The Start of the Trial: Reflection

We've reached the climactic part of the novel, now: The Trial of Tom Robinson.

Harper Lee creates a significant amount of tension at the trial, even though it seems that the outcome is a foregone conclusion. For your next blog post I would like you to reflect on how she does this.  Consider responses to the trial (Miss Maudie, in particular), the seating arrangements, the revelation of evidence, the presentation of Bob Ewell.

There are lots of online quizzes based on the novel.  See if you can find one, trial it, and share the link on your blog.

Remember also to comment on three other blog posts from members of the group.

And as soon as everyone has done this, we will begin watching the film!

Blog Jog

We have now finished reading to the end of Part 1 of To Kill A Mockingbird and you will have formed your own ideas about the book: the characters, the themes and the style.  It is now time to pause, maintain and develop your blog and get some good connections going.  This fantastic resource will only yield results if you put in time to make it work.

Your next blog post is entirely of your own choosing, but must respond to Part 1 of the novel in some way.  It could be a piece of creative writing (with the link explained), a series of revision questions of your own devising, a more developed write-up of one of your class activities.  (What about using an animation programme for Mrs Dubose?)  Be creative.

I would also like you to share a link to a good resource that you have found to support your study of To Kill A Mockingbird.  Again, the choice about what to include is entirely up to you.  Perhaps there is another blog you have found with really good ideas, a contextual resource, a study guide.

Finally, I would like you to undertake a bit of a 'blog-jog' around the class.  Go and comment on three blogs that you have not looked at before.

It's A Sin To Kill A Mockingbird

We have now read to the end of Chapter 11 and completed a wide variety of tasks and challenges designed to further your understanding of the novel's characters, themes, structure and style.  I would like you to choose one of our recent undertakings to develop and share as a blog post.  Choose from the following:

• Scan or photograph your Chapter 8 sketch with some explanatory notes
• Draft your creative writing about an early childhood memory 
• Develop your analysis of your chosen exam extract from Chapters 9 or 10

Or:

• Consider the children's changing perceptions of their father in Chapter 10.  Write about a time when you started to see a parent in a different light, or create a short story with this theme.

To Kill A Mockingbird

Now that we have read the first six chapters of To Kill A Mockingbird, as well as exploring some of the context of the novel, you should have begun to form some opinions about the characters, the story and the style.

I would like to get some discussion going via our blogs.  For your next blog post, I would like you to write a little bit about the opening chapters of the book.  Tell us a little about what happens, what you like about the writer's style, how you feel about events so far, how you respond to Scout and Jem and Dill, what kind of a character Atticus is, what kind of a society Maycomb seems to be; anything else you can think of; it can be a very personal response.

I would also like you to comment on at least two other blogs from the group, so you'll need to start following each other again. If you decide to set up a new blog for this project, please comment below with a link so that I can find you!

Starless and Bible-Black

Choose a time of day and jot down all the sounds that you associate with it.  Early morning might include the dawn chorus, alarm clocks, yawns, the first stirrings from rustling bedsheets.  Now imagine that you are going to write the opening of a radio play that begins at your chosen time of day. The audience cannot see the scene, so consider how you might communicate these sounds in a narrative form.  Look at the extract below where Dylan Thomas is trying to capture ‘night’ for the listener:

 

It is…moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, wood limping invisible down to the slowblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.  The houses are blind as moles or blind as Captian Cat there in the muffles middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows’ weeds.  And al the people of the lulled and dumbfounded town are sleeping now…

You can hear the dew falling and the hushed town breathing.  Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional salt slow musical wind in Coronation Street and Cockle Row, it is the grass growing on Llaregub Hill, dewfall, starfall, the sleep of birds in Milk Wood.

 

Happy writing!

Rebirth - from a word-hoard

Beyond the shore I stand, in menacing waves beneath a murky sky. The depraved watery sound helps me to touch solitude and the tentacles of the water draw me in.  I think how deceptively inviting the water looks.  My history pulls me.

This sounds so depressing, and it was not how I felt as I undertook the exercise - though I think it could make an interesting opening to a story. My initial theme was rebirth, and my word-hoard included menacing, history, tentacles, depraved, solitude, beyond, deceptively - and the one that I couldn't get in...'magician'.  The questions were difficult to answer with those words, but I'm pleased with the idea of water having 'tentacles' and I feel that I have certainly created a particular (quite dark) mood and atmosphere that could have some use if I were to develop the piece.  The idea that the character's history is pulling her towards the water also starts to suggest some narrative ideas to me.  Something to come back to in the future, perhaps.

Checking Out Me Writing History

I write all the time, every day. Sometimes my writing is work-related: reports, emails, marking comments, lesson plans, models for student work. Often it is for pleasure. But my memories of actually learning the complex skill of writing are vague.

I don't know if this is a real memory or one of those stories that is passed down in family folklore and becomes, by default, a memory. On my very first day at school, aged three, I wrote my name on a drawing I had done. The nuns, (for it was a Catholic school) were in raptures, amazed that I was capable of such a thing. I didn't really understand what all the fuss was about; I had been writing my name for a while. But they insisted on giving me a small cuddly toy in recognition of this 'feat', and my mother glowed with pride when she came to collect me. There indeed was an early confirmation of the transforming power of the written word.

I wrote a story called 'The School Caretaker' when I was about five. The narrative was simple: I wrote in the first person as the caretaker and described incredibly mundane tasks that I performed through the day - like changing a lightbulb and sweeping up in the locker area. Again, my teachers enthused. My grandmother kept the little exercise book in which the story was written until the day she died. There was further validation of how powerful writing could be in the reactions of the adults around me.

I recall gaining the final credit I needed for a Headteacher's Award for an essay on Maximilian Kolbe, and then a second one for an argumentative piece on the channel tunnel (before it had been built). In the final year of middle school I won the History Prize for my 100-page project on the history of my local village. I'd presented it chronologically, showing how it had grown from its first entry in the 1341 census, moving right towards the present day and including taped interviews with elderly residents who had talked about their own memories of the place changing. The prize was a book token, and I chose a book on British wildlife that I still have today.

So those amount to my early writing triumphs. If there were public disasters, I have blotted them out. I was a furious diary writer from my early teens to my early twenties and I would have been mortified had anyone found and read those entries, so personal were they. I no longer keep a journal but I do have a notebook that I am often scribbling in, though with nothing as formal as diary entires. And I have always written poetry, sporadically at times, but it is always there in the background. I am also, in spite of this digital age, an avid letter-writer. Nothing beats a hand-written letter. Nothing shows quite how much you care for the recipient. I have had pen-pals since school-days, and sustained a teenage romance by weekly letters when the object of my desire was at boarding school in Wales. These have bee replaced now by friends in far-flung corners of the earth. Most of them in parts of Australia, where I was lucky enough to teach for a year, and tempting though it is to use email to keep in touch, I try as far as possible to write letters.

I have had many fountain pens over the years. I prefer to write in real ink, but I don't have a special affinity with one particular writing implement. I just replace my Parker every few years as it goes missing at school or starts to leak. If I'm working on something creative my favourite place to go is a local cafe, sitting near the window. Well, it worked for J K Rowling, so who knows?

So, there you have it: some of my earliest memories to my current practices, and the kinds of writing that have played the most important part in my life. How do you recall your own writing history?