5 Amazing Reasons to Teach Short Story Analysis at the Start of the Year

As an AP® Literature teacher, it’s always a struggle trying to decide how to start the course. I first heard about short story bootcamp for AP® Literature when I first started teaching the course. At the time, most of the teachers who were using it were also using a text books that our district didn’t own. And, about that same time, I noticed that students were coming in to class with a lack of confidence. They didn’t want to struggle for the answers, they wanted to magically know them. The result is what I call Flash Fiction Boot Camp or Short Short Story Bootcamp which is simply a way to teach short story analysis for the first two to three weeks of class through very short stories.

What is Flash Fiction?

There are lots of definitions for Flash Fiction, but I like the one that defines it as a very short story that is under 1500 words. I write more about flash fiction in this post and you can read about 20 of my favorite stories for AP there.

5 Reasons to Teach Short Story Analysis at the Beginning of the School Year: a guide to short story boot camp for AP Literature. Five reasons to start with short stories plus suggested titles.

Reasons to Teach Short Story Analysis with Very Short Stories

One: Short Story Bootcamp Establishes the Short Story Analysis Skills

There are close reading skills that all AP Literature students must have and hone in the first days of this intensive course. In addition, there is vocabulary that is either unique to this course or that now requires more depth, so they need to delve into those differences immediately. Using very short stories, flash fiction, is the perfect way to address these needs.

Two: Small Bites for Close Reading

Using very short stories means that even in a 40 minute class period, your students can reread the full text multiple times. This allows for you to really hone in on the close reading skills. A great tool to help you with your planning is the Read-o-Meter. It is a free on-line tool that helps you determine how long it will take to read something. You can copy and paste the text into the tool, and in a matter of seconds it will tell you how long it takes the average person to read it. I love to use this tool to help me determine how much time to give the students to read. With flash fiction, I often double the time to give them a chance to read it once through and then go back and reread for details.

Three: Self-Contained Content = Increased Self Confidence

Another reason to use very short short stories early in the year is one that has emerged more recently. With the advent of the smart phone, it has become increasingly easy to look things up. AP® students don’t like not KNOWING the answer, so when they are unsure, they look it up. Often, they don’t allow their minds time to explore and ruminate on the topic or the don’t allow their minds the time to come to their own conclusions. So, using flash fiction allows us to tackle a story in a class period and hopefully forces them to struggle a little. And yes, this does mean we use class time to read the text.

Four: Loop Short Story Analysis and Writing Skills

I love to start this unit with analysis of diction and writing claims. Then we can infuse discussion of diction and practice short writing throughout the unit. This insures that students are acquiring the very foundational skills. In my unit, we loop back to the skills that we discuss with the first few stories with each story. I also start with the shortest short stories and they increasingly get longer and more challenging.

Five: Short Short Story Analysis Can Help Address Complexity

One of the skills that students struggle most with is the concept of complexity. I like to hit it right from the start with stories that are less than two pages. It is easy to start to see how complicated characters and events really are when they are contained in a text that is 1500 words or less. One of the best stories for this is “A Country Cottage” by Anton Chekhov, but that is not where we start the discussion; we actually begin discussing complexity with Franz Kafka’s “Sirens” which is all of three sentences long.

How to Run Short Story Boot Camp for AP® Literature: 5 reasons to start with short story analysis with a unit outline and suggested stories.

What Does Short Story Boot Camp for AP® Literature Look Like?

The AP® Literature Course is so big, it is hard to know where to begin, but no matter how I decide to structure the course, I always begin with this Short Short Story Boot Camp because those short story analysis skills can be applied to everything that follows in the course. (You can read more about the ways to organize you AP® Literature Curriculum Map here.)

Day One: Diction & Complexity

The foundation of much of my Short Short Story Boot Camp comes from Francine Prose book, How to Read Like a Writer. (You can read more about non-fiction texts every English teacher should read here). In her book, she starts at the word level. We do the same. We start out the first day by examining diction. Most students know that diction is word choice, but at this level, it is important for they also to understand that to truly do short story analysis they can’t just talk about word choice. They must also address why the word choice matters.

We start with the Six Word Story attributed to Earnest Hemingway: For Sale: baby shoes, never worn. This is a 10-15 minutes lesson, so it is perfect for the first day of school or it can be paired with Franz Kafka’s short story, “Sirens” where we again discuss word choice, the difference understanding an allusion makes and how stories can be complex even when they are very short.

And we immediately jump into writing claims. If you are a Google Classroom™️ user, I love to have students write claim using the question feature because it easy to read the claims for a whole class in a very short amount of time giving you a clear indicator of where they stand as a whole.

Day Two: Characterization

Characterization is one of the next most important skills that students need to develop. Again, it is important for students to not only the characteristics of the characters in a story, but also why it matters. For this practice, we use Kate Chopin’s “An Idle Fellow” which is a story that focuses on characterization over plot. In fact, many students will argue that nothing happens in this story, and that’s pretty accurate. But there is depth to the characterization.

Day Three: Setting

One of the other big concepts that I want students to take away from this “boot camp” is to make the connection between terms and techniques, like setting and how it connect to other aspects of the text like diction and characterization and complexity. For this, we use Virginia Woolf’s very short story “A Haunted House” to focus on the setting and its connection to characterization.

Day Four and Five: Plot Structure and Syntax

Although plot is the most basic of story terms, as students progress through more advanced texts, it is important that they note the nuances of structure. “A Wireless Message” (Ambrose Bierce) is a great text to use for this task because Bierce helps to build suspense through the way he reveals information. Once students have addressed the nuances of plot in the text we take a look at Bierce’s use of syntax and the impact that those sentence structures can have on the text as a whole.

Day Six and Seven: Detail, Conflict and Contrast

Students often miss the concept of detail as a writer’s technique. Again, this lesson refers to Francine Prose on a writer’s use of detail. Students can focus on detail in Anton Chehov’s “A Country Cottage” using collaborative annotation in order to really hone their observations about detail. (For more on how to use collaborative annotations, be sure to check out this post.)

Once we have focused on the details, students move on to examining the conflicts in the story. Students are familiar with conflict in literature. It is another one of those terms they begin learning about in elementary school. But they do need to understand it in greater nuance in the upper levels of high school, especially, AP® Literature. A great way to get students to see this nuance is by looking at the contrasts with in the text.

Day Eight, Nine & Ten: Pulling Short Story Analysis Together

In the final days of Flash Fiction Boot Camp, students can focus on pulling all the skills together using the AP® Literature Prose Prompt from the 2005 exam. We do another collaborative annotation, circle up for discussion and then move beyond simply writing claims to writing thesis statements. This is a great time to have students write a group essay which will encourage students to work on thesis development (for more check out this post) and using evidence to help establish their short story analysis. Additionally a group essay can allow you start exploring the concept of a line of reasoning.

Start the Year with Short Story Analysis & Flash Fiction

Starting AP® Literature with a Flash Fiction Short Story Analysis Unit is the perfect way to get the year off to a good start. It encourages students to think for themselves in small bites which honing their skills in analysis of diction, detail, contrast, setting, characterization, conflict and plot structure.