Audio - all audio content related to Ernest Hemingway, and especially his first book - In Our Time.

A short tale about a Hemingway Birthday Party long ago - meeting Hemingway's son, A.E. Hotchner, and an old woman who was once a little girl - all ripples in the pond.

 Students respond strongly to this story - and it shows in our discussions.  By now (senior or junior year), most of them have dated someone - and have broken up with that person - so it is always amazing to hear them reading this story aloud and discussing it with such personal insight.  We read the story aloud, discuss it, and then watch a video that I created on the story that can be found here.

 A five minutes for Friday about a long ago birthday party for Ernest Hemingway - meeting his son, A.E. Hotchner, and a wonderful woman who was a music student of Grace Hall Hemingway.

 We allmost always begin our unit on Hemingway's In Our Time - with this story, "Soldier's Home," though it is not the first story in book.  It does make sense to talk about this story first, after reading All Quiet on the Western Front.  The character from that novel, Paul Baumer, closely resembles Hemingway's Harold Krebs - and we talk about many of those similarities (and distinctions) in our discussion.

This year I forgot to tell the students in advance that there was something under the surface in this story (part of the iceburg approach to writing that Hemingway employed) that was incredibly important and stunning.  So we didn't get to that part until we finished reading the story in class - that made, I think, for an even more interesting discussion (an iceburg discussion?).   

 We begin the class by writing down the emotions that we think Nick was feeling when the horrible discovery in the story is made - then we get in concentric circles and whisper those words out from the center - like a ripple in the pond.  We talk about the imagery in the poem - and much of the conversation is why the Doctor would take his son with him to such an adult and potentially horrible even as a breach birth.  We end by reading the very poignant ending aloud.

We get ourselves into concentric circles - one student in the center - three around that person - maybe 10 around the three, etc.  At the beginning of class I asked the students to write down one word - an emotion - that they felt when reading the story and they got to the part of the father in the bunk - an emotion that they felt "Nick" would also have felt.  The person in the center says their word - the next circle says it a little softer - and so on.  We pass our words to the center - and listen.