I love love love the story La noche boca arriba by Julio Cortázar. If you haven’t read it, GO READ IT! It’s a short story! If you have, you know what I mean. It is full of action and a great twist at the end.

I read the story for the first time when I was in college and wanted to share it with my students, but knew that Cortázar’s language was way beyond what they could do without some major heavy lifting on my part… so I set out to find a solution.

1. I wrote the reader Vector with the time jump literary device in mind. When we read it together in class, students become familiar with the idea of a character being in one place while awake and another while asleep.
2. I adapted the Cortázar story La noche boca arriba to make it a shorter short story in much more accessible language. They’ll see the original, but not until they’re confident about what happens.
3. We can now use our adapted version and compare it to the storyline of the reader Vector.

If you’d like to try out the little free lesson (and then pair it with the original text so students can see how much more they understand when they’re already familiar with the heart of the story), you can find it here.

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