The Benefits of Having Students Choose Their FCA Novels Early

The Final Culminating Activity for my Grade 12 course will be a multi-genre project and presentation providing students with the opportunity to synthesize their learning from the semester and demonstrate their learning achievements in the areas of reading, writing, oral communication, and media studies.

A few weeks ago, I had the students each select a relatively recent novel from a list I’d created based on identities, the theme that has loosely tied the semester together. We’ve been considering identities that we create on our own, those shaped by our biggest influences, and those scripted by society.

Though we are still three weeks away from the Letter of Intent that each student must write for me, and another month from the first draft of the assignment, the requirement that they both select their novel and post a related reading reflection on their student blog has encouraged students to get a copy in hand and, in most cases, delve into it. I’m glad to see them starting well in advance, because I know that’s going to translate into more considered, interesting projects.

As an aside, I tried to emphasize relatively contemporary novels in the list from which students could choose. I had a couple of reasons for doing so. First, I wanted students to exit high school with at least a passing familiarity with modern, and possibly Canadian, fiction. Second, and perhaps more importantly, I surmised that the material available online for students to pillage and plagiarize would be much smaller, and therefore much less tempting, for more recent and sometimes obscure novels. We shall see.

For those of you who are interested, here’s the list that we’re working from this year. Next time around I hope to remove all of the older works and include more current (mostly Canadian) novels.

1. Mercy Among the Children — David Adams Richards
2. The Lost Highway — David Adams Richards
3. The Friends of Meager Fortune — David Adams Richards
4. Alias Grace — Margaret Atwood
5. The Handmaid’s Tale — Margaret Atwood
6. The Blind Assassin — Margaret Atwood
7. The Penelopiad — Margaret Atwood (read with Homer’s Odyssey)
8. Possession — A. S. Byatt
9. The True History of the Kelly Gang — Peter Carey
10. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay — Michael Chabon
11. The Jade Peony – Wayson Choy
12. The River Thieves — Michael Crummey
13. J-Pod — Douglas Coupland
14. Fifth Business — Robertson Davies
15. The Piano Man’s Daughter — Timothy Findley
16. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime — Mark Haddon
17. A Thousand Splendid Suns — Khaleid Hossein
18. Never Let Me Go — Kazuo Ishigiro
19. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams — Wayne Johnston
20. The Poisonwood Bible — Barbara Kingsolver
21. The Stone Angel — Margaret Laurence
22. The Way the Crow Flies — Ann-Marie MacDonald
23. Two Solitudes — Hugh Maclennan
24. No Great Mischief — Alistair MacLeod
25. Life of Pi — Yann Martel
26. Such a Long Journey — Rohinton Mistry
27. Anil’s Ghost – Michael Ondaatje
28. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz — Mordecai Richler
29. A Complicated Kindness — Miriam Toews
30. The Stone Carvers — Jane Urquhart
31. The Englishman’s Boy — Guy Vanderhaeghe
32. The In-Between World of Vikram Lall — M. G. Vassanji
33. I Am Charlotte Simmons — Tom Wolfe
34. English Passengers — Matthew Kneale