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This Lesson's Title:
Tillbury Town:
The Butcher's Tale
responding to Reuben Bright with three point-of-view diary entries
This lesson was created by NNWP Teacher Consultant Corbett Harrison. You can access all of Corbett's on-line lessons by clicking here. |
T his on-line writing prompt is based on the poetry of E. A. Robinson (at right). Before writing to this assignment, your students should hear and discuss the poetry of this great poet.
Click here to learn more about this poet.
If you are a Washoe County teacher, click here to search for a collection of works by this poet that you can check out from the county library. |
Teacher Instructions & Lesson Resources:
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Reuben Bright
by E. A. Robinson
Because he was a butcher and thereby
Did earn an honest living (and did right),
I would not have you think that Reuben Bright
Was any more a brute than you or I;
For when they told him that his wife must die, 5
He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,
And cried like a great baby half that night,
And made the women cry to see him cry.
And after she was dead, and he had paid
The singers and the sexton and the rest, 10
He packed a lot of things that she had made
Most mournfully away in an old chest
Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs
In with them, and tore down the slaughter-house. |
Step one (sharing the published model):
E. A. Robinson wrote many poems about the unusual characters in the fictional place he created with his pen: Tillbury Town. Richard Cory is probably Robinson's most famous Tillbury Town resident, but Reuben Bright--the butcher--is equally interesting.
Share this one-page handout with your students, or place it on the overhead projector. Before reading, let students know this poem is an Italian Sonnet, because of its eight lines followed by six lines, and because of its
A-B-B-A rhyme scheme.
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Read the poem aloud, and talk about its possible meanings. Students can easily focus on their interpretations of a butcher tearing down the slaughter house, an act that takes away Reuben's profession. Start there...but then show the students how the poem can be even more interesting than that.
Focus students on lines #5 and #6. Robinson condemns Mrs. Bright to death using the pronouns they and them, which is what makes this poem really interesting. We might immediately assume the they and them are doctors with bad medical news, but wouldn't the poem make just as much sense if they stood for government officials, or church elders, or the mob, or even voices in his head?
Have students brainstorm as many possibilities as they can as to who the they and them are, and their reasons for saying that Mrs. Bright must die.
Step two (introducing student models of writing): Tell students they will be deciding on one interpretation of who the they and them are. Using the poem as a springboard, each student will compose three diary entries from the point-of-view of Reuben Bright.
Show one or all of the student samples below to help them get their thinking started.
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Step three (pre-writing and drafting): Students need to decide on a favorite interpretation of the poem because they will be writing about it. If students have trouble making a choice about who the they/them in the poem are, the interactive buttons on the student instructions page might inspire them.
Once they have committed to an interpretation, they will plan to write three diary entries in Reuben's voice: one entry immediately after Reuben Bright is told his wife must die; one entry after she has died; and one entry after he has torn down the slaughter house. To help them capture an original voice for Reuben, have them use the graphic organizer:
To help your students add emotional voice to each diary entry, here's an idea from Corbett: "Before drafting each entry, have students look at this emotional faces handout. Have students decide on an emotion for each of their three entries; the decision should be based on how they think Reuben feels as he sits down to write. To help them remember each chosen emotion, have them sketch and label their face in their paper's margins before writing."
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Step four (revising with specific trait language): To promote response and revision to rough draft writing, attach WritingFix's Revision and Response Post-Its to your students' drafts. Make sure the students rank their use of the trait-specific skills on the Post-Its, which means they'll only have one "1" and one "5." Have them commit to ideas for revision based on their Post-It rankings. For more ideas on WritingFix's Revision & Response Post-Its, click here.
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Step five (editing for conventions): After students apply their revision ideas to their drafts and re-write neatly, require them to find an editor. If you've established a "Community of Editors" among your students, have each student exchange his/her paper with multiple peers. With yellow high-lighters in hand, each peer reads for and highlights suspected errors for just one item from the Editing Post-it. The "Community of Editors" idea is just one of dozens and dozens of inspiring ideas that is talked about in detail in the Northern Nevada Writing Project's Going Deep with 6 Trait Language Workbook for Teachers.
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Step six (publishing for the portfolio): When they are finished revising and have second drafts, invite your students to come back to this piece once more during an upcoming writer's workshop block. Their stories might become a longer story, a more detailed piece, or the beginning of a series of pieces about the story they started here. Students will probably enjoy creating an illustration for this story as they get ready to publish it for their portfolios.
Interested in publishing student work on-line? We invite student writers to post final drafts of their original at WritingFix's Community of Student Writers. This is a safe-to-use blog for students and teachers. No writing is posted until it is approved by the moderator. Contact us at publish@writingfix.com if you have questions about getting your students published.
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Learn more about poet E. A. Robinson by clicking here.
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