Blog post #3

I made a short Google Slides presentation on basic rules for writing dialogue. The rules are framed through transcribing a recorded conversation I had with my sister about the Hunger Games movies. This is a very brief little overview and I do not incorporate any rules on dialogue tags or incorporating dialogue into a larger piece of writing. I imagine this may be a nice little beginner exercise for students who are just learning the basic rules of writing dialogue or need a refresher. I regularly see writing from students where they forget to start a new paragraph or drop punctuation, etc. I initially planned to make a short little video, that would have incorporated more sound and animation, a scrolling text that updates as a new guiding principle of writing dialogue is introduced so the viewer can see in real time how the changes to the text appear, but this became a lengthier and more invested project than I knew how to handle, and I made the switch to Google Slides. A video would have been a lot more visually striking, but I am not dissatisfied with the little video I have produced. What is being visualized in this project is the spoken word as text, more so than a non text visual or the silly renderings of my sister, my dog Boots, or I. Visualization in this project deepens the viewer’s understanding of writing dialogue, as they can see the slow progression towards a product that more clearly shows what is being said and communicated than text without any punctuation, formatting, grammatical adherence, etc. I hope that this comes across in the final cut. I feel like the audio component in conjunction with the text was what really set this apart from just reading the text. I feel like it’s one thing to read about the different kinds of pauses, but seeing them applied to a text, where the text did not previously reflect the pauses in the reference speech, and seeing it grow closer and closer to more accurately characterizing tone and delivery I felt would have been an effective visualizer for learning to write dialogue. I hope that you enjoy!

Blog Post #4 Disciplinary Text Set

 Topic:  Flash Fiction and Short Form Storytelling

Grade Level: 10th-12th ELA Students

Introduction:

This text set explores short fiction, with an emphasis on Flash Fiction, a term used to characterize the range of the shortest of short works of fiction—typically ~1,500 words or less. This text set is designed for a high school English Language Arts class of 10th-12th graders. The texts that I have selected all emphasize some—but by no means all—of the tenets of what makes a piece of short-form fiction effective. To engage students in short-form fiction, I would open with the One-shot Manga, “The Enigma of Amigara Fault,” by Junji Ito, and the short film, “Alive in Joburg,” by Neill Blomkamp. Multimodality taps into a variety of student senses and literacies to engage with a text; so these texts, while not formal pieces of flash fiction, demonstrate effective short-form storytelling—with the aid of other media in addition to text. Next, I would have students read the Lydia Davis short story, “The Visitor.” This is the first official piece of flash fiction that students will encounter in this unit. Lydia Davis is a central figure in the flash fiction movement and is widely regarded as one of the most critical figures in the genre. This story is the shortest of the texts they will be expected to read and demonstrates the essential form of flash fiction through its length and structure. This will be followed by the article, “Protean Miniatures: The Adaptability and Sustainability of Flash Fiction,” by Sean Hooks. This is a complex text and the closest this text set will come to a true ELA content area text, as it is a work of non-fiction that overviews and details a history of flash fiction, key writers and their feelings on the genre, and the author of the texts case for why this is an “adaptable” and “sustainable” style of writing in this day and age. This text demonstrates to students that writing does not take place in a vacuum and that movements and trends in writing are the products of long lineages and influences of authors on other authors and so on. This text also provides some of the language used to describe what makes a piece of flash fiction successful or effective that they may use to better critically engage with and voice their feelings on the following texts in the set. Additionally, this language will aid in giving voice to their intentions with their own writing and in workshopping their peers' writing. The following two texts in the text set, “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid and, “Riddle,” by Ogbewe Amadin, are works of flash fiction that explore gender roles and societal expectations placed on young girls. These texts will be used to further the students' understanding of what makes a successful piece of short fiction, and will in turn serve to inspire the summative project, producing and workshopping a piece of flash fiction produced by the students. The format and structure of “Girl”—2nd person directive that explores the duties and social mores of a young woman in Antigua—lends nicely to writing a pastiche inspired by the central themes of this text, where students would have an opportunity to practice writing their own 2nd person directive narratives, that detail some standards or expectations placed on them. The following story, “Riddle,” is a nice companion piece to, “Girl,” as it portrays a young Nigerian girl making sense of social expectations through her complex feelings on a woman who has been outcast for not meeting social expectations. These two works both explore the ways in which society places expectations on us to perform certain roles, duties, or behaviors as we mature—some of them oppressive and some of them beneficial. Students in this class will be expected to read these texts, and engage in a variety of activities regarding individual texts, culminating in a student moving their understanding of what makes an effective piece of flash fiction and short-form fiction into writing and workshopping their own piece of short-form fiction.

