Teacher commentary:

I teach 9th graders who are often labeled "under-performing," "low-achieving," "unmotivated," and "unmanageable. Nothing could be further from the truth. I usually teach this novel early in the year as a way to get to know my students and to ease them into the kind of analytical thinking and close reading I expect of them with a text that feels accessible. It is a book that works on many levels for its seemingly simple prose and vastly complex themes. Students will often share with me that this is their favorite unit because "Esperanza talks about life like it really is." Evidence of how much the students connect with the text is evidenced in their assignments; the work generated from this unit was some of the best I have seen my students do. Even my students who complain and complain about writing did an excellent job on the pre-readings, largely because they felt so relevant to students’ lives.

I posed the question, "Where does our sense of identity come from?" because it, too, works on many levels. My 9th graders change so much in the course of the year as they try to discern what it is to be in high school, redefine their priorities, and grapple with questions (consciously or unconsciously) of "Who am I?" Given their preoccupation with their own process of identity formation, it seemed like a good way to help them engage Esperanza and her struggles of self-definition and self-determination. To the extent that I was actually able to be explicit in asking the essential question, it worked. They made connections and articulated differences between Esperanza’s experiences and their own. They began to form ideas about how the questions applied to Esperanza’s character. They read the novel! The next time I teach this, I will definitely be more intentional about how I ask and refer to the essential question so that all of my students really get it and own it for themselves.

In terms of the assignments included here, I have tried to include a range of activities that engage all of the different learning types in the classroom. Some of the activities have an artistic, hands-on component, while others require more reading and critical thinking; every assignment asks students to grapple with themes, images and ideas from the novel. In addition we did a lot of writing, ranging from autobiographical narratives to creative writing, to literary analysis. Regardless of the type of assignment, I placed a great emphasis on revision. Students frequently groaned and complained, "Why are you making me do this over?" and yet when they saw their final product bound into a portfolio, they positively beamed! I have included rubrics for many of the larger assignments, and have outlined grading criteria for students within the directions of many other handouts.

In the future, I want to explore ways of incorporating technology more as a means of enhancing lessons, as well as ways to make many of the human rights issues in the novel more visible for my students.