What We Carry
This is where the week opens outward — toward other thinkers, other art, and the help you need to do your best work.
To a Mouse — Robert Burns
1785. The poem that gave the novel its title — a farmer turns up a mouse's nest with his plough and thinks about how the best-laid plans come apart. Read it once, then once aloud, and carry it with everything else from the summer.
Read it on the Poetry FoundationPastures of Plenty — Woody Guthrie
Before you listenWoody Guthrie wrote this in 1941 — the same few years Steinbeck was writing — about the very people in the novel: migrant workers moving from harvest to harvest, tending land that was never theirs. As it plays, follow the map of it — the rivers, the crops, the constant moving on. This is George and Lennie's world, sung from the inside.
Or listen on YouTube After you listenGuthrie's worker takes a hard pride in the “pastures of plenty” he plants and picks but never owns. Sit with it, then write a few lines: whose voice in the novel does this song give words to? Is there dignity in the moving on, or only loss — and what would George make of the man singing it?
Following the Thread
This is where it all comes home. Finish your Relation Study, write your closing reflection, and gather everything from the summer — the character notes, the letter, the freedom paragraph, the scene, the haiku — into one Capstone.
Open the CapstoneBringing It Together
Camus and Sartre, side by side one last time. You don't have to choose between them — they asked their questions together, and so can you. Honors students choose one final piece to carry the lens further.
Open the Lens ReadingCompare your narration
After you've written your own narration on paper, hold it beside this one. Nothing to submit — this is for your own noticing.
The whole book keeps making one shape: something soft gets held too hard, and the holding is love and ruin at the same time. Mice, then the puppy, then Curley's wife's hair — Steinbeck makes the pattern bigger each time until nobody can call it an accident anymore. George doesn't shoot Lennie to be free of him; he does it so the last thing Lennie ever sees is the farm, and not Curley's mob. Candy's regret — letting a stranger shoot his dog — turns out to be the exact instruction George follows at the pool. The dream was never really about land; it was about having one person, so you aren't like the guys who got nobody in the world. What I carry out of this book is Slim saying “You hadda, George” — the whole mercy of the story in three words.
What makes it strong: A whole-book narration doesn't march through six chapters — it names the pattern and proves it with three or four exact moments. Ending on a quotation the student chose herself is the strongest close there is.
See the strong & weak pair on Week OneTake a clear photo or scan of each finished section, then submit them to this week's assignment in Google Classroom.