Using Guiding Questions in the MS Classroom

How many times have you heard one of the following questions in your classroom:

    "Why do we have to learn this?"   

    "Will I ever need to know this in my life?"  

    "Why should I care about this?"  

    Maybe you haven't heard these questions exactly, but almost every middle school teacher has been faced with some variation on them.

    When I design my curricular units, I think very hard about these questions.  It is so important that students be able to see the value in what they're learning.  Not everything you teach has an obvious purpose to your students. If they can't find purpose, they will not internalize what they're learning.  Meaningful learning can only happen when what students learn matters to them.

    One of the most effective ways to achieve meaningful learning is to design your curricular units around GUIDING QUESTIONS, also called ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS.  If you frame your activities, projects, and reading around these questions, the students will have something to anchor what they do in the real world.

WHAT IS A GUIDING QUESTION?

       In Jeffrey Wilhelm's excellent book, Engaging Readers and Writers with Inquiry,he writes:

                "Guiding questions create a clearly focused problem orientation for our studies that connects kids to socially significant material and learning.  This in turn leads to exciting conversations that bring together the students' lives, the course content, and the world in which we live as we consolidate major concepts, vocabulary, strategies, and ideas." (p.8)

Guiding questions are a framework for a topic.  Using them takes the onus off the teacher to convey all of the concepts and information and puts it on the students to investigate the questions and find answers that they can apply in their everyday lives.

A Review of Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

Every dog has its day, right?  So Katniss's day must be coming.  Well, Katniss isn't a dog, but she is scrappy and resourceful and loyal, so you get the analogy.  You would have to read The Hunger Games first in order to have any clue what's happening in Catching Fire.  And, of course, it's a trilogy, so there's another one on the way.  Now, if you've read my post on The Maze Runner (Click here for that post), you know the ubiquitous book series concept has gotten on my last nerve, so I won't spend too much time harping on that...Or will I?

    Oh, come on, I'm like Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm.  I can't let anything go.  I AM going to harp on this.  Why must authors do this?  Why can't I just read a book, enjoy it, finish it, and put the story away in my memory?  Why must they force me to carry it around for years, the weight of discontent around my neck, like some bookish albatross?  I won't get no sat-is-fac-tion for who knows how long!  Ms. Collins, bow your head in shame for forcing me to live in literary purgatory until the sequel's sequel rolls off the presses.

    So, you know going into this review that Catching Fire is the second book in The Hunger Games trilogy, the middle child, the one who yearns for attention but will never quite achieve what Marcia did and will never be as cute and smile-inducing as Cindy.  Poor Jan.  Poor Catching Fire. This book was pushing a boulder uphill from the opening lines.

    When we saw them last, down-and-out District 12 residents Katniss and Peeta were declared the victors in the Hunger Games.  Their prize?  They were allowed to live.  But this kind-of-a-couple embarrassed the President and the Capitol with a small act of rebellion in their last moments in the arena, so they're in deep, deep trouble as Catching Fire begins. They've unknowingly fanned the fire of rebellion across the Districts, and that is something up with which President Snow shall not put.  The people they love are in danger, which for Katniss means not only her family but her other kind-of-a-couple pal Gale.

    The first half of Catching Fire kept me riveted.  Katniss meets people from other Districts who tell her about the growing rebellion and the possibility that there has been a rebirth of District 13, which the powers that be had obliterated during an earlier rebellion.  Katniss and Peeta are walking a tightrope: They are pretending to be the loving, soon-to-be-married couple that the Capitol wants them to be, but they are also under incredible pressure to head up the rebellion.  At one point, I was sure that the action was going to move to District 13 and the rebellion would, as the title promises, catch fire.

    But that's not what happens. In the second half of the book, Katniss and Peeta are forced to go back into the arena for another round of Hunger Games.  This I didn't need.  Collins had drawn us into the arena so beautifully in the first book, but here, it seems forced and redundant.  A special Hunger Games just for the victors of past Hunger Games?  I don't think we needed to read about elderly women getting killed off just to understand the Capitol's cruelty.  We know they're mean; they've bombed and shot and whipped as many citizens as possible in the preceding chapters! 

