A Lesson Before Dying 1
As an Early College student, you are required to complete the summer reading assignment for English II Advanced. The assigned book is the same for you as for the students attending Timken and McKinley — A Lesson Before Dying by
Ernest J. Gaines. The activities for this assignment are included in this packet.
The novel is provided for your use by ECHS funds. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BUY
THE BOOK; however, copies are available at Borders, Amazon.com and Vintage
Books (online) if you would like to have your own copy.
Please do not write in the book, but you are encouraged to do “sticky-note” reading if you’d like by using Post-it notes on the pages as you prepare to complete the activities in this assignment.
This work is aligned with the Grade 10 English Academic Standards and
Indicators that will be addressed in class the first nine weeks of English II
Advanced. These assignments will give you a jump start on thinking about the literary elements and terms with which you need to be familiar to complete this year’s advanced work, as well as that work which you will encounter as you move through the advanced English program in Early College High School.
The ECHS program in your 10 th grade year will prepare you for the dual-credit
College Composition and Literature courses you are required to take for your
Associate’s Degree from Stark State College of Technology. It is CRITICAL that you take this work seriously and be ready to turn in your completed assignments on Monday, August 30, 2010 —without fail.
If you do not turn in the work on the due date, your first 9 weeks grade will be lowered by one full letter grade.
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A Lesson Before Dying 2
This packet contains, not only the assignments that you are to complete as you read A Lesson Before Dying , but also additional resource materials that will help you better understand the text, the work of Ernest J. Gaines and the reasons that the Chicago Tribune published the following about this book: “This majestic novel is an instant classic, a book that will be read, discussed and taught beyond the rest of our lives.”
Resource materials included in the packet:

