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Book Cover

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This story is an autobiography, it is about a young girl (Jeannette) and her family. Her family has lived in poverty all of her life. They are constantly on the move, because her father is constantly losing his job. Her father is an alcoholic and her mother isn't always present. Her mother lives in her own little world of painting. She is licensed to be a teacher and does sometimes have a teaching job throughout the story, but is mostly a stay at home mom. Rex (the father) has a vision of one day building a glass castle for his family. There are times throughout the book that Jeannette and her siblings have some stability. They lived in Nevada for a while. Rex had a stable job and food was constant. He eventually lost his job and they were on the move again. The last place/home they lived together as family was in Welch, West Virginia. There the children dreamed of moving to New York so they could start new lives and get out of poverty. Three of the four children were successful in getting out of poverty. Jeannette was the only one to go to college and graduate.

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I thought this was a great idea for a high school glass. "In this Text to Text, we ask students to reflect on the ways individual stories might shape or change conventional beliefs about homelessness." (nytimes)

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English Language Arts

A homeless woman in New York City in December 2015. Related Article Credit... Andrew Burton/Getty Images

Browse all our Text to Text lesson plans.
Since its publication in 2005, "The Glass Castle," Jeannette Walls's gritty memoir of her upbringing in a dysfunctional and transient family, has become a beloved and sometimes controversial text in high school classes.

In her New York Times review of the book, Francine Prose wrote:

Readers will marvel at the intelligence and resilience of the Walls kids. We root for them when they escape, one by one, to New York City, where Jeannette attended college, married and found work as a magazine columnist. And we begin to fear for them all over again when their parents follow them to Manhattan, where Rex and Rose Mary exhaust their children's patience and hospitality and wind up homeless, eventually living as squatters in an abandoned building on the Lower East Side.

The subject of homelessness is often discussed in the nameless, faceless abstract; Ms. Walls's vivid account of her parents' life on the streets portrays the issue with complexity and dimension.

In this Text to Text, we ask students to reflect on the ways individual stories might shape or change conventional beliefs about homelessness. We pair a passage from "The Glass Castle" in which Ms. Walls describes her parents' experiences with homelessness with a 2015 New York Times photo feature, Life on the Streets, which presents interviews with people living in homeless encampments across New York City.

In "The Glass Castle," Ms. Walls's parents, Rex and Rose Mary, defy stereotypes by insisting that being homeless is "an adventure." The book opens with a powerful scene set in a New York City taxi when adult Jeannette spots her mother rummaging through trash on the street. In "Chapter IV: New York City," we learn that the Walls parents have followed their children to New York, living first in a van, then on the street and eventually in a squat on the Lower East Side. The first excerpt below comes from this period in Ms. Walls's life, when her parents first become homeless in New York.

To produce "Life on the Streets," the reporter Nate Schweber and Joshua Bright, a photographer, visited homeless encampments across New York City. They interviewed dozens of people, from teenagers to those in their 70s. Mr. Schweber writes, "Some had serious medical conditions; one woman was pregnant. They spoke of job losses, mental health issues, substance abuse and problems with the city shelter system that drove them to the streets." You'll see four of those profiles and photographs republished below.

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Key Question
How do personal accounts shape our views of homelessness?

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Activity Sheets: As students read and discuss, they might take notes using one or more of the three graphic organizers (PDFs) we have created for our Text to Text feature:

* Comparing Two or More Texts

* Double-Entry Chart for Close Reading

* Document Analysis Questions

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Text 1: Excerpt from "The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls

Mom and Dad called regularly from pay phones to check up on us, and once or twice a month, we'd all get together at Lori's.

"It's not such a bad life," Mom told us after they'd been homeless for a couple of months.

"Don't you worry a lick about us," Dad added. "We've always been able to fend for ourselves."

Use the following link to Google Books to continue reading the excerpt. It ends with the passage below.
Text 2: Excerpts from "C. J. and Tiffany Dillinger Life on the Streets" by Nate Schweber

"I think that maybe sometimes people get the lives they want."

"Are you saying homeless people want to live on the streets?" Professor Fuchs asked. "Are you saying they don't want warm beds and roofs over their heads?"

"Not exactly," I said. I was fumbling for words. "They do. But if some of them were willing to work hard and make compromises, they might not have ideal lives, but they could make ends meet."

Professor Fuchs walked around from behind her lectern. "What do you know about the lives of the underprivileged?" she asked. She was practically trembling with agitation. "What do you know about the hardships and obstacles that the underclass face?"

The other students were staring at me.

"You have a point," I said.

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Image

C. J. and Tiffany Dillinger cut a tender image in the midst of hard circumstance early on Thursday as they spooned together on Broadway on a bed made from pedestrian plaza chairs that they had dressed with a foam mat, sheets and pillows, cocooned in corrugated cardboard.