    The chapters at the Games were tighter and more bizarre this time around than they were in the first book.  Collins is pretty inventive in this respect.  And I do like Katniss.  She's a plucky heroine, unable to back down from a challenge but equally unable to fathom her own heart.  And in Peeta, Collins has created a complex and rather brilliant character, a boy who can turn a crowd with his words and knows just when to do it.  I am truly looking forward to his storyline playing out in the next book.

    Catching Fire was not a disappointment.  In fact, if Collins's characters had stayed out of the Hunger Games arena this time around, I would have loved this book. I think that Catching Fire should  be read for what it is: the bridge to the last book in the trilogy.  As much as that bugs me, the book certainly fulfills its role in that respect.

A Review of The Maze Runner by James Dashner

Suddenly, it's trendy to be post-apocalyptic.  The ragged clothes, the barren environment, the starvation, the creeping insanity and stifling fear.  Cormac McCarthy"s The Road is the seminal work of this genre, but it's not a book for middle school kids.  Have you read The Road? What makes McCarthy's book so remarkable is that the focus isn't actually on the desolate wasteland of post-apocalyptic America. Instead, it's the deeply moving story of the father and son making their way across the land that captures us.  The reader shakes with fear whenever the man and boy encounter a potentially dangerous stranger.  The reader aches with joy when they find a fully stocked bomb shelter where they spend a few precious days of normalcy. And the reader cries with pain as the father fights with every bone in his withering body to protect his little boy.  When you finish The Road, you are devastated by the vision of love and loss that McCarthy presents.

    So now, YA authors are capitalizing on the success of McCarthy's work and creating a YA genre devoted to their own visions of a dystopic future. James Dashner's The Maze Runner (Delacorte), sends us into the nightmarish world of The Glade, where teenage boys whose memories have been erased must survive day to day with little hope of ever returning to the actual world.  Of course, they're not really sure the actual world is worth returning to, considering The Creators, the men and women who put them in The Glade and created The Maze that surrounds it, are out there. 

    Dashner tries to focus the story on Thomas, the newest arrival at The Glade.  Though he can't remember anything about his life before being sent to The Glade, Thomas feels in his bones that he knows something.  He also seems certain that he is meant to be a Runner, one of the chosen few boys sent out each day into the massive, ever-shifting Maze outside The Glade's walls.

    I liked much about The Maze Runner.  It is certainly original, and the action never lets up.  There's plenty of bloody violence to satisfy a YA reader's need for grisly, gruesome deaths. And Dashner's descriptions of both The Glade and The Maze are vivid, dark, and frightening.  There are plenty of allusions to The Lord of the Flies, but with the twist that the boys of The Glade are desperately clinging to the semblance of order that they've created for themselves.

    But ultimately, The Maze Runner frustrates. Dashner reveals the complexities of the boys' crumbling world in painfully minute increments. Thomas doesn't know what's going on, and neither does the reader. It was maddening to read over and over again that Thomas couldn't put the pieces of this puzzle together, that the solution to it all was just on the edge of his mind.  Also, Dashner sacrifices character development for his breathless action. Thomas and the other named boys of The Glade spend a lot of time yelling at one another and puffing up their chests, but none of them has a distinct personality that makes him likable or otherwise.  Some of these boys will die, but the reader doesn't really care if it's Alby or Minho or Frypan, since they don't endear themselves to us in any way.

    Wanting to know who had created The Glade and why kept me reading.  But here's the thing, The Maze Runner is the first book in a trilogy (I know, what a shocker).  If James Dashner had been in front of me when I reached the last page, I would have punched him.  The final chapters race along at such a breakneck pace, revealing so little but introducing so much, I felt that I understood even less at the end than I did at the beginning.  Sure, I'll read the sequel(s), but more to satisfy my curiosity than to see how things turn out for Thomas. 

    But I suppose that's what Dashner wants.  That's what many YA writers seem to want nowadays: To serve up the first book in a series as a literary amuse bouche, a taste, a flavorful little bite, but no more than that. I don't know when this became commonplace for writers, but we are never given a full meal anymore. No book can stand on its own, its story complete and satisfying as a prix fixe dinner.  I appreciate the publishers' desire to sell product, but they're not making it fun to be a return customer!

    Which brings me back to The Road.  McCarthy's book will be read for generations to come, maybe until we reach our own apocalypse.  Its vision is terrifying, agonizing, redemptive.  And completely gratifying. I cannot say the same for The Maze Runner's intended world to come.  At least not what I've seen of it.