Building Background Knowledge

 

Before you read Strong Inside, consider what you know about the biography’s major themes of American sports, civil rights, and higher education. Ask yourself the following questions: Have you studied these topics previously? What can you recall about these topics? (Holschuh, 1988, p. 2)

 

Consult the following websites to build upon your current background knowledge:

 

The Civil Rights Movement

 

1. Around the world: Civil and Human Rights Timeline

2. In the USA: Civil Rights Movement History

3. In Nashville, TN: Civil Rights Movement in Nashville

4. At Vanderbilt University

   1. 1. Integrating Vanderbilt

      2. Milestones and Achievements

      3. Black History

5. On the basketball court: College Basketball in the South

 

The South

Vanderbilt University

The Southeastern Conference

Vanderbilt’s SEC website

Basic Basketball Vocabulary

Advanced Basketball Vocabulary

Explanation of Basketball Rules

 

The “N-word”

 

Interview with the author (Andrew Maraniss)

Interview with the subject (Perry Wallace)

 

Previewing the Text

 

Before reading Strong Inside, first flip through the book. How many pages are in the biography? How long do you think it will take to read? Being aware of the length of a chapter will help you to be realistic about how much time you will need to complete the reading. Also, because this text is a biography, knowing where you are in the text (beginning chapters, middle chapters, or end chapters) will help you know where you are in the story (early life of Wallace, college years, or adult life).

 

Skimming and Scanning

 

It is helpful, before reading Strong Inside, to flip through the book’s pages and focus on the important parts to better understand what the text is about. This practice is called skimming. Ask yourself, What do the chapter titles mean? What will each chapter’s content be? How are the images related to Wallace’s story? How are the images related to the chapter title? By skimming the material for important elements, you can better understand the organization of the story, which might help you in predicting what comes next.

 

For example, by looking at the front cover, back cover, chapter titles, and images, you can hypothesize that Strong Inside is about an African American basketball player, Perry Wallace, who becomes a part of the Civil Rights Movement in America. Furthermore, you can guess that Strong Inside tells the life story of Perry Wallace (a biography) because the first images are of Wallace as a child and the later images are of Wallace as an older man.

 

A similar skill is scanning. To scan is to very quickly look over a text without reading every single word for complete understanding. By looking over the text for names, places, and dates, you can quickly understand the important elements of who is being talked about in a specific passage and where and when the action is taking place.

 

In Strong Inside, the author Maraniss shares the life story of Perry Wallace. As you read, you will notice that some passages are not descriptions of Wallace’s life. In addition to the main biographical storyline, Maraniss includes stories of lesser importance about people, places, and events that might have influenced Wallace’s life in some way or that might enrich the description (like what was happening around the world during Wallace’s life). These stories are not necessarily essential to the plot, and it might benefit you to skim and scan these passages.

 

For example, in Chapter 4, Maraniss includes details about Wallace’s high school friends. He tells the story of how Wallace’s friend Walter Murray and Murray’s future wife, Donna, met and fell in love. This information, although a nice anecdote, is not essential to understanding the main plot of Wallace’s struggle as an African American basketball player at Vanderbilt University.