Education

Essential Question: To what extent do our schools serve the goals of a true education?

Central Essay: I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read by Francine Prose

Classic Essay: from Education by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Visual Text: National Endowment for the Arts, from Reading at Risk (tables)

Related Texts:

• Superman and Me by Sherman Alexie

• Best in Class by Margaret Talbot

• A Talk to Teachers by James Baldwin

• School by Kyoko Mori

Literature Circles: Possible Titles--Students choose two books to read with a literature circle.

Titles from the classroom

Titles from Class Library

• Nobody Left to Hate by Elliot Aronson

• Class Dismissed:  A Year in the Life of an Amreican High School, A Glimpse into the Hearth of a Nation by Meridth Mann

• Dumbing Down Our Kids:  Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write, or Add by Charles J. Sykes

• Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education by Murray Sperber
• A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink

Other possible titles (we don't yet have these titles in our class library!) 

• The World Is Flat by Thomas L. Freidman
• Anything by P.G. Wodehouse
• A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind
• The Road to Whatever: Middle-Class Culture and the Crisis of Adolescence by Elliott Currie
• Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult
• Teacher Man by Frank McCourt
• Death Be Not Proud by John Gunther
• Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Grammar Focus

• Four Sentence Structures (Simple, Compound, Complex, Compound-Complex)
• Appositives
• Active Vs. Passive Voice
• Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement

Related Texts

• David Warlick blog post:  Is Something Brand New Really Happening? Already?
• Sir Ken Robinson's site (including a video) makes a "case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it."

Wow--what if we use our cell phones to create podcast?!!! I still need to play with it to create a polished

podcast, but check it out for yourselves: Gcast! 

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