A Unit on Maggie

     When we first started reading this novel, I was fooled into thinking it was a story of hope and the magic of perseverance. It would be an understatement to say that I was completely wrong. Once I finished the book and realized that it wasn't a story of conquering a classist society, the entire book shifted from hopeful to forlorn. So instead of teaching Maggie in a unit focusing on poverty or global issues as the essential questions, it would do more for students to read the book thinking about smaller topics or tools that lend to the essential questions about survival of the fittest. Why wasn't Maggie one of the strong? What made her weak? Why was Maggie considered a "flower blooming in a puddle of mud?" Does morality make us weak?
      As we read Maggie for this class, I don't feel like we had any specific essential questions to keep in mind as we discussed, read, and lead activities. Conversely, I also feel that covered a broad range of them, because it was up to each of us to pick what we thought the text was applicable to. What we focused on, for the most part, was how we would build on this for our own classroom (which could be an essential question, but not in an ELA classroom). From this unit intro, I would define "essential question" as a frame work question(s) that is the main focus students should keep in mind and pull details the pertain to it. These questions should also inspire a certain degree of reflection, and encourage students to make as many self to text/world connections as possible.
       By using Darwinism as the main focus of the text, using subjects other than English becomes possible. Science and history can be used to relate different types of "artifacts" that are brought into lessons. Also, by asking what makes Maggie weak, we can explore issues like morality and hope. Since both of those issues are subjective and will illicit different definitions from each student, a great deal of reflection is required for students to fully fathom what they mean. Like in our discussions about nobodies and somebodies, there is no one true definition. By using the broad theme of survival of the fittest, a few different subcategories can be explored while still supplementing the former. Morality, by definition, is different for each person, so I hope that these essential questions would help students to critique their own morals. I would also like for them to think about how Maggie would have felt today, in a society that holds little value in morals, and survival of the fittest seems to be the motto of even the politicians.