So this week we read “Monster” by Walter Dean Myers, a very compelling novel that I sped through in two hours before proceeding to write my lesson plans for the week and then forget about this assignment until twenty minutes before its due date.
The story is told from the perspective of a young man on trial for a murder which he may or may not have played a minimal role in. He never comes out and admits that he was the lookout for the robbery that resulted in the store clerk’s death, but he clearly feels guilty for something, and he admits to associating with the perpetrators of the crime.
Interestingly, the majority of the book is written in the form of a screenplay written in the head of the main character, who is making his life into a mental film in order to disassociate himself from the horrors of his reality. The ending is particularly compelling and drives home the pervading themes of identity, perception, and fear.
I believe this would be a very interesting text to teach in the sixth or seventh grade, although its 670 lexile level puts it as an accesible text to 4th graders. You could bring in a lot of supplemental material on psychology and especially on how society effects the formation of identity. It also lends itself to a film interpretation as a final project, where students could act out a pivotal scene and explain its importance, or else take one of the main themes of the work and write their own short screenplay exploring that theme. I would not spend a huge amount of time on the unit as it is a very easy read, but it might bridge well into a more difficult work and the amount of supplemental materials relating to it makes it worth the time. I wouldn’t teach it any higher than seventh grade though, it’d be too low a reading level to be a valuable use of time.
Diary Of An Emotional Houseplant 