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Midnight's Children Day 7: Reading Day 1

Time

50 minutes

Setting

This course is a Senior elective entitled "Literature from Around the World." It consists of 25

students, 10 male and 15 female. 10 students are white while 8 are African America. 6 are

Latino/a, and one student is Asian. Five of the Latino students are bilingual Spanish speakers, but

they are not classified as ELL. One student has ADHD. All students are of varied ability.

Theory into Practice/BackgroundIt is finally time to begin reading Midnight's Children, and we will be doing so by employing a

strategy that first seeks to find an essential problem for students to solve in their reading. In order

to do this, we turn to a video clip from the Time Magazine website where Tim Morrison

interviews Salman Rushdie by asking him 10 questions submitted by viewers. The video covers

much of Rushdie's work and briefly touches on the Fatwa issued against him 1989 which will be

discussed in greater detail later in the course, but the reason we chose to include this video as an

introduction into the text is that it provides a cogent statement of the process by which

Midnight's Children was produced. Rushdie says that as a means of trying to tell the story of

India in all of its sprawling complexity, he intentionally "overcrowded" his novel with

extraneous characters and plot points to make the reader feel as though they are immersed in a

larger-than-life world. When experiencing India, he says, "The crowd is the great fact." I thought

that this was a tremendously interesting point of access for the text because, on the one hand, it

provides an explanation for why the text is excessive in certain aspects. I believe that this will

help students to feel less discouraged if they struggle initially to understand what is happening in

the story. Once they know that Rushdie is intentionally trying to confuse them and give them


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more than it seems they can handle, we can begin to develop a plan of attack for overcoming the

obstacles that the author has put in our way.

This plan of attack draws from the work of Fisher and Frey who introduce the

"Questioning the Author" approach to DR-TA. This means that while the teacher guides the

reading of the text, modeling the cognitive processes that students should be engaging in, the

prevailing question becomes "Why would the author do this? What is he attempting to achieve?"

(108) Having this question and operationalizing students to think in these terms provides a way

of accessing the text that promotes the inherent skepticism that many readers bring to the reading

process. Whenever a text is assigned in a class, students will immediately begin to wonder "What

is it about this text that's so special?" They enter into the reading process expecting the text to

prove itself to them. By turning the focus on to the author and why he/she made the choice of

writing in a particular way, students can redirect their skepticism toward a more constructive line

of thinking, following that thread until they are actually immersed in the text. This process also

promotes metacognition as students are forced to evaluate not only what the author is attempting

to do but how they are experiencing those choices. This will likely be a very slow process as

students need more targeted instruction of this kind early on in the text, but moving at the

appropriate pace and releasing responsibility gradually will increase students' ability to function

effectively later on in their reading. Further reading assignments will be more varied in their

approach to the text.

Objectives

Students will read the first chapter ofMidnight's Children aloud and begin the process of note-

taking important ideas from within the text.


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Materials

Copies ofMidnight's Children

Preparation

The teacher should have an open word document projected up on the screen to take notes on

while reading. In the web browser, the teacher should have the Time Magazine interview with

Salman Rushdie cued and loaded.

http://www.time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,664849348001_2030982,00.html

Procedure

The teacher introduces the lesson by saying that now that the students have developed an

appropriate understanding of the historical context, it is time to begin reading the novel. The

teacher then introduces the work by showing students the Time Magazine interview with Salman

Rushdie, instructing them to pay particular attention to what Rushdie says about Midnight's

Children and how that narrative was constructed. 7 minutes

The teacher directs the students to the concept that the novel is intentionally overcrowded, asking

what students think that might mean and how it creates challenges for the reader. The teacher

then explains that there will be a lot of characters, places, and important events throughout the

book and that Rushdie, himself, has already admitted that he's trying to overcrowd the narrative

and make it excessive. Therefore, we must have a plan of attack moving forward. The teacher

pulls up the word document and instructs the students that every time a new character or

important date is introduced, they will write a note about it on this sheet. It is now time to begin

reading. 5 minutes

The teacher reads the first paragraph aloud and pauses, asking the students to pull out any

characters that were introduced and summarize what we know about them. So far, we have Dr.


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Narlikar and Saleem, our narrator. We know that Saleem was born on the day of India's

independence, August 15th, 1947. Dr. Narlikar was the one who delivered Saleem. The teacher

then directs the students to examine the writing style that Rushdie is employing. It is very

frenetic, with lots of false starts and digressions. "How reliable do you think this narrator will

be?" Early in the next paragraph, we learn that Saleem is thirty-one years old, making the date of

writing approximately 1978. The teacher makes a note of this fact. 3 minutes

The teacher continues reading along in this fashion, stopping periodically to ask probing

questions and making annotations about characters and dates, modeling visually the cognitive

process that should be occurring while students read. Once students begin to feel comfortable

with the text, the teacher can ask for student volunteers to continue reading. The class continues

to read and make annotations for the remainder of the hour. 35 minutes

Discussion Ideas

What are your immediate first impressions of the writing style that Rushdie uses? What are the

challenges presented by this style? How can we, as readers effectively negotiate this writing?

What does Rushdie mean when he talks about overcrowding his novel? What evidence do you

see of this in the first chapter? Saleem talks about how his time is running out

Accommodations

ESL: The shared reading/ read aloud activity allows students who struggle with reading to have

the additional support of other readers to help guide them through the text. Reading aloud to the

class is strictly voluntary. Students will not be expected to read aloud if they do not feel

comfortable.

ADHD: The consistent breaks in the reading will help the student with ADHD to stay focused as

the process will not become too monotonous.


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Assessment

The student's reading comprehension as well as their knowledge of the characters, historical

events, and themes will be assessed at the end of this week and every week using the Reading

Journal Sheets, the assignment sheet for which is attached.

Extension Ideas

We will continue to use the DR-TA strategy for the first several reading exercises while

gradually releasing students to work on their own, recommending that they continue to use this

strategy of reading either by writing it down or by running through the process in their heads.

Source of Activity

Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey were chiefly responsible for the theoretical outline of this lesson.

Thanks to Caitlin Stevenson, Liana Cabrera, and Jason Peterson for helping to support this

lesson.

Resources and References

Fisher, Douglas, and Nancy Frey.Improving Adolescent Literacy: Content Area Strategies at

Work. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Merrill/Prentice Hall, 2008.

Rushdie, Salman. Midnight's Children. New York: Penguin, 1991.

Illinois State English Language Arts Goals

2.A.5b Evaluate relationships between and among character, plot, setting, theme, conflict

and resolution and their influence on the effectiveness of a literary piece.

1.B.5a Relate reading to prior knowledge and experience and make connections to related

information.

1.B.5b Analyze the defining characteristics and structures of a variety of complex literary

genres and describe how genre affects the meaning and function of the texts.


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Students will be able to meet all of these standards as they internalize the model

promoted by the teacher's utilization of DR-TA, and the evidence of this will be found in their

weekly Reading Journal responses.

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