#engl380

[bookstoocoolforschool-blog]

“Out of My Mind” and Into the Classroom

Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper is a touching and inspiring novel about a girl with cerebral palsy (Information on Cerebral Palsy, Click Here).

The main character, Melody, is an intelligent, eleven-year-old girl who fights the stereotypes associated with mental and physical disabilities.  As she transcends these stereotypes, Melody makes her fair share of friends and enemies, and struggles to overcome many other obstacles along the way.

Draper introduces Melody as a young girl trying to cope with a crippling miscommunication disability. Her cerebral palsy leaves her non-verbal, and though she understands what is going on around her and is extremely intelligent, she has no way of letting those around her know. Consequently, many of her peers believe she is unintelligent and unaware. When she finally learns how to communicate with new technology, her family is astounded and her peers mock her in disbelief. Melody spends the rest of the novel proving her worth and value to those around her.

This novel is an easy and quick read. The reader can sympathize with Melody, and roots for her success. Melody’s story is important because it provides a perspective that is often over-looked. When implementing this novel in a classroom, I suggest an age group no younger than 7th grade. Because this text revolves around physical and mental health conditions, the audience needs to be mature enough to address these issues with a seriousness that is conducive to an adequate learning environment. The goal is for the students to understand that there are not only people from different cultures and backgrounds, but also who have different abilities. Students will probably encounter peers in their own school that are in special education classes or be in a class with someone who needs academic accommodations. This novel serves to address those stories that we never look at, give students a deeper understanding of what it means to have a disability, and what one who has one is capable of if they have the proper tools and assistance. 

This novel can be paired with Mental Health Awareness Month in May. Melody’s story is a structured and successful bridge for mental and physical disabilities and their inclusion in classrooms. Melody finally finds success when she gains inclusion in a general education class. Her struggles with her peers ultimately lead to progression in her social group. There are many ways to encourage growth through this medium. For example, it would be convenient to match this novel with the introduction of research papers. As an educator, it’s important to consider different types of disabilities as well as those that don’t have a medical diagnosis, like being a slow reader or having a hard time understanding numbers. By providing these examples to your students, you could provide them with opportunities to research mental and physical disabilities of their choosing. This will not only strengthen their acceptance of differences that surround them, but also entice them into an interest in a foreign concept.

 Ideas for Lesson Plans:

-        Vocabulary projects

-        “In-Your-Shoes” Activities

-        Understand Melody’s Conditions: EX- Synthesia Video

[dreamingspace]

There is a subtle state most dedicated urban walkers know, a sort of basking in solitude -- a dark solitude punctuated with encounters as the night sky is punctuated with stars. In the country one's solitude is geographical -- one is altogether outside of society, so solitude has a sensible geographical explanation, and then there is a kind of communion with the nonhuman. In the city, one is alone because the world is made up of strangers, and to be a stranger surrounded by strangers, to walk along silently bearing one's secrets and imagining those of the people one passes, is among the starkest of luxuries. This uncharted identity with its illimitable possibilities is one of the distinctive qualities of urban living, a liberatory state for those who come to emancipate themselves from family and community expectation, to experiment with subculture and identity. It is an observer's state, cool, withdrawn, in with senses sharpened, a good state for anybody who needs to reflect or create. In small doses melancholy, alienation, and introspection are among life's most refined pleasures. (186)

"The Solitary Stroller and the City," Rebecca Solnit

[dreamingspace]

So what makes a space a place? Place is alive with ghosts. It is an architecture capable of housing deceased loves, for and beyond living memory. All cities are necropoli.

Diane Chisholm, Edmonton On Location: River City Chronicles

[dreamingspace]

one of my blog posts for my english 380 class. I adore that I went totally obscure and off-topic with this one, and found out that other people have been thinking about it, too. <3

[dreamingspace]

The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organisations, no matter how panoptic they may be: it is neither foreign to them (it can take place only within them) nor in conformity with them (it does not receive its identity from them). It creates shadows and ambiguities within them. It insets its multitudinous references and citations into them (social models, cultural mores, personal factors). Within them it is itself the effect of successive encounters and occasions that constantly alter it and make it the other's blazon: in other words, it is like a peddler, carrying something surprising, transverse or attractive compared with the usual choice. These diverse aspects provide the basis of a rhetoric. They can even be said to define it.

Michel de Certeau, "Walking in the City" (it's impossible to pull a short de Certeau quote, okay)

[dreamingspace]

The ordinary practitioners of the city ... they are walkers ... whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban "text" they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of the spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other's arms. The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognised poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility. It is as though the practices organising a bustling city were characterised by their blindness. The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other. Escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface ...

Michel de Certeau, "Walking in the City"