Advanced Placement Classroom

Lord of the Flies

Timothy J. Duggan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000493535
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Advanced Placement Classroom: Lord of the Flies takes a fresh approach to a school classic by offering an abundance of student-centered classroom ideas. A large menu of rigorous choices will engage both teachers and students in the process of building interpretations through close reading, collaboration, and active learning. Clearly explained prereading, reading, and post-reading tasks help students to develop their individual encounters with the text and then enter the conversation of literary scholars. Additional chapters explore the interface between the world of the text and the text in the world, including technology integration. Sample AP prompts and essay analyses are included. Grades 9-12

CHAPTER 1
“Aren’t there any grownups at all?”:
Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003232841-1

Welcome to Advanced Placement Classroom: Lord of the Flies. If you have purchased this book, I can assume that you are about to embark on a literary journey to an uncharted tropical island, and you are interested in reinforcing your own ideas with other possibilities to create a valuable learning experience for your students. I hope and trust that you will find classroom activities here that will enhance the journey. How you use the book will be entirely up to you, as my own approach has been to generate a number of ideas, to contextualize and describe those ideas in clear language so that you can reproduce them as you see fit, and to align those activities to standards-based learning objectives.

Lord of the Flies is a cautionary tale. If we don't see it as such, there may not be much point in reading it, other than to marvel at the writing itself or to depress ourselves with the notion that humanity is doomed by its own bestial nature. I don't believe that to be true, and although Golding commented publicly that his desire was to "trace the defects in the characters back to the defects in man's nature" (qtd. in Epstein, p. 238), I do not think everyone interpreted Golding's statement accurately. Golding could not give us this masterpiece and the subsequent brilliant novels he produced if he thought there was no hope for humanity. He couldn't have produced a luminous character like Simon, a baffled but decent boy like Ralph, an intelligent but bullied individual like Piggy, or a troubled and addictive personality like Jack if he thought there was no hope for them to make the right decisions and thrive in their troublesome situation. But of course, these fictional boys do not make the right decisions in the text and, thus, things do not work out so well for them. It is we, the readers, who are left to piece out what might have been different and what Golding's parable (or fable, or myth) means for us.

My own desire to write this book connects to my experience teaching it to high school students and training preservice teachers to teach it in their own secondary English classrooms. The story and the characters last in one's imagination long after the reading experience itself. One reads this story with the sort of horrible fascination that one feels watching tragedy on the theatre stage. The story's main characters have become modern archetypes of the personalities they represent, and there are plenty of situations that arise in the story that allow us to discuss with our students concepts of empathy, democracy, shared responsibility, discretion, and cooperation. The book is also remarkably contemporary. Although readings that connect the book to the "darkness of man's heart" and that examine the function of order and society in opposition to nature and wildness have been around for decades, the book finds new currency in our concerns about bis I lying in schools, our preoccupation with conflicts that arise in reality television shows like Survivor, and our ongoing examination of our relationship with (and potential destruction of) nature.

Reading as Experience

Reading Lord of the Flies or any other serious novel within the context of a school classroom constitutes an educational experience, and, as teachers, we design that educational experience for our students. What they actually experience cannot be exactly what we imagine or design, but our influence is enormous and may dictate whether their encounter with the text is beneficial or boring. John Dewey (1938) claimed that the best sort of educational experience was the one that led the learner to want to have another, similar experience. In other words, we can never assess our success solely on what our students do at the time they encounter the work under study. We will need to look ahead to subsequent behaviors to see whether reading and studying Lord of the Flies has made our students more or less willing to pursue new encounters with difficult novels.

A friend of mine who teaches English found out that I was writing this book, and he sent me an e-mail that said:

Don't forget to include the fact that Samneric represent the interchangeable, gullible common man who is stupidly attracted to the superficial qualities of evil ("Can we wear paint, too?") and weakly cowed by evil's brutal power ("We have to go, Roger is coming.") They also let the civilization signal die out so they can run around and poke pigs with sticks, (Johnny Knoxville, anyone?) (C. Hewalt, personal communication, September 13, 2012)

I admire the critical acumen of my colleague and friend, and his comment demonstrates how strongly many teachers feel about the lessons to be learned from Golding's novel. But his setup implies that I as the teacher should give my students an interpretation that he considers vital to the overall meaning of the book. And this is precisely what I encourage you to think about in your own teaching. I would love for my students to generate an interpretive statement like the one above on their own, but if I give that statement or that interpretation to them, then they have little or no stake in it. They are only witnessing my (or in this case, my friend's) interpretive skill. As Louise Rosenblatt (Blau, 2003) stated, taking someone else's interpretation as your own is like having someone eat your dinner for you. One of the most difficult things for English teachers to do is refrain from burdening students with our well-trained readings of cherished texts. What we often do is take a Socratic approach and design questioning sessions that ultimately lead to the interpretations we value, such as "What about Samneric?" ... "Are they interchangeable?" ... "How responsible are they?" ... and so on, until students eventually arrive at our interpretation or retreat entirely from the process, leaving us to answer our own questions. I hope to offer productive classroom discussion tips that will lead students to take a stake in their interpretations without coercion, while allowing teachers to share their thoughts as well.

