Maggie and Jago: Teaching Classics

Jago notes in his few pages that the classics are worth teaching because they help readers wrestle with some of the most complex of human conditions. She also says that we need to stop kidding our students; we need to be real with them and tell them that not all reading is going to be easy. Struggling is part of education. It is also what makes the classics worth reading. Its all about finding connections between people from the past and relating to people in the present. What makes these people who they are, and why should we care about them?


The language of Maggie is not particularly difficult to comprehend, but the time jumps and setting changes may pose the most difficulty for readers. There are a lot of characters introduced in the first few chapters that may be hard to keep straight. From the very beginning we have to sort characters into "good" and "bad" during the street-fighting scene. We have to know who is punching who and what happens to them. Having students outline characters and their key characteristics may help students get their footing in preparation for the rest of the text. It would  be interesting to have them focus on the family dynamics in particular; the old woman's comment at the end of chapter II of "who's beating who now" tells a lot about the home environment and who's living there.A family tree could serve this purpose. Have students outline who is in the immediate family, who is an outsider of the family, and then examine each character's role in the functioning of the dysfunctional family unit.


In relation to the family dynamics, we should also ask students what they know about Maggie right now. How is she portrayed in the beginning? What does her  role in the family shenanigans say about her character? After all, the book shares her name; why might that be? All these questions could help students understand the characters' actions so far and reflect on their own family dynamics and what it means to be a family.