The Great Gatsby

Yesterday, I handed out the book, The Great Gatsby, to my Junior English class. Today, as an introduction, I started with a KWL chart to see what students could remember about The Roaring 20's. We ended up with a list of about a dozen things that students put together, giving them a decent background to the book.

To reinforce this information, I played a 27-minute video, Great Books: The Great Gatsby, from Discovery Education/Streaming. The attached video is a small portion of the whole, explaining how the 1974 film of the book led to a revival of all things Gatsby.

As a confirmed reader, I find it difficult to understandy why students aren't excited about getting a new book! However, I am learning that most students have not yet developed that relationship with books--they need to be coaxed, prodded, and sometimes dragged to the printed page. Through Dr. Z's class, I have learned that there are so many things that teachers can do to make that process shorter and less painful for everyone. Using strategies like the KWL and a visual element help students to be able to drop their defenses without looking wimpy.

When I played the video, I did something for a specific reason, but it had an unexpected result: I stopped the video with about five minutes to go, because the narrator spoke about the end of the story and I didn't want to ruin the ending for them. I really didn't think that the students would even notice. But they did! Stopping the video just as the narrator started talking about the event at the end of the story caused a huge outcry! I was surprised, but I quickly recovered and told them to start reading so that they could find out what happens at the end. The final 15 minutes of class were spent in blissful silent reading!