Thomas = Fiction

My 6th graders scored low in their ability to recognize "Author's Purpose" on their recent English diagnostic test, so I have been tasked with trying to get them to think of writing as having an audience and an intent. While the goal is to get them to see why an author would include a certain paragraph, I am starting out by oversimplifying the three main reasons that anyone would undertake writing for an audience: to entertain, to inform, or to persuade. In the course of the lesson, we discussed Genre and how different types of writing often naturally lend themselves to favor one of those purposes. Non-fiction, I told them, is more likely to be purely written to inform than fiction would be, etc. Anyway, I had some writing excerpts on powerpoint and we were taking turns guessing what the purpose of those different types of writing might be. One example came up and it was something in the vein of "Thomas got up and looked out the window. The sun was shining and he had a good feeling about the fishing trip he had planned with his friends..." The piece went on for a while, describing Thomas' trip and his friends.
I called on one of my students and asked him, "What is the main purpose of this writing?"
"To entertain." He replied confidently. 
"Good. How do you know that?" I probed. 
"Because of Thomas," he said. 
"... Thomas?"
"Yeah, it has to be fiction if it has Thomas in it."
"Couldn't there be a real story about a character named Thomas?" I asked. 
He looked at me as if I were saying an obvious question, a bad joke. 
"There is no such thing as a talking train."

Ah. Apparently he had never heard he name Thomas before except in relation to the tank engine. So yes, I could see why the idea that Thomas could be real jus sounded absolutely absurd. Then again, I am surprised that he didn't think it was weird that Thomas did things like: get out of bed, go downstairs, go fishing... 

Comments

Jenn said…
Brilliant! That is exactly how Isaiah would perceive the story, though, it would seem perfectly natural to him that Thomas got out of bed, etc.
25/10/11 08:20
Kenny said…
I want to be in Junior High again. In high school once a teacher asked if any of us could explain what "Irony" meant, I raised my hand, surprised that no one else knew this basic information. The teacher called on me and I answered, in all sincerity: "when you make a shirt straight, but running an iron over it." Luckily, the class laughter was because they thought I was being funny and boosted my popularity...
2/11/11 13:56
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Things I think in the city on the verge of winter

Winter is almost here. You can never tell for sure at this time of the year. One day it is warm, the next it is cold. But for the past couple of weeks, the Fall has been wrestling, and losing, to Winter. The mornings start out very cold, and slowly the day starts to warm a bit as the sun comes out. But the Cold stands patiently in the shadows, hidden from the sun's warmth, waiting for you to walk into the shade of a building or tree to show you how cold the air really is and remind you to bring a scarf. Today was especially chilly. Even our apartment made me wrap up a little tighter. It also made me close some of the windows that we had wide open. Our whole building is heated with a giant coal furnace in the basement that tends to turn our humble abode into a living inferno. We balance this out by opening windows. It is a terrible waste of energy, but we have no control over the heating. I read that madrid still has over 2000 buildings running their heating off coal. It is terribly...
Read more

Snowmelt demands movement

The sun is out again today. The snow has all but melted except for in the abandoned lots where they piled it up several stories high; but even those piles are melting, leaving behind all of the grime that was plowed up with the snow and rivulets of water running towards the nearest gutter. The fact that the water reaches the drain is quite a feat. Just weeks ago it would have frozen halfway across the sidewalk... and lain in waiting for an unsuspecting jogger. But, as I said before, the sun is out now, the temperatures are up, and the ice is nowhere to be seen. I am running out of excuses to avoid jogging, if you will permit the pun. I am in some of the worse shape of my life and I don't particularly feel good about it. Those of you who have known me for most of my life know that being "in shape" was never really been a priority of mine until recently. In high school I looked for ways to do the least amount of work possible in P.E class. When we played sports, I chose t...
Read more

Blogs

I remember when I started blogging. I think I was one of the first people I know to start blogging. Dont get me wrong, it was a cultural phenomenon back 4 years ago when I began, but none of my friends really did it. And then all of a sudden a bunch of us did. We all kept it up for a while, some came and went, but I had a pretty vibrant blogging community. Tonight I found myself checking my friends blogs and finding only abandoned websites for the most part. It kind of kills a lot of the fun of blogging for me. So I guess this post is a bit of a salute to all the blogs around me during this time: So I started thinking of all the people that had blogs I liked that stopped: -Jen -Erin Kidd (though she kept it up for a very short time) -Rebecca Wood (though it seems like she may start up again) -Kenny -Evangeline -Chris Cherene Or the ones that never really started up in the first place: -Charles And then there are the ones that I wish would write more often: -Ed Rand -Aitor -Erin Davidso...
Read more