Dove Catcher

A fellow teacher and blogger asked me about my approach to Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. With thanks, today's entry is for you, Poppy.

Catcher was the third unit I did with my freshmen this year--which is to say the third Language Arts unit I've ever done. Without the benefit (or constraint) of master teacher tutelage, I relied on of our school's stated focus for freshman English--character composition--for a central purpose.

Then I thought about what I wanted the ending assessments to look like. I decided that an essay about some aspect of Holden's character would be appropriate, and then a creative project that would allow students to write their own informal narrative in the style of Holden.

Given those two objectives, and the focus on character composition, the unit kind of wrote itself backwards. I divided "character" into four parts: Decisions, Observable traits, Values, and Environment. Don't ask me where I came up with these parts, but they seem to work, and their acronym spells DOVE. Decisions and Values clearly go into what makes a book's character who he is. Adding Environment makes sense as well, since there is always interplay between a character's past and present Environments and his Values and Decisions. Those three work really well together, and the students seem to get the flux and flow between them.

Observable traits is kind of a catch-all for the sundry and assorted character attributes that the author gives a character as a means of revealing something about him. For example, Holden has these really nice Gladstone bags. That's not exactly a Decision or a Value, but it has a bearing on those things. It's something you can observe that informs who Holden is. I tend to think of Observables as the et cetera bin.

I modeled taking "DOVE notes" for the class as we read the book together in class. The students all had pages in their notebooks dedicated to taking DOVE notes. Each major character gets his own page--in the case of Catcher, Holden is the only major character, and the subject of the upcoming essay, so note taking was pretty uncluttered.

Whenever we came to a spot in the story where Holden reveals some aspect of his Values, or makes a significant decision, etc., I would get up and make a note of it on the board thusly:

(V) Holden wants to protect women, fights Stradlater (75)

Interestingly, for me at least, such observations can often be ambiguous: the fight with Stradlater can also be viewed as a decision. I used such ambiguities as a way to let the students hash out their differences in perspective. In the end, I usually suggested they used both (V) and (D). I mean, what's the harm?

By the book's end, the students generally had about two or three notebook pages covered with DOVE notes and page numbers. This is the part that really made me happy: I was able to show the students how easy it is to create a well-supported persuasive essay from their notes because they had Holden's character diced up into four categories and had page numbers for everything.

For the informal narrative assignment I brought in some models from blogs and so forth and discussed with the students how effective personal narratives reveal aspects of the writer's values, decisions, and environment through the telling of a story from her life.

Finally, I started the unit with a Salinger bio, some context-setting literature about World War II, a description of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, (which I argue is central to Salinger's work) and Salinger's short story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish."

Oh, and for fun, get some Bebop music to play at the beginning of class. It's period specific, and sets the tone for Holden's world very well. Enjoy.