“An American Childhood”
By Annie Dillard.
1st Edition
Request Strategy
Purpose: The purpose of this strategy is to help students learn how to create effective
questions for their reading. It also helps them to differentiate between different kinds of
questions (explicit, implicit).
Context: This strategy could work well at any point in the book as Dillard is constantly
posing new issues and questions. The specific examples here are given in the middle of
the book, toward the end of
DIRECTIONS:
Step 1: Have students turn to page 160 in their book. Read the first and second
paragraphs of the following passage out loud as students follow along.
“At school I saw a searing sight. It turned me to books; it turned me to jelly; it
turned me much later, I suppose, into an early version of a runaway, a scapegrace. It
was only a freshly hatched Polyphemus moth crippled because its mason jar was too
small.
The mason jar sat on the teacher’s desk; the big moth emerged inside it. The
moth had clawed a hole in its hot cocoon and crawled out, as if agonizingly, over the
course of an hour, one leg at a time; we children watched around the desk, transfixed.
After it emerged, the wet, mashed thing turned around walking on the green jar’s bottom,
then painstakingly climbed the twig with which the jar was furnished.
There, at the twig’s top, the moth shook its sodden clumps of wings. When it
spread those wings-blood would fill their veins, and the birth fluids on the wings’ frail
sheets would harden to make them tough as sails. But the moth could not spread its wide
wings at all; the jar was too small. The wings could not fill, so they hardened while they
were still crumpled from the cocoon. A smaller moth could have spread its wings to their
utmost in that mason jar, but the Polyphemus moth was almost as big as a mouse. Its
brown, yellow, pink, and blue wings would have extended six inches from tip to tip, if
there had been no mason jar. It would have been as big as a wren.
The teacher let the deformed creature go. We all left the classroom and paraded
outside behind the teacher with pomp and circumstance. She bounced the moth from its
jar and set it on the school’s asphalt driveway. The moth set out walking. It could only
heave the golden wrinkly clumps where its wings should have been; it could only crawl
down the school driveway on its six frail legs. The moth crawled down the driveway
toward the rest of Shadyside, an area of fine houses, expensive apartments, and
fashionable shops. It crawled down the driveway because its shriveled wings were glued
shut. It crawled down the driveway toward Shadyside, one of several sections of town
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where people like me were expected to settle after college, renting an apartment until
they married one of the boys and bought a house. I watched it go” (160-161).
Step 2: The teacher closes the book, but the students keep theirs open. They can ask the
teacher questions about what they have just read. The object is to “stump” the teacher.
Step 3: The teacher now keeps the book open, while the students close theirs. Now, the
teacher asks the questions. Examples are:
1) What kind of insect is in the jar? (moth) Specifically what kind? (Polyphemus)
2) How do the children react to seeing the moth? (they are fascinated). Why?
3) What is the other object in the jar besides the moth? (the twig)
4) What is a “scapegrace?”
Step 4: When the questions have been asked, the teacher can record how many questions
the CLASS and the TEACHER answer correctly on the board. The teacher should accept
plausible answers.
Step 5: Now, read the following two paragraphs in the same manner. Repeat steps 2-3.
Questions for ReQuest Strategy
Paragraph #
3
How do the moth’s wings harden?
Why couldn’t the moth spread its wings?
What happens to the moth once it tries to spread its wings?
What two animals does Dillard compare the moth to in size? (wren and
mouse)
What are some of the things that keep us from spreading our wings?
4
What implications are there in this paragraph that the moth is meant to
represent something different? What does it seem to represent?
How does the author seem to feel about her future?
What does Dillard want us to think about the teacher?
Did the teacher do the right thing by letting the moth go? Why or why not?
Why does the moth crawl instead of fly?
In what ways does Annie relate to the moth? How is she like the moth?
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Step 6: Divide the class up into teams of 3-4 students, where they can play and try to
stump each other. The teams can use the following passages.
Pasteur had not used up all the good work. Mother told me again and again
about one of her heroes, a doctor working for a federal agency who solved a problem
that arose in the late forties. Premature babies, and only premature babies, were turning
up blind, in enormous numbers. Why? What do premature babies have in common?