Title	The Enigma of Amigara Fault by Junji Ito
Bibliography	Itō, Junji, and Yuji Oniki. “The Enigma of Amigara Fault.” Gyo : The Death-Stench Creeps / Junji Ito ; Translation & English Adaptation, Yuji Oniki ; Touch-up Art & Lettering, Stephen Dutro. Illustrated by Steve Dutro, Deluxe edition., VIZ Media, 2015. Copy of the text
Summary	This is a one-shot manga—effectively a standalone short comic—in the horror genre. An earthquake results in a major fault on Amigara mountain. The fault reveals thousands of human-shaped holes, attracting meteorologists and tourists. The story's protagonist is a young man who travels to the fault after hearing about it on the news, searching for the hole that perfectly matches the shape of his body. On arriving, he finds that those who have found their holes are compelled to enter. Rescue crews are unsuccessful at retrieving these travelers, and the fate of those that are compelled to enter their holes is uncertain. The story resolves with the man finding and entering his own hole. An epilogue shows the reader that the other side of the human hole fault is another fault, but in place of human-shaped holes, the holes are wild and distorted. A researcher looks in to see a warped and stretched human slowly inching out of the fault.
Quantitative Complexity (Story-toolz.com)	Grade Level: 5th grade Word Count: ~1300 # of Sentences: 100 Average Word Length: 4 characters Average # of words per sentence: 12 The quantitative complexity analyzer tools are designed for traditional texts, so the quantitative analysis of a manga is going to be an inaccurate reflection of the complexity of the text. This considered, I calculated this score by transcribing the first third of this text into sentences and paragraphs and entering this punctuated and formatted text into the complexity analyzer. I’m not sure how I feel about a 5th grader reading this text. The subject matter and the images are very spooky, and I am not sure that I would be interested in subjecting a younger group to this.
Qualitative Complexity	Meaning: This story has some layered meanings that it plays with to elicit a horrified reaction from the reader, but I don’t believe it is making any sort of direct or overt commentary or prescriptions—or at least they are deeply layered and non-essential for engaging with this text.  Text Structure: This is a standalone comic by a Japanese author originally released in Japan and translated into English. Where comics in English are usually read from left to right, Japanese comics are read from right to left, even when translated into English. This could definitely pose some difficulty to readers who have not encountered this formatting before. Beyond this, elements that shape the text but are non-textual like illustration cues or the shapes of the text bubbles all lend themselves to a full understanding of this text, but once again, if there is a lack of familiarity with these elements that shape and characterize text, a student could easily face some confusion or have a poor understanding of the story. Language Features: The language is easy to understand and straightforward. The story is mostly told in dialogue between characters, but this dialogue is very formal and direct and serves to advance the plot. The vocabulary is also fairly formal and direct, but conversational enough to retain familiarity to the reader.  Knowledge Demands: I touched on this in the section on the structure of the text, but because the layout and formatting of this comic may be unfamiliar to Western readers, it is important for comprehension that they are guided through how to read a comic like this. Beyond this, the use of some geological terms may be unfamiliar to a student.
Vocabulary	Enigma Fault Epicenter Silhouette Transfixed Death drive
Application	This is a story that I would use to build intrigue in the short fiction genre. It is not a work of flash fiction, but the techniques Ito uses to build suspense and intrigue can be applied and adapted to create a successful short story. Horror lends itself nicely to short fiction because a twist ending or surprise fright and a cliffhanger are usually more successful when the reader isn’t bogged down by details. This story demonstrates the power of letting the reader fill in the gaps.
Question	Would this story work if it were completely text? What role does illustration play in telling the story?

