Homework: Lord of the Flies

On Friday, my teacher gave me homework. "Figure out a way to get them to want to read Lord of the Flies. Figure out what we are going to do with them."

I will take that challenge!

I have no idea what my teacher is looking for. I haven't read Lord of the Flies since my junior year of high school and even then, I probably didn't actually read the book. Clearly, I am not an expert in it. But I'm gonna do my best with it.

I read the wikipedia page for the book (I'm sure English teachers everywhere are shuddering right now. Stop it. Wikipedia is legit. Chill out.) and then got a copy from the library. I opened the book and read the first paragraph. I put the book back down and got out my clipboard to start taking notes on all the things in that first paragraph and on that first page that would confuse students (and confused me too).

This is where I am starting. Imagining that I am a student reading this book for the first time and trying to figure out what could confuse them or make them not want to read it. One benefit experienced teachers have is that they know what has confused students in the past. I have to guess. I have no idea what my teacher has done with this book in the past and I have no idea what she plans to do with it now. I am very curious to see how she gets our students interested in this book.

I have ideas that are tailored to this specific group of students. They don't like to read. They get bored easily. So far they have read literature that is very distant from them. My goal is to make it relevant. To force them to see themselves inside this book. I think this is actually a good book for this.

I remember not liking Lord of the Flies, but I can't remember if I actually read it or not (sorry Mrs. McDowell, I didn't actually read everything you assigned) or why I didn't like it. So I am reading it suspicously. I am looking for whatever made me not like it. It may have been the action of the book. Children running around wildly and trying to make adult decisions was probably not something 17 year old me wanted to read about. But it may have been something else. I may not have felt connected to the characters. I may not have understood the story or the been able to see why the characters behaved the way they did.

I intend to find out why I didn't connect with this book and how I can help my students connect with it.

Ultimately I think the power of a story is its ability to allow one person to see the world from someone elses point of view. This is part of why I read. I want to experience the world the way other people do. This ability to see the world from other points of view is one way to grow as people. My students need to grow. They are ignorant. It sounds mean, but most high school students are ignorant. They have lived in the same place with the same people for most of their lives. They hang out with people who believe the same things they do and live similar lives as them. My students need to see the worlds that other people live in.