Grade 12
Focusing on dystopian novels, 12th graders at BCAM took part in a Behind the Book program with author Isamu Fukui. Mr. Fukui wrote the book Truancy when he was in a New York City high school.
During Mr. Fukui’s first visit, he talked about what “dystopian” means. Students discussed the book’s setting and compared and contrasted it with their own school. Mr. Fukui talked about why he wrote the book, saying that he felt the same oppression in high school that his characters suffer in the book and that he is against compulsory education. Mr. Fukui asked the students questions about their own views on education: should all people have to go to school? What do we get out of education? The students were then asked to write a descriptive piece about their own walks to school. Mr. Fukui did the prompt along with the students, and he projected the contents of his laptop onto the board so that the class could witness his story-writing process. In between Mr. Fukui’s first and second visit, the students had to start writing dystopian narratives.
The second workshop took place at the Brooklyn Public Library. Around the room there were big papers with questions written on them (such as, what about society now can be considered dystopian?), and students could get up to write their own answers. The students then did a more in-depth comparison between the high school in Truancy and BCAM, focusing on aspects such as freedom. The students then talked about Brooklyn overall, including the existence of racial profiling, racially divided neighborhoods, and rising MTA fare. For their final project, students wrote a page-long dystopian narrative describing a character that is going from school to meet a friend.
