Using Behaviors of Proficient Readers

Instructions: Read the passages below taken from Araby by James Joyce. Using the behaviors of proficient readers share your thinking through the use of the comment feature located at the bottom of this blog entry.


1 North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.


2 The former tenant of our house, a priest, had died in the back drawing-room. Air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms, and the waste room behind the kitchen was littered with old useless papers. Among these I found a few paper-covered books, the pages of which were curled and damp: The Abbot, by Walter Scott, The Devout Communicant, and The Memoirs of Vidocq. I liked the last best because its leaves were yellow. The wild garden behind the house contained a central apple-tree and a few straggling bushes, under one of which I found the late tenant's rusty bicycle-pump. He had been a very charitable priest; in his will he had left all his money to institutions and the furniture of his house to his sister.

Araby -- James Joyce

James Joyce

"Araby" is a short story by James Joyce published in his 1914 collection Dubliners The story Araby was not created solely for the purpose of a reader’s entertainment, but to makes points about living in everyday life, and what obstacles to look out for. The three main points to the story Araby in my opinion, were to insist that a temporary passion should not oversee regular a day’s needs, that one shouldn’t get his or her hopes up to the point where you are no longer thinking tactically, and that you should not make a promise unless you are absolutely sure you can live up to it.

What's This Blog About?

This is a tool for doing close reading activities with students. Based on a blog, this tool uses Comment Features, which allows comments to be connected.

With the comment feature enabled, teachers can post a short work of literature in a blog post, and students can attach comments, questions, and other learning artifacts directly to the post.