Meanwhile,
we are gearing up for our next volume, Using
Informational Text to Teach The Great Gatsby. Gatsby remains one of those seminal texts of American education,
still read, like Mockingbird, by most
high school students in the United States.
Do
your students love this book? Does Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel still resonate in
2016?
If your answer to the former question is no and you are wavering in your answer to the latter question, think about those informational text connections that can draw out the relevance of this very historically-specific novel set during the Roaring Twenties and Prohibition and layered with now-obscure references to the Black Sox Scandal and bootlegging.
For example, Nicholas Kristof just published an opinion piece in The New York Times called “America’s Stacked Deck,” focused on the ways in which the current political campaigns reflect frustration with what Bernie Sanders calls the “rigged economy.” Kristof’s piece is a great way to make Gatsby relevant for students today.
1.
Kristof talks about the “structural unfairness
in America … A dumb rich kid is now more likely to graduate from college than a
smart poor kid.”
First of all, what
American high school kid doesn’t need to be thinking about this kind of
inequity? And how are we going to begin solving this issue if we don’t enlist
the great minds of our young people in thinking about it early and often?
Plus, Gatsby is
all about this issue of educational inequity. Who, within the novel, gets to go
to Yale? Why do you think they get to go there? Does the phrase “dumb rich kid”
resonate about any character? (Hint: one who went to Yale!) And why do you
think Gatsby spent only five months at Oxford, despite the opportunity for
education in Europe offered by the Armistice? Could his experience reflect on
the struggles of many under-represented students today at elite institutions?
(Have a student interested in this question? Point him/her to Jeff Hobbs’s The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace!) How does educational privilege
underwrite the trajectory of the different characters in Gatsby?
2. Kristof also talks about how “when societies
face economic pain, they sometimes turn to … scapegoats.”
Kristof is talking about refugees. But who are the scapegoats in Gatsby? How are different outsiders within the novel sacrificed to shore up the economic and social status quo? How does Tom Buchanan’s power depend on the takedown of Gatsby? Who else in the novel is forfeited to the needs of the elite? Why, given what he’s witnessed, do you think the young protagonist Nick Carraway is “haunted” by the East and chooses “to come back home”? What do you think this choice reflects about Fitzgerald’s view of the American privileged class?
3.
Kristof cites some experiments in social
psychology: one player in a Monopoly game begins with more money than others;
that wealthy player not only generally wins but he/she “lords it over others
and even grabs more pretzels from the communal bowl.”
This experiment encapsulates a beautiful explanation of the problem of entitlement, a critical
concept for adolescents of every social background to grapple with. Who, within
Gatsby, grabs more pretzels? How does
this Monopoly experiment explain that entitled behavior? In what ways have
these different characters been granted a leg up in comparison with others? And
crucially, who, in the novel, is punished for taking more pretzels and who is
allowed to grab away without any punishment?
A text like Gatsby should
be read by most high school students, but if we don’t draw out the issues of
entitlement, inequality, and scapegoating central to the text, we’ll have
missed our moment to talk with the next generation about the central issues of
our time.
No comments:
Post a Comment