Title	Alive in Joburg by Neill Blomkamp
Bibliography	Alive in Joburg. Directed by Neill Blomkamp, Spy Films, 2005. Link to Film
Summary	This is a short film that is designed to look like a fake documentary covering the subject of an alien species living in South Africa. It briefly traces a history of the arrival of the aliens, initial skirmishes with local military, and an ongoing crisis of aliens facing abject poverty. The narrative style of this film relies heavily on interviews with South Africans on their feelings about the aliens, all which reflect the apartheid history that South Africans experienced under minority white Afrikaner rule.
Quantitative Complexity (Story-toolz.com)	Grade Level: 7th Grade Word Count: 481 # of Sentences: 34 Average Word Length: 4 characters Average # of words per sentence: 14.1 This is definitely imperfect. To my knowledge there is not a great means to quantitatively analyze the complexity of a short film. Additionally, I could not find a script for this film online, so I had to manually transcribe the spoken language of this film into a document, to run through the Storytoolz analyzer. The obvious shortcomings of this are that film exists as a collection of a number of different forms of media, video and audio are unaccounted for. But even if we are to only consider the text of this film as the transcribed dialogue, the quantitative measures are not reflective of the actual complexity as this film uses a naturalistic documentary-like dialogue and spoken word is very different from written word—sentence breaks are looser, syntax can become more complex or deceptively uncomplex, etc. Regardless, I would probably agree that a seventh grader would not face too great a challenge in making sense of this video and engaging with its themes, if approached in the right environment and given the appropriate and necessary context.
Qualitative Complexity	Meaning: The subject matter this short film is making commentary on is fairly easy for viewers to identify. Due to some of the challenges with obscuring commentary on a real life social and political issue by substituting humans with aliens, there is room for the obfuscation of the intent. There are layers of meaning when considering the different viewpoints and perspectives seen in the film—Commentator, White Police, indigenous South African local residents and police, and Alien. Text Structure: The structure of this short film may be confusing to students who are unfamiliar with the faux-documentary style, but this confusion may add to their suspension of disbelief. Additionally, balancing multiple characters and perspectives may result in the need for multiple viewings to make sense of the scope of the conflict and issue at the center of the short film, but if the viewer has any experience watching the news, this style of film should be familiar.  Language Features: The naturalistic style of language in this short film should be familiar to the student. The use of language is fairly straightforward and direct, and characters do not rely on figurative language to express themselves. Some of the formal qualities of the faux-documentary style like prompting a subject with a question and only showing their response and not the question may lead to some student disorientation, as the scope of interview topics is wide reaching, but context and simplicity of language should allow for an ease of understanding.  Knowledge Demands: While it is not absolutely essential to have a familiarity with some of the history of apartheid in South Africa, some understanding will make it very clear what this film is about.
Vocabulary	Apartheid Afrikaner Constable Equality Equity Captive labor Xenophobia
Application	This is not a piece of Flash Fiction, but it demonstrates tenets of what can make a piece of short fiction very effective. I see this short as a way to motivate student interest in short form writing. This faux-documentary is effective at presenting and engaging viewers in a complex issue from a variety of viewpoints in a short amount of time. I see this expanding a student's understanding beyond the traditional short story into satire, parody, imitation, and pastiche as effective vehicles for telling a story. While replicating or attempting a faux-documentary in their own writing may pose a challenge, a student may be inspired by this piece to write a story that incorporates elements of radio broadcasts or tweets or print news style. Additionally, they may be inspired by the found-footage components of this short film, and begin to play with the style and tension with telling a story through fragmentation. Beyond this, the feature length film District 9 is based on this short film, and while I don’t see it absolutely necessary that District 9 be watched in class to demonstrate the move from a short work of fiction into a longer one, this still serves as an interesting option for students who may be interested in trying out big ideas in short form first or adapting a short story into a longer piece of writing.
Question	Why do you feel the director chose to make this film look like a documentary?

