Text Satellite

My Prezi!

The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton became my central text because it is a Bildungsroman. I wanted to have a text which focused on the coming-of-age theme so my students could relate to the text on a deeper level.

These are themes I found important in this novel:

• Isolation (being an outsider)
• Violence
• Hope
• Friendship/Love
• Loss
• Right Vs. Wrong
• Hope
• Discovery

One of the first connections I made to The Outsiders is to Jane Elliot's "Blue Eyes Vs. Brown Eyes" experiment. I used the YouTube video of her actual experiment. My purpose of including this media is to show students how we create isolationism in society. This specific example would should how racism serves as a vehicle. Next, Romeo and Juliet is a tragic play which highly reflects violence amongst others. The Montagues and Capulets have a fight scene in the play which I would like to focus on and how their rival prohibits Romeo and Juliet's love affair. I figured also students would enjoy watching the actual scene because it provides a better understanding of Shakespeare's work.  From there, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants serves as the complete opposite. It is mainly about the friendship of 4 best friends as they leave high school and attend college. This is an ideal novel because it relates the to relationships of the main characters in The Outsiders. Furthermore, Tuesdays With Morrie is documentation of an author coping with the slow death of his friend (an old professor). This relates again to the relationship of the main characters in The Outsider because the characters experience the loss of their friend Johnny.  Since I am such a Robert Frost fan, I had to include a piece of his poetry! Nothing Gold Can Stay fits perfectly into the themes because it is actually a poem used in the central novel. It demonstrates that someday there will be an end to all good things (which relates to loss). There are many quotes included in my text satellite as well. The quotes touch on friendship and hope-all of which I think are cute alternate texts. They help mimic the importance of the themes I have chosen to study. "Some Nights" and "Gone with the Wind Theme" were chosen because both songs relates to the central text. "Some Nights" is a song about a person struggling to understand the world. Through life we begin to ask more questions and through experience we discover the answer. Also, "Gone with the Wind Theme" song is an instrumental piece based on the novel Gone with the Wind. This is the book Johnny was reading in The Outsiders. My decision to add this to the text satellite was because it would give a little insight of what kind of story Johnny was reading. The actual novel would be a good secondary source too. The music and the novel Gone with the Wind give us as readers a better understanding of Johnny as a character. The last two texts I thought would be a nice connection were American Born Chinese and The Scarlett Letter. The Scarlett Letter embodies themes of isolation and right vs. wrong. American Born Chinese deals with an American Born Chinese student who feels he is an outsider because he is unsure of his ultimate identity. Also, his fellow classmates can only seem to focus on his Chinese heritage and make fun of him.