Juniors

Observation Questions: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Aw961ZXeia7GuZA_rRVHecneEL8N9c6F_OZ_DvT5OHM/edit?usp=sharing

Semester 1:

Essential Question: “What are we willing to sacrifice for our survival?”

While the district novel for this unit is Kindred by Octavia Butler, most of my students read it in the 9th grade so we needed to request a different novel.

Personally, I would've preferred a memoir or other nonfiction so that my students are exposed to more college level texts before leaving high school.

For this unit, I wanted to challenge my students to look at the choices made by the U.S. government that justified the internment of Indigenous, and Japanese-Americans and the many immigrants that have contributed to this country. As we read the novel, I asked them to look at how language is used to hurt people and how to empower people to fight back.

Tweet Away!

Before reading, I wanted to show my students the rhetoric and ideologies that inspired the novel. Samira Ahmed, the author, speaks vocally that it was the travel ban during the Trump Administration. We watched campaign footage and the actual bill to see the rhetoric. Since this took place years ago, therefore there was very little action for them to take, I asked them to create a tweet with their response to the policy.

PBS News Hour: " Schools tried to forcibly assimilate Indigenous kids. Can the U.S. make amends?"

Video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRNcCCgnauI

Discussion Questions:

Should the U.S. government pay reparations to victims of Indian Boarding Schools?
Is forced assimilation–the stripping away of one’s culture–a reasonable path to national unity? Why or why not?
What is your familiarity with Indian Boarding Schools? Was this a subject you learned about in schools? Why or why not?

Interment Erasure Poems

To capture their understanding of what it's like to be detained against your will, I asked my students to create erasure poems using two well known poems written during WWII: "That Damned Fence" by Anonymous and "Healing Gila" by Lawson Fusao Inada.

Internment Poems

Internment Poems.docx

Internment Poems (1).docx

Internment Poems 1.docx

PBS Betrayed: Surviving An American Concentration Camp

Before Layla and her family are forced into the internment camps, my students and I watched the PBS documentary Betrayed: Surviving An American Concentration Camp so that they can learn of the lived experiences that Japanese-Americans who were forced into detainment during WWII.

Viewing Guide: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EYEnX7lyIZeRJ5lqqt3Z_o_mZtMp9a-mISPdnLxERDQ/edit?usp=sharing

White Rose Leaflet Analysis

In the novel, Layla is inspired by the Hans and Sofie Scholl who tried to organize against the Nazis at their university in Munich. By creating and distributing leaflets speaking out againt fascism, they did their best to inform their peers despite the consequences. Within two weeks, they were caught and soon executed. Layla decided to write about her experience in the camps so that the outside world would learn about the injustices happening.

With their tables, my students read through one of the leaflets and completed a SOAPSTone chart.

The White Rose Leaflet 2

Converted Leaflet to Google Doc

Original Site: https://www.gdw-berlin.de/en/recess/topics/15-the-white-rose/

soapstone_graphic_organaizer_for_rhetorical_analysis_11-7-.pdf

Final "Project":

A 3 Minute Hug

To wrap up the unit, my students and I pretended to be documentarians as we viewed and analyzed the short documentary A 3 Minute Hug by Everado Gonzalez to see what cinematic techniques he used to create his message.

As Samira Ahmed used a novel to speak out against Islamophobic and xenophobic policies in America, Gonzalez used film to capture the heartbreak of families who are separated because of the U.S.' inhuman immigration policies.

Writing A Precis Paragraph

Using the documentary as our main source, I challenged my students to write a precis paragraph to refine their ability to be more concise. A precis paragraph has very strict guidelines as they were asked to write ONLY four sentences. I'm typically not that strict when it comes to rubrics, but I felt brutal knocking off points when they missed a part of the sentence requirement or if they went over 4 sentences. In the end, it was about being precise (hence, why it's called a precis).

Precis Paragraph Planning.docx

Planning document

Students had the opportunity to plan in advance before writing their paragraph. We practiced it together using the "Author's Note" in Internment.

Precis Paragraph Rubric

Rubric

I try to be lenient when I can but I had to reign it in for this assignment to be as strict as possible.

Semester 2: Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Tales

Essential Question: What do stories reveal about the human condition?

To prep my juniors on writing personal essays for college applications in the fall, we read and analyzed various memoirs in order to find different ways to express ourselves in our journeys.

The Moth Stories

In the spring, my students will continuously work on crafting personal essays so that they have a variety of essays they can submit for their college applications. Before the end of the school year, we hosted our own Moth Storytelling session so that they can gain confidence in public speaking. But before all that, I had them listen to various Moth stories so that they can learn from the performers.

Writing Prompt: What does my face say to the world?

Writing Prompt: When did you realize your parent(s) loved you, but they were trying to teach you a lesson.

Observation Questions: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Q0cDa_PijjV_6I-cb60-6OyapGB02VPm4IVqnbYOlv8/edit?usp=sharing

Persepolis

by Marjane Satrapi

One of my favorite stories of all time, I was super excited to see that we had book one at my school, and I was also eager to teach a graphic novel. I've never taught a graphic novel before and I was stoked that it's one of my favorite novels.

