Labor Day / Civil Disobedience

I got caught up in Labor Day weekend before I could post a description of Friday's activities.   Hope everyone else had a relaxing break like me, here's a quick rundown of what we did to finish off last week:

English 11 - We spent Friday talking about civil disobedience in order to prepare for reading Henry David Thoreau's Resistance to Civil Government.  As I found out, my students hadn't had too much experience with civil disobedience.  To get them better prepared for the reading and the ideas it would present, we watched a few video and talked about whether civil disobedience was appropriate and if so, when was it appropriate and in what form.  Asking these questions before reading can help make the reading of a difficult text like this one go more smoothly since, as readers, we will come to the text with an understanding of its primary issue and the questions we ourselves have about that issue and are trying to find answers for.

Here are two videos we used to prime ourselves for a discussion of civil disobedience:



 

AP - In AP English, we worked again with the summer reading assignments and evaluated them for appeals to pathos.  We also had a discussion on appeals to pathos and their prevalence in political speeches.  I strongly encouraged the students to watch the Republican and Democratic National Convention so they could get practice doing analyses of political rhetoric.  Almost every year, there is an entire essay on the AP exam devoted to analyzing the rhetoric of a political speech.