Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl / Academic Arguments

English 11 - We worked with Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.  Incidents is a slave narrative just like the other two pieces we recently read by Frederick Douglass and Olaudah Equiano.  A key difference though is that Jacobs tells the story from a female perspective.  As a result, the slave narrative puts a larger emphasis on the importance of family and the household.  Since American literary history too often becomes dominated by male authors, frequently the important stories about American domestic life and values get swept under the rug and we end up lauding the tales of rugged individualism.  Harriet Jacobs' slave narrative is one of many alternate stories of slavery and the Civil War that provides a great contrast to a traditionally masculine story.  Interestingly enough, the most important and best-selling novel of the time was written by a woman (Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin).  In fact, it was so important that Lincoln called Stowe the "little woman who wrote the book that made this Great War".  To get at this piece, we looked at similarities and differences between Stowe's account and the accounts offered by Equiano and Douglass.  This activity helped us get at the material, but it also helped students develop analysis skills (compare and contrast) that are key for standardized testing, college success, and career success.

AP - We opened up class by working on substituting action verbs for linking verbs.  Linking verbs simply link the subject with a noun or adjective in the predicate (I am an AP English teacher).  Substituting action verbs can make sentences more engaging and direct (I teach AP English).  This small technique should liven up student writing and help bump up AP scores while also arming students to tackle college-level writing tasks.  For the rest of class, we looked at the definition of academic arguments.  Academic arguments are different from most arguments we encounter in our daily lives because they are heavily-researched arguments that target a small group of experts.  For example, the many essays I read about teaching composition are aimed at composition teachers and as a result focus on the issues of our field and make use of a very technical vocabulary.  They look much different than the blog posts I make or the descriptions of activities I would give students, parents, and even other English teachers that do not teach composition.  Understanding how academic arguments work  and how they are different from most other argumentative writing is key to college success since most of the writing students will do is academic writing inside of their own field.