[TEA-GEA] ENG3U, Eng ...

Introduce a CHARACTER CHART with the 6 issues (can be found in Unit 3 - Resource Folder)

Set up for next short story

Gabrielle Roy is a French-Canadian writer whose works are translated into English. often writes of her experiences teaching in Northern Manitoba. 

With a poetic touch, she conveys the fragile sensitivities of the children she met in remote villages while on teaching assignment. 

In her autobiography, Enchantment and Sorrow, the author conveys her personal experience of teaching on a native Indian reserve: "Once there, it was abundantly clear that the only place I could stay was the hotel, since there was nothing else except some wretched wooden shacks built right on the sandy ground, scattered among clumps of scrawny spruce trees. Forty years later I would draw on this mournful setting and the sorrowful event that marked my first day of school at Marchand to write "The Dead Child", the episode that came to light so strangely. But that day when I set foot in Marchand, terrified and homesick already, how far I was from having any sense of the aptitude I had―or would have, like a seed lying dormant in the ground long before germinating―for turning moments of my life into stories that would create a bridge between me and other people. And those moments that have made me feel the most alone have often won me the most hearts among strangers. One knows less about one's own destiny than about anything else on earth." 

In "The Dead Child," the narrator accepts a one-month teaching contract in a remote location in order 'to gain experience." She arrives in June, taking over from another teacher who left the school early. But the nature of innocence and experience is called into question as the students and teacher come together to mourn the death of one of the young children who has been sick for 2 months. 

Roy has written many stories in which a young female narrator relates her experiences teaching schoolchildren in rural northern Manitoba.