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Bud Not Buddy Analysis

Decent Essays

Set during the Great Depression, Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curits is a award-winning novel about an on-the-run orphan’s quest to find his “real father”. Through an analysis of this text using the Council of Chief State School Officers’ text complexity rubric, I have concluded that this text is easy of students to swallow but difficult to digest (cite the rubric; see Appendix A). By this, I mean that the text itself is not difficult to read or to understand on the surface; however, in order to understand the richness of the text, students must have access to a wide variety of cultural and historical background knowledge of the Great Depression, as well as the ability to decode abstract and figurative language. I came to this conclusion …show more content…

This is primarily due to the fact that the setting of the story takes place during the Great Depression. Without background knowledge and contextualization, students will not be able to fully access many of situations and events (such as Hoovervilles, extreme poverty and emphasis on jazz music and trains) in the story. In order for students to really be able to digest this text, the teacher would need to ensure that students have an understanding of the cultural and economic ramifications of the Great Depression. Students must be able to understand the context of Bud’s situation – he is not simply an orphan. He is an orphan during America’s longest and most devastating period of poverty during a time with vastly different technological and cultural understanding from today. To further push the complexity further, the characters speak using language from the Mid 1930’s. Many of the characters’ words and references (such as John Dillinger, Brer Rabbit and “shucks”; see appendix B and c) will be foreign to many 21st century students. Without support from an instructor or from additional background knowledge, students will be unable to access a significant portion of the information in the text. Finally, the author embeds many instances of figurative and abstract language within the text (see appendix B and C). While not particularly challenging to understand, without a solid conceptual understanding of how to identify and unpack figurative and abstract language, students will be unable to access a significant amount of the text. Because of this text’s complex knowledge demands and unusual vocabulary, although, on the surface, this text is not incredibly difficult to read, teachers should be aware that students’ comprehension of this text will suffer if students are not provided the background

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