For decades, summer reading and school year syllabi have included The Great Gatsby, and James Sheridan’s AP English Literature class at Houston’s YES Prep-East End is no exception. This fall, however, his personal experience with the text will far eclipse anything his students could Google related to the novel, the 2013 film starring Leo DiCaprio, or the 2023 Broadway musical.
“I designed this fellowship because I want The Great Gatsby‘s world to have a conversation with the 2024 world of my students,” James explained. “I want them to feel the ways that the book and its often-doomed characters can connect with and reflect their own life experiences (and those of their families).”
Yes Prep-East End is situated between Houston’s version of West Egg (the city’s ship channel and industrial port — the busiest in the United States) and East Egg (downtown areas for Houston’s professional basketball and baseball teams and its world-class museum district. In other words, James’ students navigate a complicated landscape of working class and wealth. Just like Nick Carroway and Jay Gatsby.
That landscape came to life in June, as James flew into Laguardia, rented a car, and set off with his wife and two children to document the context and characters described in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American novel.
“Driving in through some dense traffic on a Tuesday morning, we recreated Nick and Gatsby’s famous drive into the city in Chapter 4, the drive featuring Gatsby’s tales of his life, his Montenegro medals, and Earl of Doncaster photo. Nick states, “Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money.” It is impossible to disagree with the transfixing nature of such an entrance to one of the greatest cities in the world! Many of the key scenes in the novel happen in New York City: Gatsby and Nick’s lunch with the gangster in Chapter 4 as well as the Chapter 7 Plaza Hotel showdown.”
Each day coincided with a chapter:
- Day 1 | Nick’s NYC arrival in Chapter 1 and Gatsby’s post-war wanderings in Chapter 9
- Day 2 | Bootlegging and Baseball – sites associated with the 1919 World Series fix in Chapter 4
- Day 3 | Old Money and Power Structures – locations including The Plaza Hotel visited in Chapters 1, 6 & 7
- Day 4 | How the Other Half Lives – The Tenement Museum and walking tours of neighborhoods filling Chapters 1, 2 & 6
- Day 5 | Absent Voices – research of voices of color, women, and the working-class who create the background
texture of the novel but slide by invisible to the reader - Day 6 | East & West Egg – tour of the Gatsy-esque Oheka Castle and The Great Gatsby Boat Tour of Manhasset Bay
- Day 7 | Water’s Role – examining the role that the water plays in Nick’s final reflections on Gatsby and all that has transpired
“Driving through Great Neck, Long Island, we saw the roads that Scott and Zelda undoubtedly drove down in the 1920’s, with gorgeous skylines peaking out from behind mansions and dense trees. There was even a Gatsby Lane in the Kings Point neighborhood, but true to form, it was a false front: created as a marketing tool, no doubt, and not authentic to the time period. The views across the bay are all private ones or in parks that require proof of residence, very exclusive. And stopping at a diner for dinner, we saw myriad Gatsby references and maps that show off the Eggs (Gatsby and Nick’s West Egg = Great Neck, Kings Point; Daisy and Tom’s East Egg = Port Washington, Manor Haven, Sands Point).”
With new artifacts and insights, James intends to create content using QR codes for students to access with their phones after reading each chapter. Ultimately, students will create videos and written reflections about essential questions and places in their own lives.
” I am grateful to Fund for Teachers for supporting this journey into the heart of the novel, the 1920’s, and all of the modern-day concordances!” said James. “I feel a sharp sense of geography and place as well as numerous ways to link 2024 and 1922 because of this work…I will part with Fitzgerald’s closing sentence to the novel: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
James T. Sheridan is an AP English Literature instructor and Course Facilitator at YES Prep East End Secondary School in Houston, Texas. He was a 2000 Houston Teach For America Corps Member whose 24-year teaching career has taken him from Houston to Philadelphia and back. He has been honored as a 2012 Kinder Award Winner for Excellence in Teaching, a Finalist for the 2015 Fishman Prize for Excellence in Teaching, and a 2015 Teach For America Alumni Award Winner for Excellence in Teaching.
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