Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime is trending, and for good reason. I’m seeing the evidence everywhere.
This spring, as I ran our curriculum book choice tournament across the high school levels and hundreds of teachers weighed in, I watched it soar to the finals in BOTH the 9th/10th category and the 11th/12th category.
Then, as summer began and I opened up this new podcast series, “Plan my Lesson,” (which starts today, right now), I immediately received three separate requests for Born a Crime lessons. Naturally, with this book soaring in popularity but new to the scene, there isn’t that much out there being shared yet.
One teacher was searching for ways to get students connecting the text to the 5 key themes of the I.B. curriculum (identities, experiences, human ingenuity, social organization, and sharing the planet). Another teacher was planning to use it as an anchor for a memoir class, and still another wanted to help students identity rhetorical devices inside while also developing their question-asking skills and connecting key moments in the text with argument claims.
Is it possible to fulfill all these needs with one lesson? I think so. What we want is an in-depth lesson on a section of Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime, with a focus on connecting its big ideas to big ideas in our world today and in students’ own lives, exploring text passages carefully along the way for writer’s craft moves and theme development. And of course, we want it to be engaging. And fit neatly in one class period.
So today, in the first of our summer “Plan My Class” series of podcasts, let’s dive into planning an engaging, goal-fulfilling lesson for Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime. Whether or not you’re teaching this book, you’ll find lots of ideas for lesson planning here. After we walk through the lesson itself, we’ll be talking about helpful takeaways from designing THIS lesson that you can apply to designing ANY lesson, so be sure to stay tuned to the end. I’ll also be telling you how to grab all the curriculum for this lesson totally free. So let’s dive in!
Zooming in on the Text for this Lesson
For this lesson, I chose one of my favorite parts of the book: the section in which Trevor Noah shares about his experience with languages.
It’s perfect for exploring the IB themes, it’s funny and engaging, and it showcases several writer’s craft moves students can dig into.
If you’ve got the blue and yellow book I do, it’s in chapter 4, titled “Chameleon,” pages 54 (second paragraph)-59. Conveniently, Facing History and Ourselves has almost exactly this section in PDF form on its website, in case you want to print just it for this lesson to let kids annotate passages as they work (assuming they cannot write in their books). Just to jog your memory, or give you a little background if you haven’t read it yet, this is the part where Trevor Noah talks about all the languages he learned as a kid, and how they helped him be known, liked, and safe with a lot of different groups of people that just might have been hostile otherwise. The specific examples and stories he gives are thought-provoking and entertaining, just like the whole book!
Considering an Essential Question
First things first, let’s throw out a couple of ideas for essential questions here, as a framework before we get going. This will make it easier for you to integrate supplementary texts, like short documentaries, podcasts, poetry, short stories, etc.
Here are a few to consider:
- How does the way people adapt to challenge shape their identity?
- How do people connect to each other?
- How does the way we communicate connect or divide us?
- Is learning language still important in the age of AI?
The Agenda on the Board
As you kick off this lesson, consider writing your agenda on the board or projecting an agenda slide, so students clearly know what’s coming and how long each portion of the class will take. This will cut down on initial questions and help keep things moving on track throughout the class.
The Lesson Hook: How Language Connects Us
Let’s start this lesson with a little hook. In this video (play from minute 2 to about minute 7, it’s already queued up to the right spot below), a linguistics professor visits a school during “Languages Week” to give a speech. At first, it’s clear the audience is prepared to be bored. They couldn’t look much more unengaged. Then the professor reveals that he’ll be giving his speech about the power of learning language in gen alpha slang, the language of the kids listening. Everything changes after that. The students sit up straighter, smile, laugh, pay attention.
Heads up, there are a couple of slang phrases that incorporate a swear word in this speech, but they don’t come off as offensive in my opinion. It’s more like they show how committed the professor is to getting it exactly right in his new language. Still, you should preview it to make sure it’s OK for your school.
This speech is a great hook for the lesson, because it gets your class thinking about the role of language in connecting and dividing people, in a framework they can relate to. From here, we’ll transition into the next part of the lesson, that will ask students to consider questions about language in this speech and in their own lives.
Connecting to Real-Life Questions: A Silent Discussion
For the next part of the lesson, it’s time for a ten minute silent discussion. You’ll want to have large pieces of chart paper up around the room with questions at the top, and students ideally need colorful pens as they circulate and write comments under the questions. They can respond to the question, respond to someone else’s response, ask a follow-up question, etc. as they circulate. They should sign their name with each of their comments, to provide some low-level accountability for making an effort and being respectful with their comments.
Here are some ideas for questions to get students thinking deeply about the role of language in communication and connection in their own lives, paving the way further to consider Trevor Noah’s experiences with language.
