Unlocking Empathy and Individuality: Orwell’s ‘A Hanging’ as Teaching Tool





At the beginning of class, students wrote for five minutes about their thoughts on capital punishment — as well as the reasons we write. They also had a five-minute “mixer” to discuss with each other.
Writing, to paraphrase Joan Didion in her own “Why I Write,” in emulation of Orwell, is to discover what we think. She writes: “Who was this narrator? Why was this narrator telling me this story? Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.”

For my scholars, I wanted to know: Their influences — movies — uncles — parents — society — those types of things. Maybe they never even thought about it. That’s fine, too. It’s not too often we confront such a subject, right?

They looked up countries in the world that still had capital punishment. What about the USA? New Jersey? What were the laws regarding the death penalty and equity?
Orwell’s essay reads like a short story. It could be fiction, but he writes as nonfiction from his days serving the British Empire in Burma. We just need to trust the ethos of Eric…