CHS Students Study Their Names

At the start of the year in Alice Burns’ English 9 class at Carmel High School, students read short stories that center around an essential question about childhood and adulthood. Students made connections to the essential question, while reviewing and identifying literary devices and their impact on the text in the stories they read.   

In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, students read the short story “My Name” by the Mexican American author Sandra Cisneros.  “My Name” is an excerpt from the novel “The House on Mango Street,” and it focuses on a teenager who struggles to connect with her name and the negative experiences associated with it.    

The goal of the project was for students to make connections between the experience of the protagonist of the story and themselves, and to explore significance that their names hold. 

Students read and annotated the story, and then created a PowerPoint project where they did some research about the origin of their own names.  Their projects gave a brief introduction of their name and its origin as well as personal anecdotes from their families.  Students also modeled the author’s use of similes in the text to describe their own names.  

By asking questions and doing research, many students learned something new about their names.