Tag: the things they carried

No comments

The Things They Carried

  By Units, When the Truth Isn't Sufficient

Part of a unit of study called When the Truth Isn’t Sufficient. Preceded by The Age of the Essay, What Is Literature For?, The Practice of Empathy, and Organization: Getting Things Done. These preceding units covered the art and purpose of writing essays and reading literature; the central skill taught through literature, which is empathy; and the substructural organization needed to tackle complex texts and tasks.

Animating quotation by Tim O’Brien, author of the assured novel, The Things They Carried:

That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.

The Things They Carried

The central text and assured experience for this unit is Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Every study has a copy of this, plus plenty of time to read it, before the unit’s official start. Here are some more resources related to the book and its author.

First, the Goodreads page: Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried. The reviews and responses offer plenty of insight into why this novel is taught so often in English classes.

Second, an excellent piece on NPR’s Talk of the Nation to mark the 20th anniversary of the novel: ‘The Things They Carried,’ 20 Years On. The program is about 30 minutes.

Finally, a more recent piece on O’Brien: Tim O’Brien, a Veteran of War and Fatherhood, Opens Up to His Sons. This is a review of the audiobook of O’Brien’s Dad’s Maybe Book, which is read by the author.

The central work for The Things They Carried is the central work for the entire unit. It is outlined here:

Required Writing: When the Truth Isn’t Sufficient

The reader’s response is the central means of responding to the novel, and that is explored more below.

The best reader-response essays will use a complete reading of the novel, start to finish, as their basis. It’s possible, however, to use selections from the text without having finished the rest. This is absolutely not the best way to explore O’Brien’s writing — but it does allow the inevitable students who don’t read to practice the essay.

Suggested Selection #1: “Ambush” and surrounding chapters

“Ambush” is on page 125 in our edition. We use it as an anchor because we have a recording of it being read by O’Brien himself. Here is a direct link: User Clip: Tim O’Brien Reads Ambush.

The suggested readings around “Ambush” add up 13 pages total. Here they are, with the page numbers from our edition indicated first:

Suggested Selection #2: “The Ghost Soldiers”

“The Ghost Soldiers” is a self-contained story that works well for reader-response writing. It’s 27 pages long and starts on page 180 in our edition.

No comments

Required Writing: When the Truth Isn’t Sufficient

  By Units, When the Truth Isn't Sufficient

Part of a unit of study called When the Truth Isn’t Sufficient. Preceded by The Age of the Essay, What Is Literature For?, The Practice of Empathy, and Organization: Getting Things Done. These preceding units covered the art and purpose of writing essays and reading literature; the central skill taught through literature, which is empathy; and the substructural organization needed to tackle complex texts and tasks.

Animating quotation by Tim O’Brien, author of the assured novel, The Things They Carried:

That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.

Essential Questions

These questions relate thematically to The Things They Carried, but they are essential apart from that novel. Note that some of these questions come from Facing History and Ourselves materials, including the FHAO resources for Elie Wiesel’s Night.

Your task is to explore the following essential questions:

  1. What is the relationship between our stories and our identities?
  2. To what extent are we all witnesses of history and messengers to humanity?
  3. To what extent will the decisions we make now affect us and others in the future?
  4. How does an individual keep his or her humanity when surrounded by inhumanity?
  5. To what extent can we make the “right” moral decision when faced with adversity?

You will answer those five questions in two parts.

First, you will complete this Google Form, which is also posted to Google Classroom. Having everyone’s responses online will allow us to work anonymously and collaborative on the meaning of these questions.

Second, you will use what we gain from those group discussions and any individual feedback to expand on the original, individual answers. This will likely take the form of an optional “river” essay.

Direct link to the Google Form: https://forms.gle/4CCdP9QEMhfaFHry5

Reader-Response Essay

In the makerspace, there is a universal and modular writing process that works for open-ended essays as well as required ones. Here is a direct link: tinyurl.com/sisyphus-writes. This proprietary style can be attached to any rubric, prompt, etc, as explored in the first unit of the year.

For this unit, you will respond to The Things They Carried through a reader-response essay. Reader-response theory covers many genres and formats — see this post for the complete rundown — but we will focus on the basic format used in other English classes:

Your prompt will be simple enough: Write a reader-response essay about The Things They Carried. To do this, you’ll be given excerpts and specific chapters to read in class, and you’ll watch O’Brien read “Ambush.” Even students who read nothing else will have fodder for a reader’s response. The process, as always, will be central.

Note: The suggested focuses of your reader-response essay will be posted separately.

This time, you must also submit your writing to Turnitin. Here is a brief overview of the service, if you’re unfamiliar with it: Turnitin.com Instructions.

When Turnitin is made part of the process, it is a required part of the process. It’s preparation for the many colleges that use similar services, but it’s also a friendly reminder of the need for integrity and honesty in here. Codes and keys for each class period will be posted to Google Classroom.

2019-2020: Turnitin.com Registration Info

Reprinted here for 2019-2020. Find your period, copy the class ID and enrollment key, and register at Turnitin.com.

