Our focus for our group project is to closely pinpoint teaching (hence the title) and the importance of community.  Not only is Jefferson being taught how to become a man but Grant is being taught how to be real with himself.  As African American men both characters were limited to learning and being educated.  Luckily Grant was educated but he was still a black man.

“It takes a village to raise a child” meaning the participation from everyone in a community would help and nurture a person.  Our project would be to create a scrapbook.  The scrapbook will consists of the characters in the book but who we imagine them to be.  For example, each character in the scrapbook would be a celebrity, actor, or actress that we feel best symbolizes the character based off of how they operate in the book.  In addition, the scrapbook will consists of different recipes that were mentioned in the book and also happened to be meaningful to Jefferson.

We are trying to find a classroom or area for this but we will host an event “The Last Supper of the Spring Semester”.  At this event we will be serving all of the food that is mentioned in our scrapbook.  We will not only be feeding the community the food but feeding them the lessons we take away from the book, the idea of “becoming a man”, the idea of captivity/imprisonment, and we also wish to gain feedback and speak about the book and modern day struggles as an African American man.  Have times changed? What are the differences and similarities now? Some of the questions we hope can strike a conversation.