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.

Cold War Continued

Today in class we continued our look at the Cold War and American domestic and foreign issues in the 1940's and 1950's.

We began by having a brief discussion about the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, considering the concept of containment and how the Marshall Plan helped to accomplish that.
We then turned our attention to the end of the Korean War and a continued examination of ideas of fear, conformity and rebellion. We used the next episode of The Century (Happy Days) to help inform our ideas.  The video is embedded below and the viewing guide is here.
After the break, Mr. Rigler read a poem called America by Allan Ginsberg which reflected on the era portrayed in the film. We responded to the poem in our notebooks by trying to identify what Ginsberg's point was. After a discussion of the poem, we created our own version of an America poem modeled after Ginsberg's work.

Your HOMEWORK for Friday is to first, watch 3:03-9:19 (just these 6 minutes) from Poisoned Dreams in order to introduce John F. Kennedy and then read and annotate parts of four different speeches from him.  The first speech is his Inaugural Address which you can find in the American Reader (which you will have to bring to class on Friday) and the others are in this Kennedy Speeches Packet which you will have to PRINT out. We will be using and responding to these speeches in class on Friday so there is no journal entry necessary but we will be checking in your annotations.

Baltimore

For the past two days we have been discussing the ongoing events in Baltimore related to protests and demonstrations in response to the death of Freddie Gray.

Here are links to some of what we have been showing / discussing in class:

• "The Mysterious Death of Freddie Gray" - The Atlantic magazine
• The Baltimore Sun - the main daily newspaper of Baltimore (they have made their content free)
• "29 Moments That Show Another Side of Baltimore" - Buzzfeed
• "Angry mom beats son suspected of rioting" - a link to the video of Toya Graham (there are many other sources and commentary about this)
• "Nonviolence as Compliance" - The Atlantic magazine (article by Ta-Nehisi Coates)

If there are other sources you find and want to share, please post them in the comments below.

Origins of the Cold War

We began class by reviewing and discussing the events in Baltimore over the last few days and hearkening back to Langston Hughes' Dream Deferred and Mookie's decision to Do the Right Thing. After doing some reflection on these issues in our notebooks, we moved on to begin our discussion of the post WW2 period in American History.  To do so, we looked at old issues of Look Magazine and began to make some hypotheses about American society in the late 1940's and early 1950's.
We then looked at The Century: The Best Years using this viewing guide.  The video is embedded below.
Homework for tonight is to Read and annotate this Cold War Packet-and do a Journal Response: What image of the U.S. during the 40’s and 50’s is presented here? How is the Cold War being defined? How do the domestic and foreign issues connect?