Class Name: P2 English 12
Class ID: 23156813
Enrollment Key: tardigrade

Class Name: P3 English 12
Class ID: 23156818
Enrollment Key: tardigrade

Class Name: P6 English 12
Class ID: 23156822
Enrollment Key: tardigrade

Class Name: P7 English 12
Class ID: 23156826
Enrollment Key: tardigrade

Class Name: P8 English 12
Class ID: 23156834
Enrollment Key: tardigrade

Emulation Through Analysis

This will be a shorter response that invites you to emulate O’Brien’s style through a “The Things I Carry” piece. In the makerspace, this would be a collaborative exercise in creative and critical thinking: What do students carry — tangible and intangible — into school everyday? What does that mean, and how can we convey that meaning in emulative writing?

While creative exercises are enjoyable, this is the response that may be sacrificed to the altar of required and assured experiences. There is only so much time, after all, which leaves prompts like this as optional work.

No comments

November 6, 2019

  By 2019-2020

Drawn and Quartered: Q1

The first quarter ends next Friday. You will complete the last GAP report for Q1 on Thursday, November 14.

Take some time this weekend to review the assessment essentials for our course:

Clarifying Grade Abatement
Grade Abatement Profiles
Universal Skills and Traits
Step-By-Step Guide to Assessment
2019-2020 Calendar of Assessment
2019-2020 Student GAP Reports

The complete list is available through several menus on this site.

Current Writing Assignments

Today, you have two assignments due:

  1. The Skill of Empathy
  2. Reading Check: 11/6/19

The “reading check” will collect data about your progress in The Things They Carried. You must also write a short response.

The other assignment was posted on October 29, after you had read through the instructional background on empathy and Chad Fowler’s essay.

By the end of today, you should have practiced empathy in four ways. For each, you should have a written response and some metacognitive analysis.

Your next essay will continue into Q2:

River Writing: On Empathy

Read the prompt carefully. You will use the universal guide to write, which means you will need to discuss possible subjects and approaches in class before you begin.

Ask questions about this essay in class and in the comment section of the post. Use the comment section below to ask about this post’s overview of your work.

Note: You will be given a complete breakdown of our upcoming work on The Things They Carried. For now, continue to read at your own pace.

No comments

October 15, 2019

  By 2019-2020

Goodreads and Summer Reading

This week, you only meet in class twice; the rest of the time, you will need to use the interstitial mechanisms of the course to stay on top of your work. That’s a good thing. One of the skills you need moving forward is the ability to regulate yourself without constant supervision. You have to beat back any learned helplessness before you graduate.

And, as always, this is about making connections between lessons and lectures while making you stronger readers. That’s why you have to get used to flipped instruction, and it’s why the first part of the latest assignment on Google Classroom tells you to read this post:

Good Reads and Goodreads

That post connects to the reading you should have done at the beginning of the year, the assignment you should have done last week, the work we’ve done on writing and discussion, and a dozen other elements of this space.

If you have done your work diligently, this is the logical next step. It will make sense. If you have not done your work recently, you’ll have to catch up, as you’d expect.

Note: A copy of the assignment from Google Classroom is below the rest of today’s announcements and updates.

You have a week to figure out this writing response, although Friday’s class period should be reserved for passion projects and college essays. That further makes this Goodreads assignment a test of your ability to use the resources available to you to do good work without relying on someone to spoon-feed you answers.

College Essays: Walking Deadlines

On the subject of college essays, working on them remains on the menu of choices through October 25. That will be the last day you can elect to workshop an essay, meet with a teacher, peer edit, etc., during the class period.

After October 25, you can still get help on the essay, but you’ll have to schedule time outside of class for it. Remember that this writing assignment has its own deadline, which is the actual application deadline for the schools you’ve chosen.

Upcoming Novel: The Things They Carried

Once we’re through this week, we’ll start The Things They Carried. There’s no formal assignment until the novel is distributed, but you might want to read more about it on Goodreads:

From Google Classroom: Goodreads Assignment

Due on October 21. GAP Q1B ends with a formal score on October 22.

Your assignment is to use the resources of the makerspace — time, feedback, peers, and a new resource in Goodreads — to write about one of the BHS summer reading books for 2019.

You can do this, if you read your chosen book, by using last week’s writing (Summer Reading in the Fall) and the instructional post attached below. It will be a straightforward response based on your experience of the text, our background reading, and the reading you do on Goodreads.

If you did not read a book from the list, choose one now. You can find the complete list in a post from the first week of school: http://sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=3316. Once you’ve chosen a book, you can head over to Goodreads and read about it.

What you write can be driven by our universal process, which you can find linked again below, but it may be more useful to discuss your ideas in person, online, over email, etc., as you decide what to create after you log into Goodreads, look up your particular book, and enter that conversation.

To give it a list’s structure:

1) Download the app or load the website for Goodreads.
2) Register a new account, or decide to revisit this step later.
3) Search for the book in question — in this case, your choice from the list.
4) Dive into the writing and other data on Goodreads about this book.
5) Discuss what you find, in writing and in person, with peers and your teacher.
6) Write a response — the one you are assigned, the one you choose to write, the one inspired by the writing process, etc.
7) Decide whether or not to post the finished response to Goodreads.
8) If you publish to the site, wait to see if you get feedback. Otherwise, get feedback in the usual way.

Ask questions in the comment section below, in class, and through the usual methods.