FOOT - Chapter Four, How Stories Work

"Character, setting, point of view, theme and tone all interact to create a powerful impression" (Carol Jago, Classics in the Classroom, pg. 65).

     In this chapter, Jago discusses the importance of the elements of literature and how they combine to create the story. She also provides a detailed definition of how she views these elements, which I enjoyed because they were not just a hard, rigid definition. I always had a passion for characters and identifying with them and finding out what they are about. After all, characters are esssential to stories and they basically tell the story through their actions. This element has certainly been the one to interest me the most as well as i and words. It has always been my first choice to write about.

     Jago includes an illustration of Freytag's Pyramid. This is something we have all seen numerous times throughout our education, but something that I never knew the name of. It is basically a structure that maps out the story for us. I like the fact that Jago uses this pyramid with the whole class and they fill it in together as they go. By practicing this, they will be able to fill one out themselves easily later on. She also has them include page numbers, which I like because they actually have to find support of the event instead of just throwing it in. She has them do this in small groups and then they look at all of them after, and students seem interested to see how everybody else viewed the story. An idea that I thought of to do would be to have them complete a drawing instead of the events. They would draw it in this arc-like form, but instead of using the words like 'Exposition' and 'Rising Action', they would draw pictures of the events. I would then have them choose one quote to put at the top. This quote would have to be one that they believe encompasses the story as a whole. They would then present these and this would basically be their interpretation of the story, but they would have to defend why they made it the way they did.

I want to conclude with this quote, because I absolutely love it:

"I want Victor Frankenstein, Beowulf, Odysseus, Brutus and Cyrano to live in my students' minds forever" (Jago, pg. 67).