Unit+Rationale+(Bartley)


 * Unit Rationale for //The Hunger Games//**

One thing that teachers struggle with today is getting students engaged in reading and writing. Many students are apathetic to all reading done in school; even students who once loved to read begin to hate reading when it relates to school. While it is a fact of life and teaching that the curriculum and standards must be met, it can be beneficial to the students to bring in a contemporary text that will engage them and help them begin to enjoy reading again. The use of contemporary texts can introduce students to the standards as well as to important life issues and lessons in a new, fresh way. //The Hunger Games// by Suzanne Collins is a perfect opportunity to do this. This book, in addition to being wildly popular and being made into a movie, is a great teaching tool to teach many things that are useful both inside and outside of the classroom. It is a vehicle to teach symbolism, character development, figurative language, and an unreliable narrator. Alternatively, it can teach students through its themes such as poverty, survival, hunger, and revolution. This unit seeks to pair the literary elements of symbolism and character development with how the themes of hunger, survival and social status connect. These themes will allow students to dive into the book and come away with a good understanding. The themes of the book are important for students to know because they will make them more active, aware members of society as a whole. The lessons that can be learned from //The Hunger Games// about equality and social status can be applied in the real world. This unit is designed to be taught at Pickney High School, which is a rural school in Livingston County, to a class of ninth or tenth graders. Pinckney is not a very diverse school, and this unit will force students to think about issues that may not be found in the school, or that many students may not acknowledge. The context of the school affects how the novel will be taught because it will require the students to think critically about, as stated, issues that may not affect them. This may require prompting by the teacher, and the teacher to be prepared to discuss sensitive issues. The classroom should become a safe space for students. In this unit, students will ask themselves essential questions about the themes of the novel, including what role hunger plays in the novel (aside from being in the title). They will also analyze the book in terms of being a "reality" TV show and compare the Games to //Survivor//, a popular reality TV show. They will analyze characters, relationships and examine how class and social status affect characters lives, personalities, and performance in the arena. These activities will allow students to analyze essential elements of literature while putting them into context with the novel’s events and characters. According to Michigan ELA Standard 2.1, students are to be able to “develop critical reading, writing, and thinking strategies.” In this unit, as students read, they will be forced to think about all the things happening in the book. As they encounter symbols in the novel, such as the “mockingjay” or even something as simple as “fire,” they will need to question Collins’ motives behind its use, forcing them to think critically as they read a book that can be written off as a simple, useless novel. Students are also to be able to “develop as a reader for personal, social and political purposes through independent and collaborative reading.” This unit, by focusing on the theme of hunger and social status, will encourage students to think about the way the characters in the novel are classified by others based on the “district” in which they live and then within the district how they are classified based on social status and occupation. They will then use this knowledge to analyze how this classification affects the the tributes' performance inside and outside of the Capitol's designed arena.