Who
Killed Mr. Chippendale?
An
important passage in Who Killed Mr.
Chippendale reveals the powerful means of showing the student/teacher
relationship within the classroom. Glenn (1996) writes about the experience a
teacher named Robert Chippendale that allows the student to experience the
inner thoughts of an educator: “By the babble of two thousand students--/Not a
melting pot, but a multicultural mix,/Slouching its way toward Tower” (Glenn
2). This passage moved me because of its flow as a story of a teacher/student
relations in the classroom (aka.The Tower), which reveals the more human side
of teacher’s complex interactive stance on the school’s multicultural
background. Narrative poetry can be an excellent way in which to easily
communicate short and descriptive sentence to persons with special abilities
that I work with in the classroom. With middle school students at this reading
level, it is possible to more easily bring them into the multicultural tensions
found in Glenn’s story. Narrative poetry has a way of capturing powerful
emotions and ideas in short compact sentences. More so, the line-by-line poetic
structure makes it easy to compartmentalize these ideas for students with
reading comprehension cognitive disabilities. In this way, “students may enjoy
a poetry in a familiar narrative form” (146), which can be applied to Glenn’s poetry as a way of
connecting the teacher to the student through the inner thoughts of Mr.
Chippendale. Perhaps middle school students can find a stimulating means in
which they can see that teachers are also human and that more intimate
relationships can be developed when teaching reading skills in the classroom.
References:
Elliott,
J. B., & Dupuis, M. M. (2002). Young
adult literature in the classroom: Reading it, teaching it, loving it.
Newark, Del: International Reading Association.
Glenn,
M. (1996). Who killed Mr. Chippendale?: A
mystery in poems. New York: Lodestar Books.
Zaheeda, I do not remember that Mr. Chippendale's inner thoughts were shared by the author. What did you think of the fact that you learned about Mr. Chippendale through the eyes of others? What did you learn about Mr. Chippendale? Was this, in your estimation, an effective way to tell a mystery story? Were you surprised to find out who did, indeed, commit the murder? You never did mention the different characters that Mel Glenn has in this particular piece of poetry. Who was your favorite? Possibly you need to reread this work. Dr. Ries
ReplyDeleteDr. Ries
DeleteThe most important approach to teaching this book in the classroom is through a multiple student/faculty perspective regarding the murder of Mr. Chippendale. More importantly, the mindset of Mr. Chippendale’s former students, such as Mike Curry aka. “The Red-hooded Sweatshirt”, help encourage reading through an unfiltered teenage perspective. For instance, Curry is one of the main suspects (and eventually proved to be the killer) in the death of Mr. Chippendale, which reveals his unbridled violent personality: “The day the teacher got shot?/ it was the last exciting thing/ To happen in this dumb-ass school” (Glen 56). For students at the middle school level, the emotional tension and frustration of such a statement might be something they can relate to at this age of development. Through the mystery perspective, the student can begin to interpret clues on suspected characters, such as Mike Curry, which help them with problem solving skills while reading in the classroom. When teaching disabled middle school students in the classroom, Glenn provides an interactive and diverse array of characters that create a dialogue between students in a discussion forum. In my estimation, I definitely suspected Mike Curry as the murderer due to his murderous lifestyle, his aggressive behaviors, and his more than obvious patterns of extremely violent tendencies. Personally, I like the guidance counselor character of Angela Falcone. She is one of the only characters that seemed to care about Mr. Chippendale, which reveals some aspects of compassion, romanticism, and insight into his death.
Angela was obviously in love with him................as were several of is young female students. Do you think Mr. Chippendale has many friends? How can you tell what type of a person he was through the interviews with his students? Do you think that was a clever way to talk about this main character?
DeleteI think Angela and other females, such as poetry student Cynthia Arroyo, are really the only real friends that Mr. Chippendale has in the school due romantic affiliations. I feel that his “popularity” is superficial because he tends to favor talented female students over male students, such as John Bellerus, that he failed in his class. While some females, such as Delia, are angry with him for failing to write good poetry: “I hope his soul he goes straight to hell” (Glenn 11). In some ways, Mr. Chippendale is vey nice to successful students (mostly female) and not very nice to the male students, especially if they cannot write. For the most part, Angela is connected with Mr. Chippendale as an old girlfriend, which reinforces his favoritism towards women he finds acceptable as student writers.
ReplyDeleteI think the use of Glenn’s interview method in free verse is clever because it shows Mr. Chippendale’s favoritism towards poetry as a means of expression. Ironically, it reveals the ambiguous details of his life, which slowly point toward a resentful male character as the murderer. After all, only poets with good writings skills were acceptable in his classroom. In some ways, the lack of clarity in the murder mystery style of free verse used by Glenn defines the irony of Mr. Chippendale’s intolerance of students that could not write in this literary medium. Through the interview method, Glenn cleverly uses abstract poetry to show the motivation of the students to either love or hate him. More so, Mr. Chippendale did not appear very tolerant to primarily male writing students and in this case, it resulted in his murder by psychopathic resentful student.