Have you read/seen To Kill a Mockingbird?

[framefolly]

My eighth graders are reading To Kill a Mockingbird. Right after Thanksgiving I will lead a two-week media unit that includes showing the movie version with Gregory Peck. I have too many ideas, and I want to pare them down. If you have time to help me by responding to some of these questions, I'd really appreciate it!

- As an adult, what do you wish

Comments

[zanthinegirl]

We did something similar with To Kill A Mockingbird at about the same age (though it might have been 9th grade; can't swear to it 25 years later!). It was the first time I'd read the book, and we followed it with the movie too. I've reread it a couple of time since then; once in college, and again last spring

[framefolly]

Thank you for sharing your experience so thoughtfully! It's very helpful to me, especially these parts:

"...it was far and away one of the best books we read that year. It was compelling, and it was grown up in a way that most of the books we read in middle school weren't. It dealt with important issues and it was one of the few middle school books that I had to really think about, you know? It was beautifully written, though I'm not sure how much of that I appreciated as an 8th grader! It also gave a real sense of it's setting."

and

"I wish I'd understood more about the social setting before reading and/ or watching To Kill a Mockingbird. Though I wonder in retrospect if my teacher did that on purpose so the racial issues would have more impact?"

Would you mind if I shared this with my students? I might not have time to do so, but I like having some extra "treats" in my pocket just in case the class needs it :) .

[zanthinegirl]

Help yourself! Always happy to contribute to teaching a great book/ movie.

Your post inspired me to track down the movie BTW. I watched it last night. I don't think I'd seen it since middle school; it really is amazing. I still think the book's better but it's a close thing :D

[slaymesoftly]

Wow - when I was a kid (especially given that we lived overseas for over 5 years) there wasn't much TV. I don't know that I learned anything - other than, for a while, that you hear about news events and actually (sometimes) see them happen. Movies were for entertainment and you watched them in the movie theater with everyone else

[framefolly]

Thank you! I'm learning a lot about the traces that school readings leave in people's lives :) . Thank you especially for pointing out what you think it's important -- # 1-4 -- I think so, too :) .

Would you mind if I shared these comments with my students? I might not have time, but I think they could benefit from hearing them:

"I read TKaM when I was in high school...I thought it was very good - although at that point in my life, I probably would not have read it on my own. A few years later, yes. And I did reread it as an adult, and still thought it was good, although perhaps didn't identify with Scout quite so easily.

Yes, definitely saw the movie...Thought it was excellent and really did the book justice (which isn't all that common). I think there may have been a few things I understood better after seeing the movie, but I can't tell you now what they were."

[slaymesoftly]

Sure, knock yourself out. :) If you want to tell them when it was being taught in high school (in the honors English classes)it would have been very early 60's.

[shipperx]

I grew up in the town it was written about. Maycomb= Monroeville. Nell Lee (Harper is her middle name) still lives in town. (Unfortunately in a nursing home. She's close to blind and had a stroke a couple of years ago.) They copied our 'old Courthouse's interior for the movie ('New Courthouse' was built in the 60s). And when I was a kid the kindergarten was what remained of Nell Lee's elementary school. We even still had the huge 100+ year old oak tree out back until it was cut in the 1980s

[shipperx]

Oh and my mom still remembers meeting Gregory Peck when he came to town researching the role .

[shipperx]

'criers' heh. 'friends' and spell check 'fixed' it.

At any rate, I read the book in 7th or 8th grade. I don't remember which and I've seen the movie a few times (plus the town holds the trial in play form almost every year).

[enigmaticblues]

I remember really enjoying the book, but mostly I wanted to be Atticus. So, it's probably not surprising where I wound up.

The biggest takeaway for me, I think, is that a book (or other media) can say true things without being true itself, if that makes any sense. You should enjoy what you consume, but you shouldn't necessarily turn your brain off, or at least, you shouldn't unthinkingly turn your brain off. And that you can use the true things that something says to search for more information, for more fact, if that's something that interests you.

[zandperl]

"To Kill a Mockingbird" is the first book I can specifically remember not finishing, and to this day I haven't finished it. (Though it's on my mental to-read list now.) At the time I remember just not liking the writing style, but looking back on it today I think if I had seen how it was relevant to reality I might've been more interested. Because the relevance of the debate over whether to teach evolution in schools wasn't at all evident to me as a schoolkid in NYC in the 1980s. To me then it was a debate that was over and done with

[framefolly]

Hmm...TKaM is about racial segregation and Jim Crow injustices, among other topics. Creationism v. evolution, however, doesn't come up. I think you might be thinking of the play "Inherit the Wind," which is also set in the South and often assigned in school. I appreciate your comments about relevance, though -- I think students are more likely to "finish the book" if they feel like it has something to do with their lives right now.

[zandperl]

Hah! I probably didn't finish that one either! :-P I think they both came up for me in late elementary school, I didn't enjoy the writing style of either, they both were about the South, they both were from the perspective of a kid (I think?), and they didn't seem relevant to my life, and that's probably why I've conflated them.

Racism and its origins also didn't feel relevant to me growing up. I was raised to believe that racism was over and done with, a thing that was finally stamped out in my parents' generation. And I believed it too until grad school.