As a class, we explore how Satrapi used images to detail her childhood in Iran during the 1970s. Once we finished the novel, we watched the film and explored the effectiveness of the film being animated.

Viewing Guide (Film): https://docs.google.com/document/d/14iG3aacGUnCoaWmAMGPCfzAHXAz1NHXmyrflOySSfsQ/edit?usp=sharing

Personal Essay & Visual Accompaniment

After reading Persepolis, I asked my students to write about a time that they realized that they were a) Growing up or b) that they weren't a kid anymore. Inspired by the graphic novel, I asked the classes to create a visual component to represent their personal essay in either a collage or comic strip.

Growing Up Personal Essay Model

Outline/Essay Example

Copy of Growth visuals example 2

Comic Book Strip Example

Growth visuals example 1

Collage Example

Victor depicting the transition from being able to stay up all night playing video games to having to stay up to finish school work.

Kayla portraying the emotional struggle of a growing family and dwindling finances.

Meyah's representation of caring for the earth (a metaphor of learning to care for herself)

Using the "fairytale" style, Kalista (the lamb) represents her experience of falling prey to unwanted advances from a stranger (the wolf) when her mom (Mama Bear) steps out of the restaurant.

Though the panels are relatively simple, Gabriel displays a lot of emotion as he learns that his father has died after a long battle with cancer.

Jasmine gives viewers a detailed account of when her twin siblings were born and her mom's post-partum condition that reminded her of the importance of taking care of one's family.

Memoir Book Club

Before writing their personal statement for college, I want my students to explore how ordinary people wrote extraordinary stories about themselves (see what I did there?) by engaging in a mini memoir book club! They will read 3 of 6 memoirs but only excerpts of it. We simply don't have enough time to read all of the memoirs so they are reading parts of the memoirs.

Diane was just 14 years old when her parents were detained and deported while she was at school.

A 1960 memoir based on his Holocaust experiences with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, toward the end of the Second World War in Europe.

A 2005 memoir where Walls recounts her dysfunctional and nomadic yet vibrant upbringing, emphasizing her resilience and her father's attempts toward redemption.

In An Ordinary Man, he revisits the 100 days in which he was the only thing standing between his “guests” and a hideous death.

The story of a mischievous young boy who grows into a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist.

The remarkable tale of a family uprooted by global terrorism and of the fight for girls' education.

Memoir Close Reading Guides

To help guide their analysis, I created these Close Read Guides so that students know what sections to read and what devices to analyze.

The task is simple:

You will need to choose a prompt to write about. You can use either of the following:

A Common App prompt
A personal statement/essay prompt from the university, school, program, or company of your choice

Word Count: 400-600 words.

Assignment Sheet: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Jq5D8O3WMdlFB6YswrLlaWkb7QdmLWgcUNnfdbkTFHQ/edit?usp=sharing

Final Project: College Personal Statements

Since we've been studying how people tell their stories, this was the perfect time to challenge my kiddos how they want to tell their stories, specifically to a college admissions advisor. This is their chance to show the human behind the application: the person behind the transcripts, GPA scores, and resume.

For two weeks straight, students brainstormed, drafted, peer-reviewed, and revised their personal statements. The catch? They had to read their personal statements aloud to the class (or just one-on-one with me) as practice for a potential college interview.

Brainstorming Form: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jIgsUV0Cblzw1lmYlsV5IybGr5V18Cuyq2lty5fXmRE/edit?usp=sharing

Peer Review Form: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14r7uvsBjP5rahRFrVFwvgPU2udNkSHI_gj3NJKkur78/edit?usp=sharing

Reflection

This was easily the hardest teaching year of my career (so far) and teaching 11th grade played a small role in that stress. I had serious imposter syndrome because of the external pressure of SAT prep. I hate the test with all my body as my kids are already OVER-tested. They were exhausted from taking various tests, I was exhausted from proctoring and frankly, avoiding the test, I wanted the content to be enjoyable in class, so I rarely did SAT prep. I went into 1st semester completely delusional as I had an original plan for the curriculum, and then was bamboozled into teaching a book I had never read and felt was too low level for my kids, so I tried to teach it in a way that could still be meaningful. If I had to re-do that unit, I would use George Takei's graphic novel memoir They Called Us Enemy because I think it's important that my kiddos learn from real people.

2nd semester I tried to be bold and shake things up, but I think it caused me more stress than intended. I'm so happy that I got to teach one of my favorite books of all time, but I would likely not teach it again for 11th grade because I want to stay within the realm of American writers (that feels so nationalist to say). I had never done a literature circle before but I did that at 3x the speed of a regular lit circle because I didn't manage my time well. I'm glad that the kids liked the books but I didn't do a good job teaching them how to be a PROPER BOOK CLUB. Almost all of them misinterpreted my directions and didn't read the book in it's entirety so I had to meet them where they were at. If I were to do this memoir book club again, I would likely focus on American authors. For their personal statements, I actually enjoyed this as a final project because it's actually USEFUL! Only change I would make would be to have the students read their personal statements on a stage at school, so it could feel like a Moth Story show.

Overall, I'm glad my kiddos and I made it through. This probably all of our hardest year in school, but we're still standing.

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