The novel, It’s Trevor Noah: Born a Crime, explores the social issues of racism through the perspective of Trevor, a child, looking at the world filled with racism. It has series of episodes Trevor experiences during the Apartheid (period of where colored, black, and women were discriminated). The book is wanting annihilation of a law that restricts people with different races having sexual relationship, for Trevor, even from the perspective of pure child, he has felt the racism towards him. He couldn’t be himself in the harsh environment, where he’s birth was a crime.

Themes, Central Idea, Social Issues

Those three ideas are all connected. Central ideas are short summary of the book based on the social issues, in this case, it is racism and sexism. Themes are the lessons and how to react of the social idea. In the Hidden Figures, the central ideas are many things: World War II, women in NACA, etc. The social issues are things such as racism and gender norm. The social issues organized in the page. I also made mind maps of the central idea, for the central idea is the most important, the base of the following techniques.

Narrative + Informational 

The mini-lesson we learned is narrative part and informational part in the book. Through the Hidden Figures examples, we were differentiate the part that gives factual information about that time period or in Hidden Figures, NACA, and the narrative being Dorothy explaining her story during the situations. Connecting to our book, Trevor Noah, we can clearly see the part where Trevor describes the Apartheid (narrative) and the difference in the part where the author put additional information in about the Apartheid like Wiki Pedia style, not a personal perspective.

Analyzing Descriptive Passage

We learned how to analyze the descriptive passage, which is somewhat similar to informational passages. Today’s lesson was bit different than others, for our example was San Quentin’s Giants baseball. San Quentin Giants is a baseball team for the prisoners. Their heart is always outside in the baseball field; baseball is their one and only relief in the prison. Through the just a video introducing about the San Quentin Giants baseball team, we were able to know the story of the prisoners in San Quentin. In Trevor Noah, since we all know about the Apartheid, I thought about how Apartheid ruined normal people’s life. It stole their agriculture, land, family only under one reason; different race.

Cause & Effect

Cause and effect is one of very common and efficient techniques in novels. In the class, we learned how to see a scenario and make a cause and effect. Because of something, the consequence was this, In our novel, there were many cause and effect, and I thought the two of post its that I chose is representing the whole novel; social issues.

From the learnings we had, we were successful at finding out techniques in the novel.