The Afterlife of Anne Frank Online
Anne Frank and literature is the type of topic that is more likely to appear on one of the other blogs that I use, but in this instance, it was the tech side of teaching her diary that caught my attention.
Many teachers use Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
as a reading in their courses. It's one of those titles (like To Kill A Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men et al) that is a standard, especially in high school English classrooms, which make them perennial bestsellers. Maybe that list is too narrow, (It's also the list of Cliff Notes, Spark Notes and all those publications too.), but her diary continues to have interest.
Part of that interest may be that we have the diary to read at all. The story of its discovery and publication is part of the entire story. (It was turned down by plenty of publishers.)
Francine Prose
has a new book called Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife
. Prose's book looks at the diary in a different way: as a literary work. She doesn't approach the diary as a teenager pouring out her inner life, but as a more consciously crafted work of literature.
For students who read the diary in middle school or high school, this might be an interesting approach to the book in an upper level English class or college classroom. Prose shows evidence that Anne did a lot of revision before her arrest with the intention of being published.
There are still those that criticize Anne's father for "minimizing the Jewish essence of the Holocaust," and might criticize Francine Prose as over-inflating Anne's literary abilities and ambitions. That's just more for the discussion.
I also wonder how many teachers take advantage at the media freely available online to supplement this kind of discussion. Why not assign students as an "outside reading" to listen to Francine Prose talk about new book online?
What discussion might come from students looking at the only known film footage of Anne Frank herself? This video (yes, on that terrible time waster - YouTube, which is probably blocked in some schools) was shot July 22 1941.
"The girl next door is getting married. Anne Frank is leaning out of the window of her house in Amsterdam to get a good look at the bride and groom. It is the only time Anne Frank has ever been captured on film. At the time of her wedding, the bride lived on the second floor at Merwedeplein 39. The Frank family lived at number 37, also on the second floor." The Anne Frank House offers this on their YouTube site.
I also heard Francine Prose on my local NPR station (WNYC) interviewed and that is available online. It's from The Leonard Lopate Show which is also available by subscription in iTunes, so you can download the files. That's useful for classrooms that have limited bandwidth or block all the good media sources.
The show site's comments also led me to discover that "NYC houses the US partner organization to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam right here in Soho on 38 Crosby Street. It provides exhibitions on AF and her times and other related materials, as well as public and in depth educational programming going into the schools (such as the one Ms. Prose visited in Queens) dealing on issues of intolerance, creative writing, always using the diary as a piece of literature."
Another Recommendation: Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer - a good book for students who want to write, that encourages them to first be readers.
Many teachers use Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
as a reading in their courses. It's one of those titles (like To Kill A Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men et al) that is a standard, especially in high school English classrooms, which make them perennial bestsellers. Maybe that list is too narrow, (It's also the list of Cliff Notes, Spark Notes and all those publications too.), but her diary continues to have interest.Part of that interest may be that we have the diary to read at all. The story of its discovery and publication is part of the entire story. (It was turned down by plenty of publishers.)
Francine Prose
has a new book called Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife. Prose's book looks at the diary in a different way: as a literary work. She doesn't approach the diary as a teenager pouring out her inner life, but as a more consciously crafted work of literature. For students who read the diary in middle school or high school, this might be an interesting approach to the book in an upper level English class or college classroom. Prose shows evidence that Anne did a lot of revision before her arrest with the intention of being published.
There are still those that criticize Anne's father for "minimizing the Jewish essence of the Holocaust," and might criticize Francine Prose as over-inflating Anne's literary abilities and ambitions. That's just more for the discussion.
I also wonder how many teachers take advantage at the media freely available online to supplement this kind of discussion. Why not assign students as an "outside reading" to listen to Francine Prose talk about new book online?
What discussion might come from students looking at the only known film footage of Anne Frank herself? This video (yes, on that terrible time waster - YouTube, which is probably blocked in some schools) was shot July 22 1941.
"The girl next door is getting married. Anne Frank is leaning out of the window of her house in Amsterdam to get a good look at the bride and groom. It is the only time Anne Frank has ever been captured on film. At the time of her wedding, the bride lived on the second floor at Merwedeplein 39. The Frank family lived at number 37, also on the second floor." The Anne Frank House offers this on their YouTube site.
I also heard Francine Prose on my local NPR station (WNYC) interviewed and that is available online. It's from The Leonard Lopate Show which is also available by subscription in iTunes, so you can download the files. That's useful for classrooms that have limited bandwidth or block all the good media sources.
The show site's comments also led me to discover that "NYC houses the US partner organization to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam right here in Soho on 38 Crosby Street. It provides exhibitions on AF and her times and other related materials, as well as public and in depth educational programming going into the schools (such as the one Ms. Prose visited in Queens) dealing on issues of intolerance, creative writing, always using the diary as a piece of literature."
Another Recommendation: Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer - a good book for students who want to write, that encourages them to first be readers.
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