Tuesdays with Morrie Summer Reading Assignment

Ayush Sharma                                                                                                                        9/21/15       Bayside H.S.                                                                                                                             ELA

“Tuesdays with Morrie” Summer Reading Assignment

        The book, “Tuesdays with Morrie” by Mitch Albom, is an incredible story including a lesson taught to a young man by his aging former professor who is dying. Mitch Albom is a main character just as much he is a narrator in “Tuesdays with Morrie”. In this story, while watching television, Mitch Albom finds out that his favorite professor from Brandeis University suffers from a disease. “…Had I not been flicking through the T.V. channels late one night, when something caught my ear…” (Albom 17). “Morrie had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis” (Albom 7). ALS is a nervous system disease that weakens muscles and impacts physical function, and therefore Mitch decides to meet him. The first time Albom met his beloved professor, they talked about the world and from that point on Mitch became interested in Morrie’s perspective of the world and the drama that was happening around. Therefore, he decided to visit Morrie every Tuesday, taking a flight to West Newton, Massachusetts from Detroit, Michigan every week, hoping to learn something new every time.

        The plot of “Tuesdays with Morrie” takes place in Morrie Schwartz house in West Newton, Massachusetts in the 1990’s. The author hints the time of the plot to the reader on page 7 when it states, “finally, on a hot, humid day in August 1994, Morrie and his wife, went to the neurologist’s office, and he had asked them to sit before he broke the news” (Albom 7). Even though this quote does not provide the information on when Mitch started to visit Morrie, the author tells the reader that Morrie died in 1997 and therefore the reader could interpret that Mitch visited Morrie between 1994 and 1997. Additionally, I know the setting of the plot because majority of the story takes place in Morrie’s house. Page 26 of the book revealed the location of Morrie’s house, “as I turned the rental car onto Morrie’s street into West Newton, a quiet suburb of Boston” (Albom 26).