Rethinking English: Culturally Responsive Classrooms - A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

A Fine Balance

by Rohinton Mistry

CRP Fine Balance.pdf

This novel explores the the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of postcolonial and pre-globalized India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers–a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village–will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future. As the characters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, A Fine Balance creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state.

Rohinton Mistry was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India in 1952.He graduated with a degree in Mathematics from the University of Bombay in 1974, and emigrated to Canada with his wife the following year, settling in Toronto, where he worked as a bank clerk, studying English and Philosophy part-time at the University of Toronto and completing his second degree in 1982. Mistry wrote his first short story, 'One Sunday', in 1983, winning First Prize in the Canadian Hart House Literary Contest. He is the author of three novels: Such a Long Journey (1991), A Fine Balance (1996), and Family Matters (2002),

Curriculum Connections

Reading

Reading for Meaning: (Making Inferences) Chapter Prompts: Students use a guiding question to track their thoughts, questions and connections prompted by the big idea of the chapter.
Understanding Form and Style (Diction) Analogy Tracker: Students explore the analogies used by the author and research the expanded meaning.
Reading With Fluency Familiar and Unfamiliar words) Choral Reading: Students read aloud short excerpts from the text .

Oral Communication

Listening to Understand (Analyzing Texts) Discussion Circle: Students engage in purposeful talk about the novel within their literature circle groups.
Speaking to Communicate (Clarity and Coherence) Think Aloud: Students listen to a passage from the text and then orally react to characters, events or ideas presented.

Writing:

Developing and Organizing Content (Purpose and Audience) Opinion Article: Students compose a opinion article on a topic prompted by events in the text.
Using Knowledge of Form and Style (Organizing) Character Map: Students create a character web detailing relationships.
Applying Knowledge of Conventions (Revision) Edit Session: Students participate in a writer's workshop to improve their opinion articles.

Media

Understanding Media Texts (Critical Literacy) Radio News Broadcast: Students compose and record newscast for the major social events of the novel.
Understanding Media Forms, Conventions, and Techniques (Organization) Program Poster: Students produce a propaganda poster for the Indian Government of Indira Gandhi
Creating Media Texts (Form) Youtube Video: Students adapt a scene from the text and recreate it for a short youtube video clip

Essential Questions

1. How does the past seek to control our future?

2. What are the qualities of good friend?

3. Why do people believe lies instead of accepting the truth?

4. What is poverty?

5. Is evil something you are, or something you do?

Key Quotations

Dina struggles not to look back.

“The road towards self-reliance could not lie through the past.”

Thakur Dharamsi brutal response to inter-caste interactions.

"Crossing the line of caste had to be punished with the utmost severity."

Dina’s rejection of Rustom’s futile desire for solitude.

“There was no such thing as perfect privacy, life was a perpetual concert-hall recital with a captive audience.”

Maneck reflects on God after witnessing so much cruelty and inhumanity.

“...I prefer to think that God is a giant quilt maker. With an infinite variety of designs. And the quilt has grown so big and confusing, the pattern impossible to see, the squares and diamonds and triangles don’t fit well together anymore, it’s all become meaningless. So He has abandoned it.”

Trigger Warnings

“The purpose of trigger warnings is not to cause students to avoid traumatic content, but to prepare them for it, and in extreme circumstances to provide alternate modes of learning” Lockhart (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21689725.2016.1232623?journalCode=rfsy20)

Trauma Informed Practice A Coffey 2017.docx.pdf

Religious conflict

Poverty

Caste System

Mature language

Torture

Colonialism/Legacy

Ethnic Slurs