Title	“Protean Miniatures: The Adaptability and Sustainability of Flash Fiction” by Sean Hooks
Bibliography	Hooks, Sean. “Protean Miniatures: The Adaptability and Sustainability of Flash Fiction.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 9 June 2017. lareviewofbooks.org/article/protean-miniatures-adaptability-sustainability-flash-fiction.
Summary	This is an article that overviews flash fiction as a genre. It considers why the short short form is popular and effective, and what it accomplishes uniquely in comparison to other literary forms. It traces a lineage of short fiction across cultures and literary history, and ties the influences together with an overview of the contemporary flash fiction movement and the state of things today. The article concludes with an exploration of why flash fiction is especially impactful and popular in the internet age, arguing that Flash Fiction and short form writing has been able to adapt to a world where immediacy is more important than ever.
Quantitative Complexity (Story-toolz.com)	Grade Level: 12th grade Word Count: 2,230 # of Sentences: 100 Average Word Length: 5 characters Average # of words per sentence: 22 I agree with the grade level. This is a very challenging text that would require a great amount of scaffolding in it's application in the classroom. A lot of the sentences are long winded and structured in complex ways. A lot of the vocabulary is prosy and will be unfamiliar even to readers with great familiarity of the content. The author weaves in and out of quotes from other authors, and keeping up with the thoughts and figures he references is a great challenge. This is a text that will require a lot of time and effort from students, but it is rewarding and highly informational.
Qualitative Complexity	Purpose: If we take the title of the piece as the purpose, I would say that it explores this idea in a way that is very complex, as it arrives at this eventual conclusion through a panoramic presentation of flash fiction as a genre. The wide scope of this article is what gives it a lot of its utility, but it takes a while for it to arrive at its central point, and even when it does, it is difficult to wade through the amount of information thrown at the reader. Text Structure: The connections between concepts and ideas in this text are loose and free flowing, and require an understanding of many literary concepts and major figures in literature to fully comprehend—in other words this text is discipline specific and will probably limit those with a loose or limited understanding of literature concepts and figures from fully engaging.   Language Features: A lot of the vocabulary in this text is complicated and flowery, at times a little over the top. Sentence structures are not uniform and are pretty complex. The writing here is bound to require students to slow down and use a dictionary and a google tab to keep up with the author. Knowledge Demands: This is all very discipline specific to writing and literature. This is not a text that can be understood or appreciated without some knowledge of the figures referenced and quoted or compared to one another. Beyond this, references and comparisons to other genres of writing are a significant component to this article. Having an understanding of genre conventions and norms of a wide range of literary forms will greatly aid in a reader's understanding of this piece.
Vocabulary	Brevity Terse Discursiveness Meandering Farrago Progenitors Aphoristic Cinematic Milieu Apocryphal Vignette Redolent Legerdemain Prestidigitation Gumption Moxie Chutzpah Polarizing Technocratic
Application	I appreciate the complexity of this article. It is wordy and references a wide swathe of different literary figures through a wide span of literary history. This text in many ways illustrates how messy the formation of a genre and the work that goes into neatly categorizing writing is. I imagine that in a classroom setting this text would be assigned to students early in their flash fiction journey—after having read at least a text or two—and would prompt them to look into some of the authors mentioned in this article to find their own flash fiction stories. Additionally, this article demonstrates to students how wide the literature field is, and the ways in which genre emerges from movements in writing, sometimes over a significant period of time. This text may also serve to give students language to use when writing analysis of flash fiction texts read in class or in workshops with their peers. This is a critical text as much as it is a historical text, and I feel like dense as it is, whatever a student can glean from it will set them on a path of greater understanding.
Question	What are the genre markers of flash fiction? How did they come about?

Title	The Visitor by Lydia Davis
Bibliography	Davis, Lydia. “The Visitor.” The Masters Review, 2 Jun. 2017. https://mastersreview.com/featured-fiction/the-visitor-by-lydia-davis/
Summary	A couple expects a stranger to come and live with them. They have not met him, but they know that he will be, “Bald, incontinent, speechless, and nearly unable to help himself.” The narrator compares this stranger to two different elderly men she has encountered through her life, both in their final stages of life. The final paragraph tells the reader that the couple is prepared to accommodate the stranger even if they know they may not be repaid someday. Although they do not know the stranger, “he is one of the few people in the world for whom we would sacrifice almost anything.” It’s a story about a couple expecting a child, and comparing infancy to old age.
Quantitative Complexity (Story-toolz.com)	Grade Level: 8th Grade Word Count: 350 # of Sentences: 21 Average Word Length: 4 characters Average # of words per sentence: 16.7 I feel like I could see an 8th grade class benefitting from this story in a way that younger groups may not yet fully be able to, but the language and the writing in this story shouldn’t pose too much of a challenge for groups younger than 8th grade.
Qualitative Complexity	Meaning: This is a story about a couple expecting a child, although this is never explicitly stated, and the descriptions of the child are intentionally obfuscated to explore the similarities between caring for an infant and caring for an elderly person. I would place the meaning at moderately complex, as there is room for the interpretation in the comparisons between the infant and the elderly men, but this central theme and comparison is clear.  Text Structure: The organization of this text is straightforward and easy to comprehend, but the structure is used to further explore the central themes of the text. The opening and closing paragraphs are about infancy, sort of like the ways in which the beginning and ends of a life both resemble infancy—a theme explored in the text. This kind of understanding and analysis is not too complicated, and is not essential to making sense of the central theme of the story.  Language Features: The language of this story is largely direct and explicit, with the major exception being that the infant is never revealed to the reader as such, but done so through descriptions and framing. The vocabulary is not overly complicated and students should have familiarity with most of the words in this text. Sentence structures vary, but should not pose a serious challenge to the reader. Davis uses a number of sentences with fronted subordinate clauses, as well as a number of compound sentences that feature heavy use of descriptive language. Descriptions are regularly presented in list form.  Knowledge Demands: Nothing in this story is content specific, even the vocabulary should be straightforward and familiar to most readers. The major knowledge demand is whatever understanding you would need to connect that Davis is describing an infant in the first and final paragraphs.
Vocabulary	Incontinent Stranger Visitor Residence Speechless Halting  Sacrifice
Application	This is a beautifully crafted piece of flash fiction. I see this being an introductory text in the unit, as it embodies some of the most important tenets of flash fiction. Not ever explicitly stating that the “visitor” is actually an infant that the couple is expecting allows for the reader to make comparisons between the elderly men and the stranger before they have realized that they have been affecting the theme—comparing infancy with old age—as they read. Beyond this, the form of the story, closing the story by returning to the opening creating a sort of mirrored or palindromic structure demonstrates how the structure of the text, similar to poetry, can be manipulated more overtly and used to clearly communicate themes to the reader. Like a relief sculpture, this story demonstrates how effective flash fiction is at communicating through its subtractions and omissions.
Question	Why is the narrator willing to sacrifice almost anything to the stranger?

