I've finished reading Chapter 2, and I will do my best to post an entry on that chapter sometime in the next couple of days. Meanwhile, I've had a couple of ideas for discussion items. These are just topics we may (or may not) discuss either here or during our meeting this coming Wednesday. I wanted to do something to get the ball rolling again.
1) What do you think of the image on the book's cover? Is it well chosen? Can we analyze it? I'm sure the authors (and/ or designers, if any were involved) had many pictures of boys to choose from. So why did they pick *this* boy? Why *this* image?
I was prompted to ask this question by my father (who happens, annoyingly enough, to be a professor of educational psychology)...so I probably don't really deserve credit for raising this. He was visiting and picked up the book. He pointed to the picture and said "This is GREAT! LOOK at this guy!" and started analyzing it.
2) In the article titled "On Not Being Only One Thing: Book Clubs in the Writing Classroom" (we read this for class a few weeks ago), Rona Kaufman and Lee Torda suggest that book clubs will work best if the books under discussion are "substantial, fictional texts" (273). They quote Salvatori (whose piece just happens to have been assigned to us for this week!):
...students' descriptions of difficulties almost inevitably identify a crucial feature of the text they are reading and contain in nuce the interpretative move necessary to handle them. They might say for example that they had a 'difficulty' with a text because it presented different and irreconcilable positions on an issue--their 'difficulty' being in fact an accurate assessment of that text's argument. (qtd. Kaufman and Torda 273)So, what do you think? Does Reading Don't Fix No Chevy's present enough difficulty? And/ or, if we want to consider this issue more broadly, do you agree with Kaufman and Torda that "substantial, fictional texts" might be most/ more generative of book-club discussion?
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