Book, Head, and Heart for Jerry Craft's New Kid

 

Book, Head, and Heart for Jerry Craft's New Kid

Before I go into my Book, Head, and Heart analysis for Jerry Craft’s New Kid, I want to take a moment to talk about how much I appreciate this reading strategy. A lot of kids treat reading as a box to check on a list of nonsensical homework assignments. They don’t realize that reading can both be important and fun. BHH gives them the chance to tackle books from another angle—instead of reading for completion, they are asked to read in a way that makes their pre-existing opinions important while also leaving room for new opinions to take hold. I will definitely be using this in my classroom.

 

That being said, here is my BHH for New Kid.

 

BOOK: This story is about Jordan. There isn’t all that much plot, but the book doesn’t need a long and complicated plot full of twists and turns. It’s more of a character study on a young, African-American boy and his experiences in an upper-class, predominately white public school. Jordan feels pulled in several directions—he wants to go to art school, his dad wants him to embrace his blackness, and his mom wants him to learn to navigate a career in a country that prioritizes the needs and experiences of white people. The book has a wonderful, lighthearted way of tackling social issues like code-switching, subtle and overt racism, and class differences.

 

HEAD: This The book is so charming. I was surprised to find myself so immersed in children’s literature. It is written in a way that appeals to almost all demographics. There are grammar jokes, political commentaries, and fun moments of kids being kids.

What surprised me was how the book handled class. While offering some light criticisms of the wealthy, it never demonizes them. One of Jordan’s greatest friends and supporters is Liam, a kid embarrassed by his family’s wealth. He wants to be seen for who he is rather than what he has.

This book assumes a couple of things. It assumes that the reader understands what it is like to be the new person in an environment. I do wish the book was longer. I’d love to see how Jordan’s ‘newness’ factors into his experiences in 7^th-8^th grade as he prepares to be new at the high school level.

 

HEART: What really touched me in this book was the importance of names. Several of the African-American students have their names mispronounced or miscalled by several of the staff members at the school. Even one of the teachers is called the coach, despite having worked there for several years. The book takes this serious issue of being disregarded by peers and gives it a lighthearted spin—Jordan and DeAndre begin to intentionally misname each other in a joke that builds comradery.

 

BHH is so interesting. It takes the ideas of deeper reading and repackages them into a manageable and teachable system that can be fully grasped by younger readers. Like I said earlier, a lot of students ‘read’ books in the sense that they just look at the words on the page without digesting them. Bomer talks a good deal about this. BHH does an excellent job at remediating this. While it won’t help vocabulary deficits or inattentive readers, it serves as a great tool for those who can read but get little out of their reading.

 

I plan on using this the way the creators of BHH did—introducing it to my class one word at a time. Book will be a mechanical summary of what happens. Head will be thoughts before and after reading. Heart will be the emotional takeaway. I’ll offer them a worksheet with graphics and bubbles to fill in each of these three subsets. For 9^th grade and early 10^th grade, I think it’s acceptable to leave it at this. For older readers, I’ll repackage it and offer it as more of a rough set of guidelines instead of a codified worksheet. I’ll have them use it as a foundation to have a Socratic seminar. They will take their BHH notes and use them as a jumping-off point for open-ended, student-led discussion. Combining rote summary with thoughts and feelings works as a great starting point for deeper discussion.