Title	Girl by Jamaica Kincaid https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1978/06/26/girl (un-paywalled)
Bibliography	Kincaid, Jamaica. “Girl.” The New Yorker, 26 June 1978.
Summary	This is a flash fiction short story written in the second person and in the imperative mood. This is a directive text that reads as one long sentence full of commands directed to a young girl ostensibly by her mother. These directives command the girl in a variety of gendered domestic duties and expectations for public appearance and behavior. It is broken up by short italicized lines of internal dialogue that refute and deny accusatory lines from the narrator. This story explores the expectations and the roles women play in society and how these gendered roles and duties are socialized generationally.
Quantitative Complexity (readability-formulas.com)	Grade Level: Sixth Grade Word Count: 687 # of Sentences: 1 Average Word Length: 4 characters Average # of words per sentence: 19 words This Quantitative score is a poor reflection of the complexity of this text, due to the uncommon structure. The full text is one sentence that is broken up by semicolons, so any automated tool that relies on using words per sentence as a metric for text complexity is unable to accurately compute the difficulty of this text. As a solution to this challenge, readabilityformulas.com breaks a text up by lines, and treats the lines as sentences to attempt to more accurately apply reading complexity analysis tools. This explains why the text is one sentence with 687 words, with an average number of words per “sentence” of 19.
Qualitative Complexity	Meaning: The meaning of this text is pretty straightforward and I would imagine would be relatable for all students in a high school classroom who have already been socialized into gendered duties and performances—Considering questions like what it means to be a woman or a man, and so on. This story presents the ways in which the expectations to fulfill gender duties and roles are both clearly dictated but also extensive and overwhelming. Beyond this, the stakes of poorly performing duties or not behaving in accordance with rigid gender expectations are expressed to the girl—who the mother threatens will become, “...the slut [she is] so bent on becoming,” if she does not conform. This prompts further considerations for how we use language to punish and ostracize those that do not conform.  Text Structure: This text is in 2nd person, and it is written in the imperative mood. It is one long sentence, broken up by semicolons and a change in speaker written in italicized dialogue, internal and external. The internal dialogue written in italics may pose a challenge to readers unfamiliar with this kind of writing, but the framing within the story makes comprehending these breaks semi-intuitive, as the italicized lines are direct rebuttals to the text that closely proceeds it. The italicized external dialogue is easier to comprehend, as the 2nd person speaker responds to the italicized text.  Language Features: There is very limited if any use of figurative language or overt metaphor and simile in this text. The language is explicit and easy to understand, and the function of the language is clear. There is some complexity in this text due to the structure—one long sentence—but the participle units work very similarly to sentences, so they should not provide major confusion for the reader. Knowledge Demands: This story is written by an Antiguan-American. Many of the tasks directed to the girl are specific to Antigua, expressed through vocabulary and context. Pre-teaching vocabulary terms that are not used commonly outside of Antigua or by Antiguan-Americans will aid in a students understanding of this text if they have little to no familiarity with these terms or their cultural contexts and significances. This is very significant to having a full understanding of this story, as language is a profoundly important site for cultural inheritance and dictated expectations of gender roles.
Vocabulary	Benna Wharf-rat Dasheen Doukona  Salt fish Slut Pepper Pot
Application	This text has a variety of applications in a unit on flash fiction. This specific text was selected in this text set as it holds cultural relevance, so this would likely be something akin to an anchor text where students would be tasked with creating their own piece of flash fiction. One assignment would have students writing a pastiche that tasks them with using second-person imperative language to dictate some social or cultural mores that have been dictated to them or that they may dictate to others, with the goal of critically considering the ways we create, follow, and police rules. If not as an anchor text that influences a piece of writing, this work also demonstrates the ways in which tense and sentence structure can be used to give writing character in personality. Exposing and familiarizing a student to writing that features a lack of sentence breaks, the italicized internal dialogue, and the use of second person can add writing tools to the students’ disposal.
Question	How does gender shape the way we are expected to act and the duties we are expected to perform? In what ways do we learn these actions and these duties? What do we risk by not meeting these expectations?