ELA Academic Standards Glossary

A synopsis of A Lesson Before Dying

A brief biography of Ernest J. Gaines

Editorial reviews of A Lesson Before Dying

Vocabulary Log Sheet

Literary Elements Analysis

Poetic Interpretation of Novel
1. Vocabulary: = 25 points
2. Themes and Literary Analysis: = 25 points
3. Literary Elements Analysis: Conflict = 25 points
4. Poetic Interpretation: = 25 points
5. When you return to school on August 27, 2010 (or August 30,
2010 —depending on assembly schedules) you will take a DID-
YOU-READ-IT? test over A Lesson Before Dying. Do
expect to do well on the test if you have not read the novel. You will be permitted to use your annotations on your test. = 25 points.
English Language Arts Academic Content Standards
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A Lesson Before Dying 3
Reading Applications/Literary Text
Glossary
Term Definition
Chronological
Conflict
An organizational structure of text in which events are placed in the order in which they occur.
The struggle between opposing forces that brings about the action within a story or drama; can be internal (within a character) or external (between a character and an outside force.)
Colloquialism
Dialect
Dialogue
Dynamic
Character
First Person
Narration
Flashback
Flat
Character
Foreshadowing
An expression or use of language that is appropriate in informal situations but not in formal ones or an expression that may be considered old-fashioned or folksy, such as
“Aw, shucks.”
A form of language as it is spoken in a particular geographic area or by a particular social or ethnic group.
A conversation between two or more characters in a work that is used by writers to give insight into the characters themselves.
A character who undergoes a change during the course of the story.
Narration in which the point o view is that of the main character.
The technique of stopping the chronological action in a story and shifting to an earlier period to introduce additional information.
A character with only one outstanding trait or feature.
Imagery
Irony
The technique of giving clues to upcoming events in a narrative.
Words of phrases that create vivid sensory experiences for the reader.
The recognition of the difference between reality and appearance; includes situational irony in which there is a contrast between what is intended or expected and what actually occurs; verbal irony in which there is a contrast between what is said and what is actually meant; and dramatic irony in which words or actions are understood by the audience but not by the characters.
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A Lesson Before Dying 4
Term
Language
Limited Point of
View
Definition
The systematic use of sounds, signs and symbols as a method of communication; in writing, the choice of words used to convey meaning.
The vantage point in which a character tells the story in the third person, often confining himself or herself to what is experienced, thought, or felt by a single or limited number of characters.
Literacy Element A component of a piece of literature such as plot of setting in a story.
Metaphor
Monologue
A figure of speech in which an implied comparison is made between two unlike things ( ex: He’s a tiger.)
An extended speech in a drama or a narrative that is presented by one character.
Mood
Nuance(s)
The feeling or atmosphere that a writer creates for a reader, or a reflection of an author’s attitude toward a reflection of an author’s attitude toward a subject of theme.
A delicate shade of difference.
Omniscient Point of View
Parallel plot
Persona
Plot
The vantage point in which a narrator is removed from the story and knows everything that needs to be known.
When a literary work has two separate and equally important story lines.
A voice or character representing a speaker or narrator of a literary work.
The careful sequencing of events in a story generally built around a conflict. Stages of plot include exposition
(background), rising action, climax, falling action and denouement (resolution).
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A Lesson Before Dying 5
Term Definition
Point of View
Round Character A character who is complex and multi-dimensional.
Satire
The perspective or attitude of a narrator of a literary work.
Sensory Details
Setting
A literary technique in which ideas, customs, behaviors or institutions are ridiculed for the purpose of improving society.
Details perceived by sight, hearing, smell or any mode by which one perceives stimuli.
The time and place of the action of a literary work.
Simile
Soliloquy
A comparison of two things that are unalike, usually using the words “like” or “as”. (“O my love is like a red, red rose.”)
A speech, usually given alone on stage, in which a character speaks aloud his or her thoughts.
Static Character
Subplot
Symbol
Syntax
Theme
Third Person
Narration
Tone
A character who does not change throughout the story.
The secondary action of a story that reinforces or contrasts with the main plot.
A concrete thing used to suggest something larger and more abstract.
The way in which sentences are formed; the grammatical rules that govern their information; the pattern or structure of word order in sentences, clauses, and phrases.
A topic of discussion or writing; a major idea of proposition broad enough to cover the entire scope of a literary work or work of art. A theme may be stated or implied.
Narration in which the point of view is that of someone outside of the story who refers to all characters by name or as “he”, “she”, and “they”.
The reflection of an author’s attitude toward his or her subject.
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A Synopsis of A Lesson Before Dying
A Lesson Before Dying 6
In a rural Cajun community in the 1940s Louisiana, a white shopkeeper had died during a robbery attempt. Jefferson, a young black man, is in jail awaiting execution for the murder he did not commit. A country schoolmaster, Grant Wiggins, understands that the verdict and the penalty were inevitable. Likewise, Wiggins finds that he is also deprived of liberty. Although university educated, his ways are barred. He can find no better job than teaching in the small plantation church school. When visiting the house of a white person, African-Americans must come in by the kitchen door. Custom and the law rigidly separate the races. HE longs to leave Louisiana with his girlfriend,
Vivian, to leave the antebellum attitudes persisting 80 years after the Civil War.
However, Jefferson’s grandmother, Miss Emma, pleads with Wiggins to teach her grandson pride so that he can die as a man. During the ensuing weeks, both Wiggins and Jefferson learn lessons—lessons about love, salvation, and their common humanity.
About the Author, Ernest J. Gaines
Ernest Gaines says, “We all know—at least intellectually—that we’re going [to die]. The difference is being told, “Okay, it’s tomorrow at 10 a.m." How do you react to that? How do you face it? That, it seems to me, is the ultimate test of life.”
“When I speak to black students about Hemingway, they often ask me what I expect them to learn from ‘that white man’. I tell them: ‘All Hemingway wrote about was race under pressure. And he was talking about you. Can you tell e a better example of grace under pressure than our people for the past three hundred years?
Grace under pressure isn’t just about bullfighters and men at war. It’s about getting up every day to face a job or a white boss you don’t’ like but have to face to feed your children so they’ll grow up to be a better generation.”
Ernest J. Gaines was born in 1933 on the River Lake plantation in Pointe Coupee
Parish, Louisiana, the setting for most of his fiction; he was the fifth general in his family to be born there. At the ages of nine he was picking cotton in the plantation fields; the back quarter’s school held classes only five or six months a year.
When he was fifteen, Gaines moved to California to join his parents, who had left
Louisiana during World War II. There he attend San Francisco State University and later won a writing fellowship to Stanford University.
Gaines published his first short story in 1956. Since then he has written eight books of fiction, including Catherine Carmier, Of Love and Dust, Bloodline, the Autobiography of
Miss Jane Pittman, A Long Day in November, In My Father’s House, and A Gathering of
Old Men. A Lesson Before Dying won the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award. He has also been awarded a MacArthur Foundation grant, for writings of ‘rare historical resonance.”
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A Lesson Before Dying 7
Gaines divides his time between San Francisco and Lafayette, Louisiana, where he is writer in residence at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. He is married to the lawyer Dianne Saulney.
Editorial Review
Amazon.com Review
Oprah Book Club® Selection, September 1997: In a small Cajun community in
1940s Louisiana, a young black man is about to go to the electric chair for murder. A white shopkeeper had died during a robbery gone bad; though the young man on trial had not been armed and had not pulled the trigger, in that time and place, there could be no doubt of the verdict or the penalty.
"I was not there, yet I was there. No, I did not go to the trial, I did not hear the verdict, because I knew all the time what it would be..." So begins Grant Wiggins, the narrator of Ernest J. Gaines's powerful exploration of race, injustice, and resistance, A
Lesson Before Dying. If young Jefferson, the accused, is confined by the law to an ironbarred cell, Grant Wiggins is no less a prisoner of social convention. University educated, Grant has returned to the tiny plantation town of his youth, where the only job available to him is teaching in the small plantation church school. More than 75 years after the close of the Civil War, antebellum attitudes still prevail: African
Americans go to the kitchen door when visiting whites and the two races are rigidly separated by custom and by law. Grant, trapped in a career he doesn't enjoy, eaten up by resentment at his station in life, and angered by the injustice he sees all around him, dreams of taking his girlfriend Vivian and leaving Louisiana forever. But when Jefferson is convicted and sentenced to die, his grandmother, Miss Emma, begs Grant for one last favor: to teach her grandson to die like a man.
As Grant struggles to impart a sense of pride to Jefferson before he must face his death, he learns an important lesson as well: heroism is not always expressed through action--sometimes the simple act of resisting the inevitable is enough.
Populated by strong, unforgettable characters, Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying offers a lesson for a lifetime.
From Publishers Weekly
Gaines's first novel in a decade may be his crowning achievement. In this restrained but eloquent narrative, the author of The Autobiography of Miss Jane
Pittman again addresses some of the major issues of race and identity in our time. The story of two African American men struggling to attain manhood in a prejudiced society, the tale is set in Bayonne, La. (the fictional community Gaines has used previously) in the late 1940s. It concerns Jefferson, a mentally slow, barely literate young man, who, though an innocent bystander to a shootout between a white store owner and two black robbers, is convicted of murder, and the sophisticated, educated man who comes to his aid. When Jefferson's own attorney claims that executing him would be tantamount to killing a hog, his incensed godmother, Miss Emma, turns to teacher
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A Lesson Before Dying 8
Grant Wiggins, pleading with him to gain access to the jailed youth and help him to face his death by electrocution with dignity. As complex a character as Faulkner's
Quentin Compson, Grant feels mingled love, loyalty and hatred for the poor plantation community where he was born and raised. He longs to leave the South and is reluctant to assume the level of leadership and involvement that helping Jefferson would require.
Eventually, however, the two men, vastly different in potential yet equally degraded by racism, achieve a relationship that transforms them both. Suspense rises as it becomes clear that the integrity of the entire local black community depends on Jefferson's courage. Though the conclusion is inevitable, Gaines invests the story with emotional power and universal resonance.
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A Lesson Before Dying 9
Assignment Packet for English II Advanced
Student: _____________________________ School: __________________
Teacher: ______________________________ Mods: __________________
Complete the following Vocabulary Log as you read A Lesson Before Dying: As you read, look for words, terms or phrases with which you may not be familiar or which
you believe help bring the writing to life because of their vividness or variety.
THEY DO NOT HAVE TO BE WORDS YOU DO NOT KNOW! Number each of your entries. Your log should contain a minimum of 20 entries. If you need more pages, you may create your own or copy more from this packet.
Citation of Usage and
Page #
Word, Term, or
Phrase
Interpretation/Definition
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A Lesson Before Dying 10
Assignment Packet for English II Advanced
Student: _____________________________ School: __________________
Teacher: ______________________________ Mods: __________________
Complete the following Vocabulary Log as you read A Lesson Before Dying: As you read, look for words, terms or phrases with which you may not be familiar or which
you believe help bring the writing to life because of their vividness or variety.
THEY DO NOT HAVE TO BE WORDS YOU DO NOT KNOW! Number each of your entries. Your log should contain a minimum of 20 entries. If you need more pages, you may create your own or copy more from this packet.
Word, Term, or
Phrase
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Citation of Usage and
Page #
Interpretation/Definition

