Document
Middle School Memoir Unit
NYCDOE, June 2021 — a 20-lesson reading and writing sequence
Original artifact
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Supporting text transcription: memoir rubric
Standards-Based Student Rubric
Memoir Standards-Based Rubric — RL3: Students will be able to write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, descriptive details, and clear event sequences.
| Category | Evidence of Meeting Standard | Approaches / Meets |
|---|---|---|
| Context (RL3.A) | Tells the circumstance and backstory of the experience — context for the reader to understand the narrator's behavior and personality. | |
| Dialogue & Description (RL3.B) | Includes purposeful dialogue and description that reveals more about character(s), event(s), and experience(s) as the story moves along. | |
| Experience (RL3.D) | Explains the impression the event(s) made on the narrator using precise words and phrases, relevant descriptive details, and sensory language. | |
| Reflection (RL3.E) | Includes a conclusion that explains the narrator's thinking about the experience when looking back and making meaning of it. | |
| Conventions (L.1) | Demonstrates command of the conventions of standard English grammar and usage. | |
| Organization (RL3.A) | Context, events, experiences, and reflection are organized coherently — beginning, middle, end — to guide the reader through the memoir's development. |
Supporting lesson summary: reflection lesson pair
Reading & Writing Lesson Pair: Reflection in Memoir
Lesson 7 · Reading
Objective: Analyze how the narrator's reflection develops the narrator's character in a memoir I am reading.
A good memoir isn't a story about this morning or last week. It's a story about the past that the narrator has had time to think about — an experience they've decided is meaningful. Their reflection shows that their story is important to them.
Students study reflection in three mentor texts — Amy Tan's Fish Cheeks, then excerpts from Shonda Rhimes and Sherman Alexie — moving from I Do, to We Do, to You Do: what is the writer's experience, and what is their reflection on it?
Lesson 11 · Writing
Objective: Add my own reflection to the memoir I am writing.
Using my own mentor text, Car Keys (below), students see the same reflective move modeled from the teacher's own writing, then return to their own memoir draft to add reflection of their own — now that time has passed, why was this experience important?
The lesson closes the same way it opened in Lesson 7: experience named, then reflection built on top of it — this time in the student's own writing.
The Mentor Text: “Car Keys”
An original teacher-written mentor text used to model the same reflective writing students were asked to produce.
I had my two weeks of dried and frozen foods, my toilet paper, my alcohol cleaning station, my outdoor clothes and my indoor clothes, and my puzzle. I could stay put and stay safe. It seemed.
Trains weren't safe. Subways weren't safe. Busses weren't safe. Cabs weren't safe. People weren't safe. And I didn't have a car…
A few weeks after I got the car keys, I drove away to a little cabin in the woods. I carried firewood at night and kayaked on a lake during the day. My parents visited a little and we tried to keep our distance. Then, one evening, my mom and I clinked our dinner glasses by accident. “Cheers!” “Oops.”
The pandemic has ravaged families, jobs, mental health, balance, everything that was once accepted as normal. For me, I was mostly okay, I guess. But it was a big shake up. It helped me realize that I wanted to live my life differently — that I wanted a quieter lifestyle, near my parents.
Pandemic 2020. The Great Interrupter.