Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. Does any community you belong to have spoken or unspoken rules (think about your hometown, subcultures you enjoy, online communities you’re a part of, etc.)? How do those rules affect you? What would happen if you violated those rules?

Teaching Suggestion: Students who do not have experience with inner-city life and the violence that Black communities struggle with may have little understanding of why Will is beholden to the social norm that reinforces Cycles of Violence. Getting them to think about the spoken and unspoken rules of their own community might help them empathize with the central conflict of the story.

• Social Norms – The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a thorough entry on the concept of social norms and how they shape human behavior.
• Violence-Related Norms and the “Code of the Street” by Sebastian Kurtenbach and Abdul Rauf – This book chapter provides an in-depth understanding of social structures that are similar to “The Rules” in Long Way Down.

2. Literature has a long history of ghostly visitation as a tool for metaphor about guilt, loss, and duty: From A Christmas Carol to Hamlet, the entrance of a ghost bears real significance to the story.