to increase student engagement and success and to foster a common academic experience.
Fall Semester ENC 1101 Composition I Assignment: Before you begin to read The Other Wes Moore, please review the study questions below with care. As you read the book closely, make notes in the margins and highlight passages you find important. Consider the questions below as way of preparing to join the campus and classroom dialogue this Fall. During the early weeks of the semester, students will be required to work with the text in their Composition I classes. The Study Guide Questions below are intended to get the wheels of thought turning in preparation for this work and for upcoming conversations about this text.
Study Questions
1. Neither Wes had the benefit of a father’s guidance growing up, but both of their mothers tried to keep their sons out of trouble and on the right path. Discuss the relationships between both Wes’s and their mothers. How are Joy and Mary’s efforts similar or different, and what challenges does each mother have to contend with? How does the absence of a father affect both boys, as well as the reasons behind each absence? Why doesn’t Tony’s attempts to steer his younger brother away from negative influences work out?
2. Wes the narrator describes feeling torn between his Bronx neighborhood and the affluent campus of his private school, Riverdale: “I was becoming too ‘rich’ for the kids from the neighborhood and too ‘poor’ for the kids at school. I had forgotten how to act naturally, thinking way too much in each situation and getting tangled in the contradictions between my two worlds” (pp. 53-54). How does Wes try to “keep up” with the kids in these two different environments? Think of a time in your life when you felt similar pressures – what did you do to reconcile those feelings? How important do you think fitting in is to one’s overall happiness and growth?
3. In the book’s introduction, the narrator states of the other Wes, “The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his” (pp. xi). Do you agree or disagree, and to what extent? What signs are there throughout the book that both boys could have shared the same fate, or that they were always destined for different outcomes? At what point do their paths begin to diverge, and why?
4. For Wes the narrator, attending Valley Forge was a powerfully formative experience and presented a dramatic turning point in his young life. For the other Wes, the Jobs Corps Center seemed to offer similar promise, and yet he returned to his previous habits roughly a year after graduating from the program. Why wasn’t Wes’s attempt to “go straight” successful in the long run? What does it mean for our culture to have such a large population living and working outside the boundaries of the law? How difficult does our society make it for young men like Wes to succeed?
5. The incarcerated Wes states that people often live up to the expectations projected on them. Do you agree with him, and why or why not? If someone you care about expects you to succeed or fail, will you? Where does personal accountability come into play? Think about others’ expectations of you, particularly as a student entering college. How much have the expectations of your family, friends, etc., contributed to your getting to this point in your academic career, and to what extent will they continue to motivate you as you progress into adulthood?
The above information was adapted from Spiegel & Grau / “Questions for Discussion.”
Contact Information
Linda Rowland
One Book, One Campus Project Coordinator
Email:
Phone: (239) 590-7254