Use these activities to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity. 

ACTIVITY: Compare and Contrast: Connie and Arnold

Arnold Friend is often seen as a dark reflection of Connie’s impulses and desires, and he presents himself as the inevitable, logical endpoint to her moving into womanhood. Use a T-chart to identify similarities and differences between Connie and Arnold. Then use that chart to make a case for what the story is trying to say about Connie’s Search for Identity under a system that prioritizes Patriarchal Gender Roles.

Teaching Suggestion: Students may have difficulty seeing the similarities between Connie and Arnold, since Arnold is a grotesque villain and Connie a young teenager, but they are both driven by a performative need to be something they aren’t. Getting students to look past the danger inherent in Arnold’s threatening persona can lead them to a stronger understanding of the relationship between the world Connie wants to enter (sometimes literally crossing the border into that world, as she does when she crosses the freeway) and the danger she finds herself in.