Year 10 blogs

Year 10 students in my English GCSE class have been creating blogs to record their work on the novel To Kill a Mockingbird. They have been asked to research background  material to contextualise the novel and the author. The were given choices relating to their general and academic interests. These were relating to music – Billie Holliday Strange Fruit – the Civil Rights Movement – Martin Luther King’s I have A Dream speech – heroes of the movement – KKK – maps of Alabama, the author, and any other directions their interest led them.

They were also asked to keep copies of their work, such as their first impressions, the town as shown through the eyes of the child narrator, and the family relationships.

All 30 of the class have set up blogs, they have all posted downloads from youtube and images of the south, and the author. They are varied, reflect their interests, and have a revealingly personal tone absent from much GCSE essay writing. So far this has been a success I think. I want to see how these develop, it will be a bit complicated as I am leaving so my time with them is limited, unless I can persuade them to keep them up, after I have left.

Follow the links to visit their blogs 

 http://ashleex.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

http://celiaaax.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

http://josie-englishblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/first-impressions-of-to-kill-mocking.html

http://moysie10.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

 http://mockingbird-blog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

 

 ’Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee,’ by Charles J. Shields

Good Scout

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Review by GARRISON KEILLOR

 

Published: June 11, 2006

Here is a book about a woman who knew when to get off the train. A tomboy from Monroeville, Ala., editor of her college humor magazine, The Rammer Jammer, and law school dropout, she took it on the lam to New York, got a job, made friends and managed to write a novel that hit the best-seller lists and stayed there, won a Pulitzer, got made into a major movie and became a staple of high school English along with “Romeo and Juliet” and “The Great Gatsby.” Total sales are somewhere around 30 million, and it continues to sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year. As her father, A. C. Lee, said, “it’s very rare indeed when a thing like this happens to a country girl going to New York.”

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Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Harper Lee in the courthouse in Monroeville, Ala., May 1961.

MOCKINGBIRD

A Portrait of Harper Lee.

By Charles J. Shields.

Illustrated. 337 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $25.

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She worked for years on a second novel, and then, in the mid-1980’s, on a book of nonfiction about a serial murder in Alabama, neither of which worked out to her satisfaction and so she squashed them. She made her peace with being a one-book author. Unlike her friend Truman Capote, she didn’t enjoy the limelight. So she backed away from celebrity, declined to be interviewed or be honorifically degreed and simply lived her life, sometimes in Manhattan, riding city buses, visiting museums and bookstores in her running suit and sneakers, seeing old friends, and most of the time in Monroeville, in a ranch house with her older sister Alice, a house full of books. Built-in bookshelves, floor to ceiling.

Every summer, Monroeville draws crowds of tourists to see a staged version of “To Kill a Mockingbird” at the old county courthouse that was the model for the one in which Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch strode before the all-white jury to argue for Tom Robinson’s acquittal, as little Scout and her brother Jem and friend Dill looked on from the gallery. Everyone would surely love it if Miss Lee would consent to walk out on stage and wave and take a bow, or even say a few words, but she will not do it. She has been known to show up at the high school and speak to English classes, but this is rare.

She is 80 years old and wears a hearing aid and eats out at the diner or the country club and to strangers who seek her out, she can be frosty. A reporter and photographer from Birmingham banged on her door 10 years ago and Miss Lee opened it and said, “What is it?” They asked her to autograph a copy of her book. She wasn’t happy about it but she fetched a pen. “I hope you’re more polite to other people,” she said. She signed it: “Best wishes, Harper Lee.” She said, “Next time try to be more thoughtful.” They thanked her. She gave them a big warm smile and said, “You’re quite welcome.”

Charles Shields is a former English teacher who taught Harper Lee’s book, and a scrupulous journalist who respects the lady’s privacy even as he opens up her life. This biography will not disappoint those who loved the novel and the feisty, independent, fiercely loyal Scout, in whom Harper Lee put so much of herself.