A Lesson Before Dying 11
Literary Elements Analysis: Setting & Theme
As you read, you will need to consider the significance of these literary elements and be prepared to answer questions pertaining to each on the DID-YOU-READ-IT? test.
 Setting
 Characterization
 Conflict (both external & internal)
 Tone, Mood, and Imagery
 Figurative Language
 Symbolism
 Theme
For the chart on page 12, you will need to evaluate the significance of events in the six specific locations listed that occur throughout the book. For each location, think of an event that stands out in your mind and connect the importance of that event to a theme that you identify below.
The theme of a novel is the lesson or insight about life that the story gives the reader.
Below, list at least 3 lessons you have learned from reading the novel:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
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B.
A Lesson Before Dying 12
A. = A significant even which occurs at this specific setting
B. = The setting’s significance as it relates to any one of the themes of the novel. Connect the significance to the themes you identified on page 11 of this packet.
Tante Lou’s House
A.
B.
Jefferson’s Jail Cell
A.
B.
Grant’s Classroom
A.
The Day Room at the Prison
A.
B.
The Rainbow Club
A.
B.
The Henri Pichot’s House
A.
B.
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Literary Elements Analysis: Conflict
A Lesson Before Dying 13
Tante Lou
Vivian
Conflict: Explain how each of the following characters contributes to the conflict(s) experienced by Grant. Cite specific examples and page numbers to support your answers. Use short summaries OR direct quotes for the specific examples; NOT
JUST THE PAGE NUMBERS.
Character Conflict Support from the Text (p.#
PLUS summary, or quote)
Jefferson
Paul, the deputy
Reverend Ambrose
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A Lesson Before Dying 14
Poetic Interpretation of A Lesson Before Dying
After having completed the novel, reflect on the setting, the plot and conflict, the characters, mood, and theme. Now, think of how any or all of these literary elements might be communicated in the genre of poetry. Write a poem in which you express your interpretation of the novel. Your poem may be lyrical or narrative; rhymed or metered or free verse. The final draft written below must be in INK or typed and attached to this packet.
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