As always, be mindful of your students’ backgrounds and life experiences and be aware that they may have strong reactions to the book. Additionally, the nonfiction articles students read in this unit discuss issues of violence and crime today. Although there are few truly “graphic” scenes in the text, students will very likely feel emotionally impacted by many of the events and topics described. There are also several scenes that include slurs and offensive stereotypes about women, indigenous people, and gay people.
This book addresses a number of difficult and mature topics, including gang violence, murder, domestic violence, the death of parents, the death of friends, a police shooting/suicide by police, and PTSD/depression.This unit also includes three nonfiction texts that, in addition to providing students with a contemporary lens through which to understand the events and characters in The Outsiders, are also an opportunity to practice the skill of deciphering the meaning of words in context. Students will also compare a film version of the core text with the original novel, thinking metacognitively about how the experience of reading is similar and different from viewing a film. Additionally, this text provides opportunities to study foreshadowing and how that literary device works to create tension in the text-and provide the reader with the opportunity for reflection on earlier events and how these events influence later outcomes. They will also pay close attention to the way that authors structure text, studying “standard” narrative structures in order to better understand how individual incidents, scenes, and chapters fit together to create a cohesive narrative.
In this unit, students will closely analyze how authors develop the unique perspective of their narrator and track how characters’ perspectives change in response to specific events. This book is a middle school “classic” for good reason: Ponyboy’s story continues to resonate with young readers, even sixty years after its original publication. Although the text is set in the 1960s, the emotions Ponyboy experiences are timeless and universal, as Hinton captures the inner life of a young teenage boy as he navigates the complexities of life as a “greaser” in a world prejudiced against them. Written when Hinton was just a teenager, the text follows the story of Ponyboy, a young teenager who has recently lost both of his parents and is being raised by his older brothers. Hinton’s 1967 novel, The Outsiders, is a classic coming-of-age story.
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