“Look in the incubators!” Mother would holler, and knock the side of her head
with the heel of her hand, holler outraged, glaring far behind my head as she was telling
,e this story, holler, “Look in the incubators!” as if at her wit’s end facing a roomful of
doctors who wrung their useless hands and accepted this blindness as one of life’s tough
facts. Mother’s hero, like all of Mother’s heroes, accepted nothing. She rolled up her
sleeves, looked in the incubators, and decided to see what happened if she reduced the
oxygen in the incubator air. That worked. Too much oxygen had been blinding them.
Now the babies thrived; they got enough oxygen,
and they weren’t blinded. Hospitals all over the
world changed the air mixture for incubators, and
prematurity no longer carried a special risk of
blindness.
Mother liked the story, and told it to us fairly often.
Once she posed it as a challenge to Amy. We were
all in the living room, waiting for dinner. “What
would you do if you noticed that all over the
United States, premature babies were blind?”
Without even looking up from her homework, Amy said, “Look in the incubators. Maybe
there’s something wrong in the incubators.” Mother started to whoop for joy before she
realized she’d been had.
Problems still yielded to effort. Only a few years ago, to the wide-eyes attention
of the world, we had seen the epidemic of poliomyelitis crushed in a twinkling, right here
in Pittsburgh” (167).
“At school we had air-raid drills. We took the drills seriously; surely Pittsburgh,
which had the nation’s steel, coke, and aluminum, would be the enemy’s first target.
When the air-raid siren sounded, our teachers stopped talking and led us to the
school basement. There the gym teachers lined us up against the cement walls and steel
lockers, and showed us how to lean in and fold our arms over our heads. Our small
school ran from kindergarten through twelfth grade. We had air-raid drills in small
batches, four of five grades together, because there was no room for us all against the
walls. The teachers had to stand in the middle of the basement rooms: those bright
Pittsburgh women who taught Latin, science, and art, and those educated, beautifully
mannered European women who taught French, history, and German, who had landed in
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Pittsburgh at the end of their respective flights from Hitler, and who had baffled us by
their common insistence on tidiness, above all, in our written work.
The teachers stood in the middle of the room, not talking to each other. We
tucked against the walls and lockers: dozens of clean girls wearing green jumpers, green
knee socks, and pink-soled white bucks. We folded our skinny arms over our heads, and
raised to the enemy a clatter of gold scarab bracelets and gold bangle bracelets.
If the bomb actually came, should we not let the little kids- the kindergartners like
Molly, and the first and second graders- go against the wall? We older ones would stand
in the middle with the teachers. The European teachers were almost used to this sort of
thing. We would help them keeps spirits up; we would sing “Frere Jaques,” or play
“Buzz” (181).
Assessment: Students will be given the following passage.
“As a life’s work, I would remember everything- everything, against loss. I would
go through life like a plankton net. I would trap and keep every teacher’s funny remark,
every face on the street, every microscopic alga’s sway, every conversation,
configuration of leaves, every dream, and every scrap of overhead cloud. Who would
remember Molly’s infancy in not me?
Some days I felt an urgent responsibility to each change of light outside the sunporch windows. Who would remember any of it, any of this our time, and the wind
thrashing though the buckeye limbs outside? Somebody had to do it, somebody had to
hang on to the days with teeth and fists, or the whole show had been in vain. That it was
impossible never entered my reckoning. For work, for a task, I had never heard the
word” (173).
For homework, students must come up with at least 3 questions that require not just
recollection, but also critical thinking and analysis. Examples are as follows:
1) Why does Annie feel a need to remember everything?
2) What does she mean when she says, “I would go through life like a plankton net?”
3) Do you think its our “urgent responsibility” to record our lives? Why or why not?
4) What are “buckeye limbs”?
5) Annie doesn’t think it’s impossible to record her story. Do you think its possible
to record your story? Why or why not?
For the next class period, the teacher will
Are there any moral lessons to learn from this book?
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Is Annie prejudiced? Look at all the times she makes fun of Catholics, specifically nuns.
Consider the fact that Annie Dillard eventually converted to Catholicism. Is she being
hypocritical, or are people allowed to change their minds concerning religion? Also
consider how her mother never will allow her to use offensive words about African
Americans. Is it possible to be prejudiced in one area (religion), but not in other areas
(race)? In what ways are you prejudiced?
Is Annie’s rebellious behavior toward her parents and other adult figures justified?
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