Minister's Black Veil / James Baldwin

English 11 - Today, we continued to work with Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil".  Students gathered textual evidence for the first part of class and then we worked through it to get a better idea of how the veil worked as a symbol inside of the short story.  We came to a number of great conclusions.  The veil could symbolize the degree to which we depend on external appearances to determine how we understand people.  It could also symbolize the body that we are trapped behind and the secret thoughts and ideas we hide behind it.  Most of the class discussions went great and tomorrow we are going to build on them as we do some free writing and start working with Edgar Allan Poe's "Pit and the Pendulum".

AP - For the whole of class, we focused on doing a rhetorical analysis of James Baldwin's "Talk to Teachers".  Baldwin's piece was published in 1963 and it urged the teachers of black children to educate them in a way that would allow them to be critical of the fallacies and inequities in their society.  Baldwin felt that too frequently America was praised for its excellence while it allowed many of its citizens (especially its black citizens) to be marginalized or taken advantage of.  For our rhetorical analysis, we worked on defining and categorizing his argument and then looking at how he used the rhetorical appeals to better sell his message. 

Here's a video of James Baldwin talking about education:



Here is a video him debating William F. Buckley:


James Baldwin was one of my favorite authors in high school and at the beginning of college.  Here is a link to one of his most famous short stories "Sonny's Blues".