So as you should know if you have been on my blog recently (or if you scroll down to the last post I wrote), you should know that we are finished our first novel study of the book The Outsiders. We have done lots on it: blog posts about every 2 chapters with a summary and our thoughts, the movie, a final project, and now, this. I know it doesn’t really seem like a lot, but we did it over a long period of time. We started near the end of October, and we are still working on it! So now, we all have to do a reflection about all the parts of this study. So, here it is!
So this book can teach you a lot. Trust me, I know. We’ve done practically anything and everything just so we can understand it. We’ve talked about themes, characters, the style of writing, basically anything. But we haven’t really talked about our opinions about it, and how we feel about the book. So this is our chance to do that.
This book teaches you a lot, but about what? It’s nothing like something you would learn in school, it’s just about life. That’s all this book is about. Life. And that’s why you learn so much. It’s about all the things you go through, and what you have to do and survive through. Reading this book makes me feel like I have actually gone through what they have; because I learned so much from it.
One of the most important things about this book is the author’s (S.E. Hinton’s) choice of writing style. She chose to write through the eyes of Ponyboy, one of the main characters. Sometimes, this can be a good thing, but it can also be a bad thing, but in this case, it can be both. Everything that we know to happen in this book is what Ponyboy knows, and what he thinks about it. So if something bad happens and Ponyboy doesn’t know the story exactly, we still hear it anyway. For another example, we only know Ponyboy’s view on the Socs. It would be interesting to know what one of the Socs’ view of a Greaser would have been. But having this kind of style is also a good thing, because it makes the book more interesting.
There are also many different themes in the book, things like teen violence, survival, heroism, etc. We had to do a final project that revolved around one of these themes. But I’ll get to that later. All of these things are a big part of why this book teaches you so much. It opens your eyes about what really goes on in a common situation like this one.
The characters that S.E. Hinton chose were right for the book. You just know that once you read about the 3 Curtis brothers and learn who they are, they just suit the title of the book. Three kids, with no parents, in a gang, getting in fights all the time? I’d think that it’s a pretty decent match. All of the characters suit what they go through, and how they deal with it.
The amount of characters in the book is large, but not all of them are main characters, but they still play an important part in the book. For example, when Ponyboy and Johnny were at the park, and Ponyboy was almost drowned, if only one Soc showed up, it would have been weird for just one person to show up against 2 people, Ponyboy and Johnny. Things like that.
We watched this movie in class after we read the book. Overall it’s a really good movie, and it is very similar to the book, but there also are differences. But I’m going to start with the similarities. Both the book and the movie had all of the same main events and they both had the same message to send out, just expressed in different ways. The differences are that lots of scenes were cut out, like when Randy, a Soc, came to see Ponyboy at his house when he was sick, and also how in the book it talked about Johnny getting jumped at the beginning of the book, which wasn’t in the movie. I enjoyed watching the movie to actually experience how it would really be in real life, not just on pages. I like the movie, but in my opinion the book is a bit better.
The Final Project:
For this project, we had to choose a theme that was portrayed in the book and do some sort of project on it. I chose the theme survival and I was in the survival group 2 with Zaira and Vanessa. We chose to do a voicethread presentation. I think that we made the right choice because we all got to do our own part and it was easy to add it all onto one, we just had to be on the same account. The only trouble we really had was having a few small troubles with setting and following due dates for certain parts of the project that we set for ourselves/each other.
I think that it is really interesting that we get to meet new people and collaborate on projects with them even though they live so far away and that we are able to have such good ways to be in contact with them.
Sara