They were shaken awake just before 7 a.m. by a security guard for the Gramercy District Alliance. As they stuffed their pillows and blankets into a ratty rolling suitcase, they said they had been homeless since their house in Old Bridge, N.J., was foreclosed on a year ago.

They had fallen behind on their mortgage. Then they were both laid off. She had a shipping and receiving position. He was a construction worker.

"We're trying to get some housing," Ms. Dillinger said. "I don't want to be separated from him."

They married 16 years ago, and homelessness is the hardest challenge they have faced, Ms. Dillinger said. They started taking public transportation into New York City in July because they heard it was a more manageable place to be homeless.

"Believe it or not, there's more resources here," Ms. Dillinger said. "Soup kitchens, places to eat. We came because we heard about a couples' shelter."

When they tried to get into the couples' shelter, however, they were denied. But Ms. Dillinger said, "I'd rather be out here than in shelters."

As Mr. Dillinger turned the walls from their previous night's room back into flattened cardboard and dropped it beside a curbside trash can, Ms. Dillinger's eyes misted.

"There's more resources for survival here," she said. "But I wouldn't call it living."

Jason Jones

"Being sober - it just didn't work for me," said Jason Jones, who is married and has a daughter on Long Island.

Mr. Jones said he served in the Army and once did a stint as a fund-raiser for a congressional candidate. It was around 2006 that alcohol began to take control of his life, he said, along with what he described as a desire to be more aware of "what's really going on in the world, like in Rwanda," rather than the mundane daily duties of working a job and tending to his family.

He bounced around the homes of family members and girlfriends before finally winding up in the city shelter system, but he hated it. He spent time in the Wards Island shelter, and went on to share a house with other men from the shelter.

One of the roommates took him on a walk through McCarren Park, where he met a group of people who hang out around the northwest corner. He fell in with them quickly and has spent his summer with them. But he is already thinking about the winter, and said he intended to enroll in a back-to-work program and either make amends with family or re-enter the shelter system.

"If you're willing to work with the people inside it's not that bad," he said. "It is just perseverance, with the winos."

Jerelyn Fisher

Jerelyn Fisher sat in a wheelchair early on Thursday under a building scaffolding, bathed in bright light, with newspapers spread across her lap. She rested her bare, badly swollen feet on a black suitcase. Trash bags were piled high around her, nearly bursting with her belongings.

Ms. Fisher lived for years in an apartment on Avenue D and Third Street. She taught sewing classes in New York City public housing and also in a fabric store until 2003.

"I just couldn't find another job," she said. "I became homeless and discovered a whole new way of living."

She has avoided the shelter system because she says she finds the other residents challenging.

"There are a lot of people who are upset and angry because they are homeless," she said.

She turned to religion to deal with the stresses of being homeless and now preaches to others.

"The biggest thing I've learned is how Satan has mistreated humans," she said. "I've learned that God Jehovah lives above us and you have to know how to pray if you're going to survive in this world."

Her plan for the winter is to wrap herself in double plastic bags, as she has done for years.

"It insulates you from the cold," she said. "Sometimes you get so hot inside you have to take off one of the bags."

Jose Morales

Jose Morales and his 17-year-old girlfriend, Kimberly Williams, who is five months pregnant, had built a shelter out of a blanket tethered to a fence, underneath the No. 4 train.

Mr. Morales said he grew up in a troubled home in the Bronx and eventually attended high school at a residential treatment center for drug and alcohol addiction. When he got out, he went into foster care with a family in Brooklyn, because his mother had been sent to prison on drug charges. He rebelled.

"I didn't want to listen, I didn't want to do no chores, I didn't want to obey no curfew," he said. "If I was able to go back right now, I'd apologize and fix it."

He was sent to another foster home in the Bronx. That was when he met Ms. Williams over Facebook. When she was kicked out of her home on Long Island after a fight with her grandmother, Mr. Morales allowed her to stay with him - a violation of house rules. They were both evicted.

They squatted on a rooftop in Brooklyn before taking up residence in their current location. They went to the city intake center in the Bronx for homeless families, but learned they were ineligible because they were not married or in a domestic partnership.

On Wednesday night, they huddled together on the sidewalk and watched a praying mantis crawl on the fence above their bed.

"I go around, I ask for a job here and there, but nobody's hiring," Mr. Morales said. "This isn't good for her, it isn't good for me."

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Questions for Writing and Discussion
1. What kinds of stereotypes exist about homeless people? Why do you think this is? How are they portrayed in media such as movies and television shows? How, if at all, do real people's stories differ from fictional portrayals?

