In English 7, the second unit of the school year is called “Raising our Voices.” This unit began with an examination of the contents of Realms of Gold, the Core Knowledge Foundation’s anthology for seventh-grade students. As the students surveyed the first two pages of the table of contents, found on pages vi-vii, they discovered that just one of the 38 featured texts was composed by a woman.
In response, we are reading across eras and genres to highlight works composed by women between 1848-1929. Most years, this unit includes a political document by Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1848), a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892), an excerpt from the journalism of Ida B. Wells (1895), a poem by Alice Duer Miller (1915), and an essay by Virginia Woolf (1929). Woolf’s “Shakespeare’s Sister,” an excerpt from A Room of One’s Own, sets the stage for our next unit, Emily Dickinson’s “Letter to the World”
Last week, the English 7 students read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” twice. On Monday, October 31, a group of mothers, grandmothers, and special friends joined the class for a Socratic seminar. In Gilman’s story, the voices of the men are amplified while the nameless protagonist is silenced in a number of very specific ways. Creating an intergenerational circle of women helps the seventh-grade students identify, reflect on, and analyze the issues raised by Gilman’s story.
