The Beginning of the End - Starting the Second Semester Final

Today we started work on our last unit together - the second semester final.

We started by asking you to complete this activity - the "Brain Wave" (click for a copy).  You filled this out by identifying the moments during the year when your thinking was most engaged - when you were doing some of your best thinking, when you were most curious, when you did some of your best writing - as well as moments when you were least engaged.  In a journal response you reflected on one from each of these categories.

Next we listened to "What's Goin' On" by Marvin Gaye (click for the lyrics - you can find the song on our American Studies playlist. Our discussion of the song asked you to find connections between those lyrics and other units from the year.

After that, we read a speech from Dr. King, "A Time to Break the Silence" (click for a copy). We focused on the section where he quotes Langston Hughes, and bridges from being a person who focuses on civil rights to one who is actively questioning the Vietnam war and encouraging others to do the same.

Here is a link to the homework for the weekend. You MUST come to class with these note cards for use on Monday.

• Start this process by re-reading your journals, highlighting interesting things you wrote. Then, once you've found 15 great lines from each semester, copy them down onto note cards (as in the instructions).
• After you've created the notecards of your own writing, you'll work on the notecards from other voices from the year (#2 in the instructions for the homework). All 60 notecards are due in class on Monday. These are a significant part of the final which you must have ready to go at the start of class. They will not be useful if you do not have them on time.

The Catcher in the Rye

Today in class we discussed The Catcher in the Rye by focusing on several key ideas and themes. The notes from those conversations can be found HERE.  Your assignment for Friday is to write a "personal essay" about your experience reading the book.
Personal Essay for Catcher
The essay is due to be submitted to turnitin.com by the start of class on Friday, May 29.

End of the Vietnam War

In class, Mr. Kramer presented a lecture on the end of the war and we discussed its legacy. You can see the lecture slides here
Then we heard a speaker, Jon Schaefer, share his experiences of what it was like to be in war. His presentation can be found below.
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Jon Schaefer Presentation
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Here is Mr. Schaefer's list of"Considerations Before Going to War".

Here are the pictures that Mr. Schaefer used in his presentation.

Vietnam Continued

On Friday in class, we discussed the massacre at My Lai.  We responded to clips from the documentary Remember My Lai , a 60 minutes story called Back to My Lai, and multiple perspectives from a variety of voices that you can find here.
Today in class we heard Mr. Rigler and Mr. Kramer read Chapter 7, How to Tell a True War Story aloud.  We then considered questions of truth in regard to what we've been learning and thinking about the novel. Here are some notes from that discussion. To add to our discussion, here are two articles based on interviews with Tim O'Brien where he addresses whether his novel is "true" or not.  PBS Interview, NY Times Interview.
Your homework for tonight is posted in the calendar.

Dear America

Today in class we watched the film Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam. 
We also assigned the project that will be the final assessment for this unit.
Be sure to check the calendar for the link to the homework for Friday.
 

The Draft, Tet, and Protest

On Monday in class, we all received draft notices and reflected on what it might mean to be drafted into war. We followed that by listening to Bruce Springsteen tell the story of what happened when he received his draft induction notice. Then, after hearing Mr. Rigler read Chapter 4 of The Things They Carried (On the Rainy River) we talked about the meaning of courage and the choices and decisions that young men had to make about whether to go to war.
Today in class we got into groups and began by learning about the Tet Offensive. Then, after each member of the group read and shared an individual perspective on the war, groups made conclusions about what story a movie about Tet might tell and then created movie posters that expressed those ideas.  Here is a link to the documents we used to learn about Tet.
During the 2nd half of class, we learned more about the protest movements against the draft and the war in Vietnam by completing the Protest Webquest that you can find in your American Studies Hist/Lit folder.  (There is a copy here as well).

Into Vietnam

Last Tuesday we began our look at the Vietnam War by listening to Mr. Kramer lecture about the background to the conflict and then watching from 30:30 until the end of the video embedded below.
During the lecture we also looked at these documents (Time Magazine Article, Reader's Digest Article) to get a better sense of what Communism looked like in both North and South Vietnam.  We also looked at this correspondence between President Kennedy and a concerned citizen by doing a creative piece in our notebooks, trying to write the next letter in the correspondence.
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Today in class we continued to explore America's escalating involvement in Vietnam first by exploring the Tonkin Gulf Incident, looking at the resolution and Johnson's speeches while asking whether he made his case. We complicated our judgments by looking at what Robert McNamara later said about it in the film Fog of War.
After going over some key people and strategies found in this presentation, we watched some CBS news reports from the war, reflecting on the footage in creative ways (visual, poetry, collage). The assignment for this weekend in addition to reading the assigned chapters from The Things They Carried is to find quotes from the novel to use as captions for at least three of your responses from today.

The Things The Carried - Transformation

Today we focused on Mary Anne Bell and her transformation in chapter 9: "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong."  How does she go from this:

To accessorizing with this:

You wrote a paragraph explaining it and we had a discussion about whether her transformation was caused more by internal forces and desires or external forces.  

We also listened to two songs today: "Eve of Destruction" and "Ballad of the Green Berets."  Click on the titles for a link to the lyrics and check out the videos below:

The Things They Carried - Perspectives and Styles

Today we discussed our first set of readings from Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. We noticed the stories / chapters in the novel are told from a variety of different perspectives, including these:

• 1st person (I, we) - protagonist
• 1st person - witness
• 1st person - reflective
• 2nd person (You)
• 3rd person (he / she / they) - omniscient (knows what each character is thinking and doing)
• 3rd person - objective (describes actions, not emotions)
• 3rd person - limited - story is focused through one character's awareness (like Huck)

We also noticed the stories are told in a variety of styles, using language in different ways, including:

• Teaching a lesson
• Formal
• Informal
• Imagine if...
• Emotional
• Description
• Memoir
• Poetry / Song
• Factual
• Reflective - looking back over time
• Dialogue
• Symbolic / Figurative
• Lists
• Detailed / expert language

We read chapter 3 - "Spin" - aloud. You chose one of the sections of that chapter and re-wrote it, using a different style and perspective.

Lastly, I had you generate a list of random memories. Then, you used this chart to write about them in a variety of different ways:

• TTTC writing activity chart

We closed by writing about this question: In what ways did writing about a memory in a variety of styles and perspectives shape your understanding of it? Now that you've written about it in these different ways, what do you now know that you didn't know before?

Kennedy and the Cold War/Starting The Things They Carried

Today in class, we worked in groups to complete this CHART that helped us to analyze President Kennedy's vision of America's role in the world and to judge his responses to major events and conflicts during his administration, including The Bay of Pigs, The Berlin Wall, The Cuban Missile Crisis, and The Space Race.  You can find the description of those events HERE.

During the second part of class, we began by brainstorming a list of "things that we carry" and spent some time describing those in our notebooks and considering why we carry them.  Then, after numbering the chapters in the table of contents, we listened to the first thirteen pages of the first chapter of the novel, "The Things They Carried".  We chose a few items that the author listed as things that the characters carried to discuss. We also talked about the setting and tried to identify words to describe it. We also noted that we should try to keep track of the characters and to pay attention to a timeline-that the book doesn't move in a straight line.
We finished our initial look at the novel by making some comparisons between the list of things that we carry and the the things that the characters in the novel carried, trying to identify their similarities and differences.

The new calendar is posted in the tab above. As you read the novel, this GLOSSARY will be helpful.