2. Why do you think some critics have described Jeannette Walls's portrayal of homelessness as "complicated"? Do you agree? Why or why not? How would you describe Rex and Rose Mary Walls's experience of homelessness as it is described in this chapter? How does it compare to the people profiled in the "Life on the Street" feature?

3. Which "Life on the Street" profile elicited the strongest reaction for you? Why? Do the photos tell any stories that the profiles do not?

4. What are some of the issues and circumstances in the lives of the people featured in both texts that contributed to losing their permanent dwellings? What impression of homeless shelters do the texts offer? What other unifying themes or issues do you notice in the texts?

5. Both texts are written in the third person - Ms. Walls writes about her parents, not herself, in this section of the memoir, and Mr. Schweber chronicles his interviews with people on the street. Do you think these writings would have a different impact on the reader if they had been written in the first person? Why or why not?

6. Some readers of "The Glass Castle" have discussed the connections between homelessness, alcoholism and mental illness. When asked if her mother was mentally ill Ms. Walls responded that she doesn't know. What are your thoughts and impressions on this topic, based on what you have read?

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Going Further 1. Exploring New Forms of Itinerant Life: Millennial Homeless Culture

Investigate the new wave of young people who are homeless by choice. Many of them are skeptical of the system that they feel has left their parents high and dry, and they are rejecting conventional models of work, the trappings of materialism and consumerism, and the traditional notion of "home" to forge a new way of life.
2. On Memoir and Truth

Teach all or part of the lesson plan " In Service of the Story? Exploring Questions of Truth and Memoir." Discuss memoirs and family secrets, perhaps in light of these prompts:

* the quote from a 2013 New York Times Magazine interview in which Rose Mary Walls says of her daughter's memoir: "I enjoyed it," she said. "Though it has a completely different perspective from me."

* a recent book that explores what sometimes happens to memoirists after they have revealed the most intimate details of their lives.

* a recent article that notes, "[T]he family memoir genre reveals an ethical minefield of sibling conflicts, clashing memories and unwanted exposés."
3. Homeless Veterans

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates that 49,933 veterans are homeless on any given night. Why are the numbers so high? What kind of programs are in place to serve veterans in need? Investigate and report on current federal government plans to end homelessness among veterans.

4. Homelessness and Mental Illness

According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 20 to 25 percent of the homeless population in the United States suffers from some form of severe mental illness. The streets of New York City and other cities in the United States are home to thousands of people who suffer from mental illness, as well as alcoholism and other forms of addiction. As the number of homeless people rises, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is looking for solutions to help get people off the streets for good.

Debate the pros and cons of the mayor's supportive housing initiatives.
5. Squatters' Rights
In "The Glass Castle," once Jeannette's parents became squatters, she writes, "Mom thought I should be writing exposés about oppressive landlords, social injustice and the class struggle on the Lower East Side." Examine the history of squatters' rights, from the mid-1990s squatter evictions in New York City to the modern-day squatters who are forging new ways of life around the world.
6. "Glass Castle" as a Banned Book

Take a look at some of the places that have banned this book, and their reasons for doing so.

One of them is a 2014 incident in which a high school in Dallas, Tex. banned "The Glass Castle" from its reading list, along with Hermann Hesse's "Siddhartha," Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon" and others.

Here is what Ms. Walls said about the ban to the Dallas Morning News:

"My book has ugly elements to it, but it's about hope and resilience, and I don't know why that wouldn't be an important message," she said. "Sometimes you have to walk through the muck to get to the message."

Walls said teenage readers have told her the book gave them courage to overcome their own troubled childhood or seek help.

"A lot of teachers told me someone reported an abusive relative after reading it in my book. How valuable is that?" she said. "People tell me about their drug-addicted parents. There are so many complicated situations out there. And we can begin to give kids the tools they need to deal with it, if only to say, 'You are not alone.'"

But she said she respects and admires the

What do you think? Do you think your opinion might change if you were a parent, a teacher, or a school board member instead of a student?

Find many more resources for learning about banned books here.
_________ Related Resources
The American Place Theater "The Glass Castle" Teacher's Resource Guide (PDF)
"The Glass Castle" Reading Group Guide Jeannette Walls: By the Book The New York Times Topics Page: Homelessness

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Text to Text | 'The Glass Castle' and 'Life on the Streets' (Published 2016)

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English Language Arts Browse all our Text to Text lesson plans . Since its publication in 2005, "The Glass Castle," Jeannette Walls's gritty memoir of her upbringing in a dysfunctional and transient family, has become a beloved and sometimes controversial text in high school classes.

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The Glass Castle was turned into a movie in 2017.

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The Glass Castle Trailer #1 (2017) | Movieclips Trailers

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I would give this story 5 out of 5. I read this story because it was required for a class. I would recommend to anyone that is currently learning about poverty in a class or anyone who needs a good/interesting read!