The Big Wave offers a natural bridge between English Language Arts and science curricula, since the novella's fictional tsunami and volcanic eruption pair directly with units on plate tectonics, natural disasters, and geological hazards. Schools that coordinate this pairing across departments give students a richer, more grounded reading experience, since the scientific reality behind the story adds weight to its emotional content. This kind of cross-curricular design also creates opportunities for writing assignments that blend narrative analysis with informational or explanatory writing, which is a valuable but often underused combination. Grading these hybrid assignments requires thinking carefully about which department's standards apply to which part of the student's work.

A well-designed cross-curricular assignment might ask students to write an essay in two parts, first explaining the actual geological process behind a tsunami using accurate scientific vocabulary, then analyzing how Pearl S. Buck's fictional portrayal compares to that reality. This structure lets students practice explanatory writing in the first section and literary analysis in the second, giving both departments a legitimate stake in the assessment. Teachers coordinating this assignment should agree in advance on how much weight each section carries, since a science teacher and an ELA teacher may have very different intuitions about what counts as sufficient depth in each part. Clarifying this weighting before the assignment is given prevents confusion during grading and keeps expectations consistent for students.

One benefit of this pairing is that it gives students a concrete, factual anchor for interpreting the emotional core of the novella, since understanding that a real tsunami can strike with almost no warning helps explain why the characters' fear and grief feel so immediate in the story. Students who understand the actual mechanics of seismic activity often write more precise and less melodramatic descriptions of the wave itself, since they are drawing on real knowledge rather than vague disaster movie imagery. This precision is worth rewarding explicitly in a rubric, since it reflects genuine cross-disciplinary thinking rather than simply retelling the plot with added vocabulary. Teachers should watch for whether students actually integrate the scientific content meaningfully or simply insert a few technical terms without real understanding.

Designing a Rubric That Serves Two Departments

A cross-curricular rubric works best when it clearly separates the criteria that belong to each discipline rather than blending them into a single vague standard that neither department fully owns. The science-focused section might assess accuracy of the geological explanation, appropriate use of vocabulary like tectonic plates or seismic waves, and clarity of cause-and-effect reasoning. The ELA-focused section would assess the quality of literary analysis, evidence use from the novella, and overall writing craft. Keeping these sections distinct, even within a single combined assignment, makes it much easier for two different teachers to grade their respective portions without stepping on each other's disciplinary expertise.

• Scientific accuracy: does the explanation of tsunami formation reflect real geological processes
• Vocabulary use: are science terms used correctly and in appropriate context
• Literary evidence: does the analysis section cite specific moments from The Big Wave
• Integration: does the essay meaningfully connect the scientific explanation to the story's events
• Writing craft: is the essay organized clearly with appropriate transitions between the two sections

Coordinating Grading Between Two Teachers

Splitting the grading workload between an ELA teacher and a science teacher is often the most practical approach, with each teacher scoring the section that matches their expertise and then combining the scores according to an agreed weighting. This requires some logistical coordination, since both teachers need access to the same set of student essays and need to agree on a shared timeline for returning grades. Digital submission systems make this coordination easier than it would be with paper essays, since both teachers can review the same document without needing to physically pass papers back and forth. Schools running this kind of collaboration for the first time should build in extra planning time before the unit starts, since the coordination itself takes more upfront effort than a single-teacher assignment.

When full collaborative grading is not feasible due to scheduling constraints, a lighter-touch version still works, where the science teacher reviews and grades only a short factual paragraph as a separate, smaller assignment, while the ELA teacher grades the main literary essay independently. This reduces the coordination burden while still giving students the benefit of writing across two disciplines and receiving disciplinary-specific feedback on each. Even this simplified version reinforces for students that strong writing looks different depending on its purpose, since explaining a scientific process well requires different skills than analyzing a character's emotional arc. That lesson about writing for different purposes is valuable on its own, independent of the specific content of this novella.

Why This Pairing Is Worth the Extra Coordination

Despite the added logistical complexity, cross-curricular units built around The Big Wave tend to produce noticeably stronger student engagement than either subject taught in isolation, since students see a direct, meaningful connection between what they are learning in science class and what they are reading in English class. This kind of connection is exactly what many school improvement plans and curriculum frameworks explicitly call for, making a well-documented cross-curricular unit a strong example to share during instructional reviews or department presentations. Administrators and instructional coaches often respond well to seeing concrete evidence of departments collaborating around a shared text, since this kind of coordination is frequently discussed in theory but less often implemented in practice.

For departments considering this kind of collaboration for the first time, starting small with a single shared writing assignment, rather than attempting to fully integrate the two units, is usually the more sustainable approach. Once the grading logistics and rubric design have been worked out once, they can be reused and refined in future years with much less upfront effort. The Big Wave is particularly well suited as a starting point for this kind of experiment because its scientific content is factual and well documented, while its literary content is rich enough to support genuine analytical writing, giving both departments a legitimate and substantial role in the assignment.