The novel, The Outsiders, is a book that most young adults love to read. It's the story of the relationship between the greasers and the Socs, two different groups of kids growing up during the early sixties. The story emphasizes the consequences that these teenagers face when they make some important decisions that affect their lives. There is a great deal of violencein the book. There are gunsand a huge fight between the two "gangs". There is a stabbing and one of the characters dies. The book refers to alcoholabuse, child abuse, smoking, and hiding from the police. It tells of three young boys living without adult supervision. It alludes to teenagepregnancyand one of the main characters is a high school dropout. Pretty outrageous stuff for the middle school classroom. . . And that's just the problem. Because of the nature of the book, many parents are angry. The superintendent of schools wants to eliminate the book from the eighth grade curriculum and replace it with a less controversial book. 

What can you do to keep the book in the eighth grade classroom? You can go on the Oprah Show. You can be Ponyboy, the main character in the novel, and you can let teenagers know about the consequences that they might face if they make some poor decisions. You feel very strongly that teenagers should be allowed to read your story. You're hoping that the decisions you made in the novel will help them with their own growing up process. OR, you can pretend that you are the superintendent of schools and convince the audience that the book ought to be tossed out. 

Remember, you are trying to help students understand and think about some of the consequences that they need to consider when making decisions about their lives.

Back To Beginning

1. First you’ll need to read the novel, The Outsiders, by S. E. Hinton. While you are reading, you need to create a graphic organizer of your own. You are to list ten different decisions that were made by characters in the novel. After you've described the decision that the character made, you are to write your thoughts about that decision. Remember to include the answers to questions like: 

2. Once you’ve finished the novel and your Character Decision Log, you need to visit several web sites with information on some of the controversial issues in this book. These are listed below. For each website that you visit, you must complete a Bubble Diagram. You can find the Bubble diagrams by clicking here . Print out three pages and fill each one in with important facts from each article below . Here are your sites to visit:

3. O.K., you’ve  thought about the decisions made by some of the characters, and you’ve done some research on some of the issues discussed in the novel. Now, you need to write your script for Oprah’s show. Your finished script should take approximately 10 minutes to read. You need to brainstorm questions with your partner that you think Oprah might ask Ponyboy. Remember, your questions need to be open ended. No "yes" or "no" answers, please. You need to make sure that you ask questions of Ponyboy as well as the superintendent. You may also have them interacting with each other. 

4. Write your first draft when you think that you and your partner have  your questions finished. Remember that you are writing to persuade your audience to keep this book in the curriculum or to find a replacement novel, depending on which character you are representing. You need to make Ponyboy give some very persuasive answers to Oprah’s questions. 
 

When you have finished with your script, you should have completed a persuasive task convincing the audience to accept or reject the novel in the eighth grade curriculum. Hopefully, you will have thought about some of the choices that the characters in the book made and how their decisions affected their lives. S.E. Hinton has written several other novels. You might be interested in finding some of them at Amazon.com.

Thanks to all the eTechnology leaders and mentors who were so amazingly patient and who answered and coped with even the dumbest of requests and questions.
The scoring rubric came from the Anne Arundel County Guide to Reading and Writing Across the Curriculum.

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