Farah Ahmedi: The Other Side of the Sky

This is in the "Do I want to teach this book?" category, and the answer is yes, in three out of four categories.

It would be easiest to start with the only way in which this is not a good book to teach my students: the length. They have taken seven weeks (more or less) to read a book that is half the length. The payoff of teaching this book would simply not be worth the instructional time it would eat up. A teacher at a school where the students would read so much as a page a night on their own might come to a different conclusion.

One way this book is eminently suitable is its readability. SMOG (http://www.harrymclaughlin.com/SMOG.htm) calculates the level at 11th grade, which is too high for my students technically, but the thorough and helpful footnotes figure nowhere in that calculation, and I only typed half a page into the calculator, so it may well be skewed. My assessment is more like 9th.

Both of the above criteria are a bit sterile, but the book is anything but. It is delightfully idiomatic, thoughtfully written, and filled with emotion and imagery. The students will especially appreciate the author/narrator's nearness to their own age, and my Latino students will relate well to the immigration and ELL themes in the book.

As a teacher, what I am most interested in is the books pedagogical possibilities. There is so much that can be done with this highly topical book--relating it to the war in Afghanistan, 9/11, family conflict, culture shock, any numerous other themes, both in language arts and social studies. If I were staying at my current job, I would co-teach it with my Social Studies compatriot across the hall in a heartbeat.