Lisa Napell Dicksteen February 17, 2005

Thoughts About Teaching Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt

One of the values to be extracted from this text is the opportunity to teach narrative, rather than analytical, abstract, or argumentative writing. The latter is generally privileged in schools and is thus the most-taught form of writing. Narrative is thought to be something kids arrive already able to do -- at least in terms of thinking and speaking, so it is not taught often -- sometimes not at all. This is a false and potentially harmful dichotomy, as well as an erroneous and potentially harmful pedagogy.

The value of narrative is that it can teach its writer about his or her self in a way that literary analysis, even in its most virulently reader-response form, simply cannot. Narrative can be a learning tool that allows even somewhat reluctant writers access to success.

If an assignment requires research into one's own family background, not in the "where was grandma born?" sense, but in the "I remember when…" sense, then the child writer is the expert, and no one can make them "wrong." If their research into the more formal aspects of their family history is used to inform their writing, rather than as the reason for their writing, I think students will be more able to tap into their inherent story-telling abilities.

Considering the possibility of invasion of privacy or other reasons for not being forthcoming about one's family life, the assignment might include a note that the memory can be brief and happy -- even the most miserable child probably has a moment or two of sunshine. It should also not require the memory to have taken place at home or with any specific family member -- asking all kids to write about a happy time with dad or grandma immediately assumes memories that might not exist for children with absent or abusive fathers, no living grandparents, or no access to whoever you have selected for them.

In this light, the tone of McCourt's book is important. Here is a guy who obviously had a miserable childhood of Dickensian proportion, yet the story is recounted without bitterness or rancor. He maintains the voice of the child -- this is the way it is, and that's it, nothing one can do but go along as best you can. The inherent optimism of the child comes through, even though the story is being written by an adult who can clearly see that the things that seemed so obviously true (the idea that adults understand everything, the ultimate "rightness" of everything his parents and teachers tell him) are not true at all.

In considering truth, we could then discuss how accurate McCourt's memory really is. Do the students think he really recalls these conversations and the thoughts he had as a tiny child verbatim? Does it matter if he doesn't? How much can he reconstruct from vague memory and still maintain that the book is truth rather than a fictionalization of his childhood? Who decided these things? This should provoke some heated discussion among students with differing opinions about how to answer these questions. Perhaps it will alter their feelings about their own narrative -- maybe a second narrative assignment would be appropriate at this point, or maybe this conversation should precede the initial project.

Returning to the concept of tone, it might be interesting to talk to the students about how McCourt creates the tone in his book, and whether it adds to their own emotional engagement with the story, detracts from it, or leaves them ambivalent -- and why they think that is. This conversation would be scaffolded with review of specific scenes that are interleaved with the observations and thoughts and fears of McCourt as a child -- which we as readers can see from a more mature vantage. The scene in which McCourt's innocence of the concept of gravity results in his brother's injury on the seesaw is a good example. Here McCourt thinks his brother is going to die -- and that it's his fault, and no one tells him any differently until the very end when his father comforts him. Students might be asked to re-write the scene from the POV of the brother, the father, the mother, McCourt as an adult rather than a child. What would be lost or gained by hearing the story from a McCourt who let his readers know right away that he realized that it was an accident, that his brother was not seriously injured, that there was no connection between his brother's bleeding and that of the dead dog in the street? Students might be asked to find another scene in the book that would be dramatically different if told from the POV of another character, or if McCourt had told it in his "adult" voice.

Students might then be asked to rework their own narrative from the POV of someone else who was present at the time. How might the story's "facts" change? How might someone else have felt about the incident? Why might they have seen things differently? Is one version more "right" or "better" than the other? Why or why not?

All these exercises are meant to bring the student's attention to the value of narrative writing. Within the scope of this unit, I would be able to address practical issues of writing such as word choice, vocabulary, and other sentence-level mechanics, while working on the higher order issues of perspective, continuity, clarity, coherence, dramatic tension, description, engaging the reader, dialogue, and more.