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Resource 7: How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading by John Holt

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Resource 7: How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading by John Holt

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NCTE/CAEP Standard 7.1
AMLE Standard 5d

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Rationale for Resource 7: How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading by John Holt

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Rationale for Resource 7: How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading by John Holt

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NCTE/CAEP Standard 7.1
AMLE Standard 5d

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Resource 6:Middle School High Five: Strategies Can Triumph

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Resource 6:Middle School High Five: Strategies Can Triumph

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NCTE/CAEP Standard 5.1
AMLE Standard 4a

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Rationale for Resource 6: Middle School High Five: Strategies Can Triumph

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Rationale for Resource 6: Middle School High Five: Strategies Can Triumph

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NCTE/CAEP Standard 5.1
AMLE Standard 4a

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----A Long Way Gone - Ms Halkovic's Website

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This site is for the students of Ms. Halkovic at Masuk High School.

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NCTE/CAEP standard 5.4
AMLE standard 4d

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Resource 4: Babe in Arms by William Boyd, A book review on A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah (Newspaper Article)

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Resource 4: Babe in Arms by William Boyd, A book review on A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah (Newspaper Article)

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NCTE/CAEP standard 1.1
AMLE standard 1b

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What is it about African wars that is so disturbing? Why do they unsettle us so? We in the civilized West know all about bestial and mindless cruelty, as the events of 1939-45 graphically prove. And yet as we read about Darfur and Mogadishu today and recall Rwanda and Sierra Leone not long ago, or Biafra and Congo further back, we realize that these vicious, bitter African conflicts have left their trace on contemporary history, and on contemporary consciousness, in ways somehow different from the usual squalid reckoning that modern warfare encourages.

The great benefit of Ishmael Beah's memoir, "A Long Way Gone," is that it may help us arrive at an understanding of this situation. Beah's autobiography is almost unique, as far as I can determine - perhaps the first time that a child soldier has been able to give literary voice to one of the most distressing phenomena of the late 20th century: the rise of the pubescent (or even prepubescent) warrior-killer.

Beah was 12 years old when the civil war in Sierra Leone entered his life, in 1993. Sierra Leone, a former British colony in West Africa, sandwiched between Guinea and Liberia, suffered the usual post-independence rites of passage of corruption, unrest, military coups and gerrymandered elections. In the '90s, civil strife in Liberia prompted the rise of the R.U.F. (the Revolutionary United Front), a ragtag liberation army headed by a former corporal, Foday Sankoh, who took over the diamond mines in eastern Sierra Leone and whose brutal militia (with a horrible penchant for amputating hands) moved on toward the country's capital, Freetown. There is a historical chronology at the back of the book, but you will gain little idea of the internecine political struggle from Beah's account.

In a sense, however, this is beside the point. A 12-year-old is conscious only of immediate circumstances, and in Beah's case the arrival of the rebels in his small town meant sudden separation from his parents and months of indeterminate flight from danger with a handful of other boys. These terrified youngsters wandered aimlessly along jungle tracks, starving and desperate, harassed and suspected as they scrounged for food and tried to make sense of what was going on. Finally they reached the Atlantic Ocean, but, once again, fearful villagers sent them packing, and they were eventually recruited into the Sierra Leone Army as boy soldiers.

Given rudimentary training, an AK-47 and as many drugs as he could consume (amphetamines, marijuana and a toxic mix of cocaine and gunpowder called "brown brown"), Beah seems then to have gone on a two-year mind-bending killing spree, until he was rescued by some Unicef fieldworkers and sent to a rehabilitation center in Freetown. There, with counseling, care and attention, and the psychological ministrations of a kindly nurse named Esther, Beah's slow return to normality began, further augmented when he was sent to the United Nations with the task of explaining the lot of the child soldier to a baffled and concerned international community. He came to live in the United States, graduating from high school and Oberlin College. "A Long Way Gone" is his first, remarkable book.

It is interesting to try to comprehend what act of remembering is going on here. Who of us in our 20s could accurately summon up our day-by-day lives as preteens? As you read "A Long Way Gone," the details allow you to distinguish precise recall from autobiographical blur. Beah can remember the logo on the sneakers he is issued by the army. When he is captured by hostile villagers, he is released because he has a few rap cassettes on him (LL Cool J, Naughty by Nature, among others) and can mime the songs and dance to them. All this has the idiosyncratic ring of precisely remembered truth. But with lines like these, the effect is quite different: "We walked around the village and killed everyone who came out of the houses and huts." Or: "After every gunfight we would enter the rebel camp, killing those we had wounded." The horror is duly registered, but its vagueness and generality don't add up to moments of lived personal history. Indeed, Beah's time in the army, and the accounts of the patrols and firefights he was caught up in, represent only a small portion of this book. And who can blame him? The blood-lust of a drug-crazed adolescent on the rampage with an assault rifle would challenge the descriptive powers of James Joyce. Beah confesses to slitting the throat of a trussed prisoner, and writes lines like: "I angrily pointed my gun into the swamp and killed more people. I shot everything that moved." If these and similar passages are to be given credence, his personal body count must total many dozens. Such knowledge is shocking, but it's the reader's imagination that delivers the cold sanguinary shudder, not the author's boilerplate prose. It is a vision of hell that Beah gives us, one worthy of Hieronymus Bosch, but as though depicted in primary colors by a naïve artist.

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war crimes  genocide and crimes against humanity

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long way gone  a: memoirs of a boy soldier (book)

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A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier - By Ishmael Beah - Books - Review

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What is it about African wars that is so disturbing? Why do they unsettle us so? We in the civilized West know all about bestial and mindless cruelty, as the events of 1939-45 graphically prove.

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Rationale for Resource 4: Babe in Arms by William Boyd, A book review on A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah (Newspaper Article)

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Rationale for Resource 4: Babe in Arms by William Boyd, A book review on A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah (Newspaper Article)

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NCTE/CAEP standard 1.1
AMLE standard 1b

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NCTE/CAEP standard 4.3
AMLE standard 4b

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Resource 3: CSET Response Writing Strategy

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Resource 3: CSET Response Writing Strategy

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NCTE/CAEP standard 4.3
AMLE standard 4b

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C-SET Response Writing Strategy - Eighth Grade Reading

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8th Grade Reading, Morgan County Middle School, Mrs. Jackson, Reading, Homework, Discussions, Homework, Online lessons, Extra help, communicating with your teacher.

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Resource 2: Strategies for Teaching Inference (Professional Journal Article)

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Resource 2: Strategies for Teaching Inference (Professional Journal Article)

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NCTE/CAEP standard 3.6
AMLE standard 4b

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Using Literature to Teach Inference Across the Curriculum

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Rationale for Resource 2: Strategies for Teaching Inference (Professional Journal Article)

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Rationale for Resource 2: Strategies for Teaching Inference (Professional Journal Article)

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NCTE/CAEP standard 3.6
AMLE standard 4b

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Rationale for Resource 2 Strategies for teaching inference (professional journal article)

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Rationale for Resource 1: Engaging the Adolescent Learner: Checking for Understanding Continuous Formal Assessments. 

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Rationale for Resource 1: Engaging the Adolescent Learner: Checking for Understanding Continuous Formal Assessments. 

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NCTE/CAEP standard 3.6
AMLE standard 4c

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Resource 1: Engaging the Adolescent Learner: Checking for Understanding Continuous Formal Assessments. 

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Resource 1: Engaging the Adolescent Learner: Checking for Understanding Continuous Formal Assessments. 

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NCTE/CAEP standard 3.6
AMLE standard 4c