We may also hope that our students will develop a positive stance toward the book so that they may encounter it at a later time and eagerly dive back into the story with whatever perspectives they have gained in the intervening years of their lives. We cannot give our students a comprehensive experience with the book, nor should we attempt such a feat. Such is true with any great literature in the classroom, from Shakespeare to Golding. Our students cannot explore every possible reading of the book, and many teachers make the mistake of loading the students down with every symbol, every metaphor, and every interpretation, which leaves nothing for later discovery and overwhelms even the most gifted readers. We can teach them to encounter the text with determination and rigor, with the understanding that the book offers deeper treasures for future readings. As a teacher, you may have productive, engaging discussions and readings with your students, leading to their production of complex and reasonable writing or project work. Th is book offers ideas to support preparation for reading, the initial encounters with the text, and follow-up study and student work.

Reading a Text Versus Studying a Text

We must acknowledge that, in the classroom, students don't simply read for pleasure, and so merely reading Lord of the Flies is not sufficient for your lesson designs. Many teachers are so happy when they have success getting students to do one simple reading of a text that they forget the point of rereading, of probing, of taking bits and pieces of the text and poring over them over and over to build an interpretation. They forget the value of examining secondary informative and argumentative texts to spark discussion of themes and other literary elements. The activities and potential assignments described in this book will help your students to systematically read, think about, discuss, and write about the book in ways that open up analysis and build their confidence.

Part of studying texts is also the building of a literary vocabulary and a familiarity with the processes and language associated with literary analysis and criticism. Lord of the Flies offers students an example of a novel that fully engages the traditional literary elements, and while you as the teacher may be introducing or reinforcing your students' understanding of literary terms like "symbolism" or "setting" through their study of Lord of the Flies, the greater benefit of using this book will be to make the language of literary elements and devices operational for the students. In other words, it is not enough to use the examples in the novel to teach about symbolism or irony or setting—students must own those terms by using them appropriately, something the activities in this book will encourage and develop.

In this era of instant access, students can easily find a large number of prefabricated readings of the text. I believe that students should always encounter literature first from an open intellectual space, as opposed to seeing a work first through the eyes of another's analysis. That said, the study of a work of literature should never end with one's personal and often naive stance. For that reason, we will look at a number of critical sources (see Chapter 6) to further our study of the book.

The Book, Historically

When Golding's novel first appeared in 1954, it did not make much of a splash (Carey, 2009), but by the early 1960s, the book had replaced Salinger's Catcher in the Rye as the most popular book on college campuses (Time, 1962). It has enjoyed a steady readership and popularity ever since, and it has become a staple in the canon of required school texts in English classes. It also continues to appear on syllabi for college courses in everything from modern literature to sociology to political science. While most Golding scholars consider either Pincher Martin(1956) or The Spire (1964) to be his masterpiece, Lord of the Flies continues to be Golding's most popular and culturally pervasive work. The book and its author have engendered so much criticism and analysis among the academy that Golding himself felt compelled to jump into the fray and explain the work on several occasions (e.g., Biles, 1970), and Golding eventually wrote a fictional parody of the relationship between a writer and his literary biographer in The Paper Men (1984).

Although Harold Bloom (2008) dismissed Lord of the Flies as a period piece, wedded to the post-World War II era that produced it, the book continues to haunt readers and students. Perhaps the book remains in school curricula not only due to its use of established literary elements, such as symbol, but because it is both accessible and challenging to young readers. Another reason to teach the book is that the new Common Core State Standards clarify goals for literacy education and emphasize encounters with complex fictional and informational texts. Lord of the Flies and its accompanying volume of critical analysis provide the balance between literary and informational text that the Common Core advocates.

Common Core State Standards

The Common Core State Standards articulate a vision for college and career readiness across core subjects in primary and secondary school curricula. Developed by a partnership between the National Governor's Association and school reform groups such as Achieve, Inc., the standards shift the focus of literacy away from discrete individual skills toward higher level competencies across domains of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and language. The standards are stated and explained on the Common Core website at http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/CCRA/R.

The Common Core State Standards for grades K-12 reading consist of 10 anchor standards split among four areas of concern for both literary and informational texts. The first three standards are listed under the heading "Key Ideas and Details" and concern themselves with the practice of close reading (including explicit decoding and inference making), citing evidence in text to support an interpretation, and tracing development of characters, ideas, and themes throughout a text. The second heading is "Craft and Structure," and these standards focus on specific textual elements such as vocabulary, literal and figurative meaning, text structure, and point of view. The third heading is "Integration of Knowledge and Ideas." Contained here are competencies in comparing texts, analyzing textual ideas in broader contexts, and considering the connection between genre and meaning. Finally, "Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity" (Standard 10) addresses the goal of developing students' ability to read both literary and informational texts of increasing complexity with increasing independence. Specific benchmarks for how these competencies are manifested through assessment at different grade levels are stated under the separate tabs of "Literature" and "Informational Text."

A similar approach has been taken for the Common Core State Standards for writing, speaking and listening, and language. Headings have been constructed for each, with stated standards distributed underneath and specific grade-level benchmarks provided. I encourage you to familiarize yourself with these standards as soon as possible, even if your state and district have not implemented them, as they are driving much of the new textbook and curriculum material being created today.

In this book, I identify the connection between specific activities and Common Core State Standards using the signi...