Teaching A Separate Peace to modern students is important.
At my first teaching job, the curriculum was decided ahead of time, kinda. My first year, for example, I was told for freshmen English to teach The Odyssey, Romeo and Juliet, The Glass Menagerie, and To Kill A Mockingbird. However, choosing informational texts and short stories was my decision. As long as my choices didn’t overlap with other classes (like sophomore English), my choices were fine.
In the next few years, sophomore English became my main teaching load and luckily, I loved the pre-determined reading choices which included Julius Caesar, Night, and John Knowles’ A Separate Peace.
I had never read A Separate Peace (ASP), and it quickly became a beloved YA read of mine.
Falling in love.
Ok, maybe I didn’t fall in love, but I certainly loved teaching this book and seeing powerful results with students. If you are not familiar with the storyline, ASP follows two boys at boarding school, Gene and Finny. Finny is nonchalantly popular, and Gene is jealous. The setting is World War II, and their friends go off to war. Tragedy strikes at the school, and the boys must deal with circumstances at school and from the world. (I’m trying not to give spoilers!)
A Separate Peace was published in 1959, over sixty years ago.
What is the process for teaching A Separate Peace?
Since the text is not recent and the setting of the story is even older, you will need to provide background information. Students will need background information about boarding schools, World War II, and America in the early 1940s. Provide quick reading checks and study the beautiful language.
Below are more areas to build your lessons for teaching A Separate Peace.
Teach the genre.
ASP is both a buildingsroman and a historical fiction novel. Introducing the book by explaining the genre allows the teacher to build on class’ prior knowledge.
First, coming-of-age (bildungsroman) novels are hugely popular with young adult readers. Sarah Dessen, Jason Reynolds, Lauren Oliver, Nicola Yoon, Jenny Han, and Brandon Sanderson always do well with my classes. Find several books to which students can relate, and draw conclusions about the characteristics of these book. Then, explain that ASP is an older bildungsroman book: What could students expect from a YA book set many decades ago?
Also, the book is historical fiction. Kristin Hannah, Ruta Sepetys, and Markus Zusak are popular historical fiction writers with my classes. Again, build student confidence and prior knowledge by finding books in which students are already familiar.
Highlighting important moments.
Two pieces of ASP stand out to me and my former students.
One, the climax occurs in chapter four, and the book has thirteen chapters.
Two, the final paragraph of ASP is one of the most haunting paragraphs in literature.
Since the story has a unique plot structure, use that to your advantage! It is not often that a climax occurs so early in the book. Do students agree with this assessment? Does the story’s layout bother them? Intrigue them?
Remember characters with a quick quiz.
The characters are male, and readers will confuse Brinker Hadley, Cliff Quackenbush, Chet Douglass—lots of male characters! Plus, Phineas is called “Finny” and Leper Lepellier is a confusing name. Then, Gene Forrester, our narrator, is a unreliable narrator which further lends itself to confusion.
I made quick reading checks that provide fast feedback. Often, I don’t use those quizzes for grades, but rather, I use them to explain characters and to end confusion.
Meet language standards with a small bundle.
ASP has great vocabulary options. Plus, the background information needed to understand a World War II novel allows for rich discussions and lessons concerning vocabulary.
To meet those higher language standards, students must understand the context of a word and then the nuances. The discussions with vocabulary, therefore, cannot simply be memorization. Even if learning the definition of a word can be part of a vocabulary lesson, it cannot be the only component.
I address vocabulary and language with mentor sentences. For students to deeply engage with vocabulary words, they must do something with those words! We manipulate the words, perhaps changing a verb to a gerund or questioning the purpose of sentence structure. Teaching A Separate Peace allows for a deep exploration of language and vocabulary.
Bring it together!
After students read, review the story. ASP is not a past-faced novel, but instead, a reflective one. Teaching A Separate Peace can be a rewarding experience because the book’s design is unique. The book opens with adult-Gene returning to the Devon school. He walks along the Devon River, and he then walks into the high school to look at the hard marble stairs. The rest of the book is a flashback that ends in the same melancholic way it began.
As I mentioned, the final page of the book is quintessential coming-of-age as Gene reflects on his boarding school experiences with a backdrop of war. After you finish the final page, flip back to the beginning of the book: the first pages foreshadowed the entire story.