Title	Riddle by Ogbewe Amadin
Bibliography	Amadin, Ogbewe. “Riddle.” Fireside Magazine, January 2018.   https://firesidefiction.com/riddle
Summary	Idara, a young girl, is taught at an early age that witches are evil paranormal creatures. She accepts this characterization because her “mama never lied.” Her mother suspects that Idara’s Aunt Adesuwa is a witch, as misfortune seems to follow her. Idara accepts that Adesuwa is a witch and grows to resent her, although her fascination with what it means to be a witch leads her to secretly observe her aunt. One day, while observing her aunt, she sees her transform into a creature with the body of a cat with her aunt's head. Her aunt confronts her about spying on her, and challenges the girl’s belief that witches are evil. The story ends with Idara asking her aunt if she would teach her how to be a good witch, so that she may make her human mother proud and reconsider what it means to be a witch.
Quantitative Complexity (Story-toolz.com)	Grade Level: 5th Grade Word Count: 1,180 # of Sentences: 122 Average Word Length: 4 characters Average # of words per sentence: 9.7 Personally, I think that you could use this story with a fifth grade class, but there will be a stronger impact at a higher level. There are a number of terms and phrases that would definitely require some pre-teaching, but pre-teaching would be a prerequisite with any group you would use this story with.
Qualitative Complexity	Meaning: The meaning of this text can be critically considered on a number of levels. On the surface, the theme of judging others unfairly is probably going to resonate with the audience most immediately. But beyond this, this text explores how we treat those that break social expectations and standards, and the language we use to separate them from us—human vs witch. Beyond this, Aunt Adesuwa is not just called a witch, she actually is a witch. The story tells us that a witch is, “a paranormal creature that lives between the shadows cast by daylight. They traverse the infinities of a heartbeat, they sail in seas of dreams…they manipulate nature.” This specific characterization of what it means to be a witch leaves room for deep interpretation that can be furthered through an understanding of Edo culture and beliefs. Text Structure: This text is written in the past tense from a first person perspective. The events in the story are presented chronologically. Language Features: This story uses simile and metaphor. This is a work of fantasy, so the figurative nature of some of the metaphor or simile is interpretive. The characterization of the witch quoted above is an example of this metaphor/fantasy speech. The author also uses imagery to explore the themes in this story. Critical engagement with the imagery in this story is not essential to understanding the plot, but aids in a deeper understanding of the author's intention. Some of the vocabulary may pose a challenge to students, but those terms are few and far between and can be mostly understood within context or are non-essential for a full understanding of the plot and themes of the text. Sentences are not overly complex and the structure should be familiar to students as young as fifth grade. Knowledge Demands: The author of this text, Ogbewe Amadin, is from Benin, Nigeria. This story plays with Edo traditional beliefs; specifically, the concept of the witch has a unique history, culture, and significance to the Edo people. The word “Aunty” as it is used throughout the story may be deceptive, as in Nigeria, Aunty is used as an honorific and term of respect for women who are older than you.
Vocabulary	Aunty Witch Trepidation  Consternation  Illegitimate Perpetually Subliminally Independence
Application	This text was selected as a culturally relevant and significant text that I imagine could be paired next to “Girl” in a unit where students are tasked with writing their own flash fiction stories that explore gender norms and how gender socialization occurs. This story pairs well with “Girl” as both consider cultural constructions of femininity and where “Girl” loosely suggests the alternative to following gender rules and expectations, “Riddle” explores what it means to be an outsider to gender norms and societal expectations. This is a work of fantasy writing, so it opens students up to incorporating storytelling elements that are more contrived and plot driven than the pastiches produced in the “Girl” writing exercise.
Question	What does it mean to be a witch? What does, “[Witches] traverse the infinities of a heartbeat, they sail in seas of dreams…they manipulate nature,” mean to you?