- Did you pay more attention to the professor’s speech because of his use of gen alpha slang? Did the students in the room?
- Have you ever tried to learn a language with an app, program, or book on your own?
- Have you ever used Google translate for anything? Were you impressed with it?
- Do you speak more than one language? What other language(s) do you speak?
- What does speaking another language give to you? Give to others?
- What do you lose if you have no way to communicate with someone whose language you don’t speak?
- What languages do you notice being spoken in our school and community?
After ten minutes or so, or as soon as you feel engagement is dropping, announce that there’s just a minute left and you’d like students to circulate around one more time just reading other’s responses before the discussion comes to an end.
Guided Partner Close Reading: Chameleon One-Pager
Next, it’s time to transition from the wider questions of language in life to Trevor Noah’s specific experiences with language. For this activity, let students work in partners unless they really prefer to work alone – that’s fine. Either print the “Chameleon” section of the book from Facing History or have students turn to that section of the book, and pass out the close reading activity.
Give the students about 20 minutes to choose a passage and walk through the steps of the activity. As student work, make your class’s guide to literary terms available to them to make it easier for them to locate writer’s craft moves in their passage and consider their role in expressing Noah’s ideas. I like having a deck of literary vocabulary cards available on the shelf, like the one I designed for The Lighthouse, for times like this. Use whatever works for you.
Walk around the room to consult and answer questions as students move through the following steps and create a close-reading one-pager:
#1 Consider the challenge that Trevor Noah is facing in the part of the text you have chosen. Write it in the circle in the upper left. Include a brief quotation that illustrates the challenge.
#2 How does Trevor Noah make his point about language with this passage? Examine your text for literary devices Noah uses to help express the challenge and his solution. Showcase these craft moves in the boxes in the upper right of the page.
#3 How would you and your partner express the theme in this part of the book? Use the space in the middle right to illustrate this theme, using your own words, at least one quotation, and some kind of illustration or icon.
#4 Choose the line in your passage that you find most persuasive in showcasing the idea that Trevor Noah is a chameleon. Add it at the very center, inside the chameleon.
#5 At the bottom of your paper, brainstorm a list of questions that are on your mind now relating to language. They can be about Trevor Noah’s life or language in the world now. For example: How did Trevor Noah learn all these languages? What role does language play in getting opportunities in my country?
Out of their Seats to Share: Partners Showcase their Passage to Another Group
As students finish their close reading work, let them know when there’s one more minute. Then have each partnership find another and present briefly on the passage they used and what they discovered inside. Rinse and repeat if you have time. You can have partners put their one-pagers up in a wall gallery, or collect them for a stamp/sticker and a quick participation grade.
Exit Task: Place your Post-It on the Chameleon
For this exit task, I’m going to ask you to push your art skills a little and draw a general outline of a chameleon on your board. Use the outline in the picture above for inspiration. Invite students to answer this quick final prompt on a post-it: How is Trevor Noah like a chameleon? How did his approach to language shape his life? As they leave, they can add their post-it to the collage inside the chameleon.
Teaching Takeaways from this Lesson (No Matter what Book you’re Reading)
I realize not everyone is teaching Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime, but so much of what we talked about today can be useful to you in planning any lesson.
Here are a few things I want to highlight:
- Build community at the start of class with an attendance question
- Help manage behavior and expectations in class with a clear agenda (including times, or even timers) and specific step-by-step tasks that include resources students may need to succeed
- Activate student interest and prior knowledge with small activities that help students connect the day’s lesson to their own lives and backgrounds. In this case the attendance question, Youtube video, silent discussion, and question generation at the end of the close reading all help create relevance.
- Help engage tired students with out-of-their seats activities like a silent discussion that moves around the room and partners traveling to present to each other
- Help students use dual coding to make information memorable when you use visuals to complement text, as with a one-pager or sketchnote activity. Also allows for practice in modern communication, which so often presents a combination of visuals and text to put a point across.
- Integrate small instances of connecting ideas to text as in the close-reading one-pager and the exit task, helping students build argument skills without yet writing a full essay
- Take the pressure off yourself by creating a lesson that flows with clear expectations and virtually no lecture, freeing yourself to answer questions, put out fires, and check in with groups instead of trying to command attention constantly from the front (but if you are trying to command attention, be sure to stand in your go-to attention spot)
Curriculum Takeaway: Everything you Need
You can get all the materials for this lesson delivered straight to your inbox when you register for my (totally free) teaching idea emails below. I hope this fully-prepped lesson will save you time and get some great conversations on language going in your classroom!
Looking for More It’s Trevor Noah: Born a Crime Lessons?
If you’re in search of more Trevor Noah activities, check out The Open Mind Project, a creative visual activity for exploring characterization.
