Reading Lord of the Flies

You have several options for reading Lord of the Flies. You can:

• use a book that you check out from school (of course)
• read the full text online here
• read my abridged script versions of chapters 2-12 online:
• chapter 2
• chapter 3
• chapter 4
• chapter 5
• chapter 6
• chapter 7
• chapter 8
• chapter 9
• chapter 10
• chapter 11
• chapter 12

Here is a study guide for the first three chapters of Lord of the Flies. And here are the study questions for chapters 4-6. You do not need to turn in answers to the questions for homework. But, you will take a reading quiz on each of these chapters on the day that you are supposed to have read it. The study guide will help you prepare for it.

Make Connections to the Text

It's easy to read things by people whose interests are similar to yours. But to be a truly good reader, you must challenge yourself to read outside your comfort zone. You have to read hard books to succeed in school, and that's a good thing, because reading challenging books makes you grow and become a more interesting person.

But, how to do it? How do you read a difficult text? The first step is finding personal connections to it. Even the most obscure and old-fashioned text has something in it that relates to your life today. The Great Gatsby is about money and class. The Crucible is about back-biting gossip. Macbeth is about someone who will do anything for power. These are themes that we see in our lives and in the newspaper every day.

When you find personal connections to a difficult text, you become more interested in it, and that gives you the motivation to keep slogging through the hard parts. The pain is worth it. These classics repay the work you put into them.

We're using Jim Burke's Making Connections organizer to practice connecting to a text. First up, we're trying it with Paul Feig's hilarious autobiographical essay, "We Stood in Line at Ellis Island for This?" Next week, we'll practice on the introduction to Anne Lamott's classic how-to-write handbook, Bird by Bird. We'll also talk a lot about making personal connections when we read Lord of the Flies.

Reading Skills Expected of College Students

We discussed the skills that are expected of students who are entering college, and we examined a list of expectations that was developed by a board of teachers and professors in California. Even if you go to school in another state, these are the skills that college professors will expect to see in you. More importantly, these are the skills that you need to be a good reader. They are worth developing. We will be talking about them all year:

• Read texts of complexity without instruction and guidance
• Summarize information
• Relate prior knowledge and experience to new information
• Make connections to related topics or information
• Synthesize information in discussion and written assignments
• Argue with the text
• Determine major and subordinate ideas in passages
• Anticipate where an argument or narrative is heading
• Suspend information while searching for answers to self-generated questions
• Identify the main idea
• Retain the information read
• Identify appeals to the reader
• Identify the evidence that supports, confutes or contradicts a thesis
• Read with awareness of self and others