The Story of an Hour

I'm not sure how I got through Columbia Prep and Princeton without learning more about white people.  I'm going to chalk it up to the fact that it was the 90's and diversity/multi-culturalism was very much in vogue.  

This year I have had to play catch up in order to teach my overwhelmingly "traditional" curriculum. Although, at times it has been hard to connect to the material, I have discovered some gems.  I found "The Story of An Hour," by Kate Chopin by flipping through an anthology of short stories for Middle-School students.  I used it in my 6th grade class to review literary elements for their Language and Literature final exam.  Initially, students had to read the story and find one example of foreshadowing and one example of irony.  We ended up having a competition in which students read the story multiple times in an effort to to figure out why the main character died.  We had a really interesting discussion about why Chopin had to kill her main character in order to get her story published.

"The Story of an Hour" is a good tool for teaching plot, irony, foreshadowing, symbolism, and theme to Middle and High-School students- but it is also a great story for any woman in search of herself.

Read it here.