posted
Ok, I plan on reading Ender's Game with my 8th grade reading class. Here's my question, or plea for help, If you were teaching this in class, what would you ask? I'm looking for good in depth questions that force students to think morally, tactically, blah, blah, blah. Also just any project suggestions. Basically If you could explore this book with younger readers in what ways would you do it?
I know that I will be comparing the novel to the short story at some point, I'll be looking at character relationships, survival skills, adult manipulation, enders leadership abilities, and a number of other things. I'm just starting to pull my thoughts together on this so any help would be awsome.
Just as a side note, I'll also be reading The Hobbit and Redwall at the same time as a kind of Sci/Fi fantasy unit. Any suggestions on these two books would also be welcome.
posted
I was always fascinated with Ender's relationship with his brother. How much of Ender's fear of Peter was justified? When Peter spoke to Ender when he thought Ender was sleeping, was that honesty or manipulation? We know Peter was cruel, but was he dangerous to Ender?
Posts: 6367 | Registered: Aug 2003
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posted
I think the Hobbit and EG are both great for talking about ethical situations. You could explore how the author describes the ethical dilemma and how they resolve it. So kind of looking at it from an English composition point of view. How well does the author accomplish the goal of establishing and resolving an ethical conflict -- and what techniques did they use.
You could also talk about how the characters act (ethically/not ethically)...and why. So from a civics or general comportment aspect, the books are good too.
I've never read the third book you mentioned, so no comment there.
Given what I've learned about what the "right" age is for EG, I suspect you may have some kids with both EG and the Hobbit who just aren't ready for it all.
For them, there's still the action sequences though. I suppose you could talk about how to describe action. What words are used to heighten the sense of it. Whether the descriptions of "alien" environments is adequate or needs more description. Things like that.
For more advanced students, there's an element of both EG and The Hobbit of the main character being the odd-man-out. Bilbo is a wandering Hobbit. Unheard of. Ender is a rare 3rd child with some fairly special attributes. You could talk about that kind of thing as a literary device. What it means to the reader identifying with such characters.
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posted
For the Redwall books, you might have them examine what about the characters' natures comes from their species (mouse, rat, badger, etc.) and what is individual. I always rather thought there was a good balance in those books -- the mice were distinctive from the badgers in very mouse-like ways, but each was ALSO a distinct individual.
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posted
I know this question is kind of answered in the book, but "why use kids?" Do you buy the answer given or not, etc.
Also you can compare Ender's fights with the kid from kindergarten, with Bonzo, and with the buggers. All of them kinda tread that line between self-defense and unbridled agression. Like the U.S. dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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posted
I guess I should have mentioned that I am using this in my advanced class. These students all read at very high levels many of them are at a college level (according to STAR tests). So my objective is to really push them into thinking critically and to explore much more than the basic comprehension of the book.
Posts: 1294 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
You might just want to scroll through some of the other side, looking for some of the debates on the game that came up. I remember a fairly heated one lately, that was actually in an Iraq thread IIRC, where the ethics of Ender's killings of Stilson and Bonzo were debated. It's so common when you're reading to accept the justifications of the POV character without question. So, Stilson was going to beat Ender up. Ender gained a temporary advantage due to surprise. Ender would not have the same advantage again next time, and Stilson would beat the crud out of him. So it was "necessary" to press the temporary advantage, to beat Stilson so thoroughly that he would not be a threat in the future. Right? We all swallowed that while reading the book, but then, we were getting things from Ender's pov. Are Ender's actions really okay, or are they completely out of proportion to the "torture" he was likely to receive from Stilson and his friends? Who hasn't been bullied? Is a response of such violence that the kid dies appropriate? (Sure. Ender was a little kid. He didn't know his actions would kill Stilson. That makes it okay, right?) Is Ender, in fact, a psycopath, every bit as much as Peter, but simply more charming and less overtly frightening?
I think that issue has the makings of a good debate right there, and it can be traced down through all of his killings.
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posted
I think that discussion was on this side, actually. And the thread, IIRC, was started by Squicky.
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posted
How about something like, "What do you see as Ender's true gift? That is, what made him the only child out of thousands capable of prosecuting the war to its conclusion? Would he have been able to utilize these gifts the way he did without Graff's manipulations?"
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I teach Ender's Game in conjunction with The Lord of the Flies. One of the things I stress is the role of adults in children's lives... Do students, at the end of EG, agree that the adults have done what needed to be done? Graff et al.'s is the ultimate "because I said so" argument. The kids have no say in their being used as weapons (which leads into interesting debate on whether it is true that Ender could not have done what he did knowing the ships were real... we discuss cartoon/video game violence versus real-life violence, the slippery slope between them, etc.).
Later, if I have more time, I'll post more ideas.
Posts: 5663 | Registered: Jun 2000
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posted
I agree with what PSI said -- I had to think about what parts of the book had the most impact on my kids when they read it. It all had a significant effect, but probably the most emotional response came about because of the relationship between Ender and his brother Peter. Maybe that is because my boys had a very love/hate relationship toward each other at the time they read it -- and they could identify with the conflict.
So which parts of the books are your students going to most relate to? That is the big question -- which parts make them feel like "this is me"...
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