Essential Question: What are the challenges of human interaction?

As human beings we all have a lot in common. And yet interacting with one another can often be extremely challenging. Why is it so difficult for people to get along? What are the barriers that hold us back from communicating with one another and forming strong, lasting relationships? In addition, humans face challenges in their interactions with the environment. As humans, we have used or changed the natural world to suit our own needs, and our interference with nature has had a huge impact on the other living things that share our planet.

In this Grade 7 unit, a variety of texts will help your students explore the outside forces that create challenges for human interaction. They will read about the steps people take to overcome these forces so that they can form meaningful relationships with other people. The unit begins with an excerpt from the novel The Outsiders, which focuses on class conflicts in the 1960s between two rival gangs from different economic groups. Other selections relate real-life stories--for example, the award-winning drama The Miracle Worker shows how Annie Sullivan broke down barriers in teaching Helen Keller to understand language and to learn to communicate. In another selection, journalist Nicolas Gage honors the woman who taught him the power of the written word and who led him to follow a successful career in journalism. Human interactions with nature also presents a challenge, as students will learn from the informational text “California Invasive Plant Inventory.” In addition, students will read celebrated works of fiction--Langston Hughes’s “Thank You, M’am” and Willa Cather’s My Ántonia--in which characters struggle to get along with one another amid a harsh environment. Throughout this unit, students will explore the many challenges human beings face in forming relationships with one another and with the world around them.