One of the challenges of being mixed grade teacher of a small class is teaching English. Don’t get me wrong, I love English and I love teaching middle grades students grammar, sentence structures, non-fiction text types and writing, creative writing, but it can be difficult supporting my year 7’s and pushing my year 9’s to meet various learning objectives in the same one-hour period. And of course, no English class is complete with reading great books during novel studies.
Sadly, I have read time and time again that reading whole books is becoming obsolete in the pressure to prepare students to analyses passages for standardized testing. Excerpts from books and single passages are used as tools, not as pieces of art to be consumed and digested. I will skip the lament of the lost art of reading for learning and fun with the youth, but rather share our in-class success with a classic American novel: The Outsiders.
I am a newish teacher. I don’t have a lot of experience teaching, or teaching English, and at such a small school, I am left to my own device to pick and choose what to use to teach a class. Thankfully, this is the information age and the internet has plethora of advice from bonafide, experienced English teachers who gladly share their knowledge. One book I had completely forgotten about from my own middle school days was recommended and I knew it was going to be a hit with my students.
The Outsiders in a fairly short novel by American author SE Hinton written in the 1960’s. It follows a young man and his group of friends as they navigate their was through class division and growing up in survival mode. The language is clear and easy to follow (aside from some antiquated terms and references which make fun side lessons!), it’s only about 200 pages divided into easy to finish in a night chapters, it follows a pretty clear plot line and has plenty of easy to identify and understand messages.
Many of my students are lower-level English students and I had a few pull me aside and tell me they liked this book so much since it was easy to understand but also very enjoyable. One student told me it helped her understand more English as she was so invested in the story she stopped to look up words as needed!
Half my class are a motley crew of boys and they also really enjoyed the story. Just about everyone was completing the reading each night to participate in the class discussions. They especially liked the fact they the characters are boys and speak and act like boys their age; the profanity (which is mild) and violence (which again is very tame by today’s standards) was appealing and relatable. They were all insulting each other for weeks with terminology from the book, and they did so appropriately so A+ on comprehension!
Finally, the message of staying gold in an otherwise unfair, ugly world is just as relevant to day as it was for the place and time of the story. My students, who are a fairly privileged group of kids, really felt empathetic for characters who struggled with broken families, social ostracism, and basic survival.
After the book we took Spring break and went into narrative writing for term 3. But still my student’s hound me, begging to know what our next novel study will be as they loved The Outsiders so much. (Get ready for Shakespeare kids!)
I am still curating my reading list and studying the curriculum’s and recommendations of the experienced teachers, but I have to stop and add my two-cents to those out there scouring the internet for advice for their own classrooms. The Outsiders is an excellent choice for middle school and roused my middle schoolers for the few weeks of our novel study.