LESSON DAY 4:
TITLE:
On Whether or Not to
Come to the Aid of One's Countryman:
Pre-Reading
Group Activity for The Crucible
SUBJECT:
American Literature and Composition
GRADE:
10th
QCC(s):
2, 20, 22, 24, 36, 37, 41
GENERAL
OBJECTIVES: (IRA/NCTE standards for the English Language Arts)
Students will:
•
Read a wide range of literature from many periods in many genres to build an
understanding of the many dimensions (e.g., philosophical, ethical, aesthetic)
of human experience. (No. 2)
•
Apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and
appreciate texts. They draw on their prior experience, their interactions with
other readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts,
their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual
features (e.g., sound-letter correspondence, sentence structure, context,
graphics). (No. 3)
•
Participate as knowledgeable, reflective, creative, and critical members of a
variety of literacy communities. (No. 11)
SPECIFIC
OBJECTIVES: (Georgia’s Quality Core Curriculum)
Students will:
•
Read critically, ask pertinent questions, recognize assumptions and
implications, and evaluate ideas. (Topic: Core Skills – L.A. 9-12 No. 2)
•
Gain insight into human behavior from the study of literature. (Topic: Core
Skills – L.A. 9-12 No. 20)
•
Defend conclusions rationally. (Topic: Core Skills – L.A.
9-12 No. 22)
•
Work as a team member to solve problems. (Topic: Core Skills – L.A. 9-12 No. 24)
•
Engage in discussion as both speaker and listener, critically and
constructively interpreting, analyzing, and summarizing ideas. (Topic:
Speaking/Listening – L.A. 9-12 No. 36)
•
Conceive and develop ideas about a topic for the purpose of speaking to a
group, choose and organize related ideas, present them clearly, and evaluates
similar presentations by others. (Topic: Speaking/Listening – L.A. 9-12 No. 37)
•
Write in narrative, descriptive, persuasive, and expository modes with emphasis
on exposition. (Topic: Writing/Usage/Grammar – L.A.
9-12 No. 41)
PROCEDURES/TEARCHER
NOTES:
Daily Writing
Prompt:[10
minutes]
As
students enter the class each day they will be given a new expository prompt
either in a handout, written on the board or projected by an overhead. Students
will respond to the text by writing a paragraph.
Prompt:
"There
is nothing that dies so hard and rallies so often as intolerance. The vices and
passions which it summons to its support are the most ruthless and the most
persistent harbored in the human breast. They sometimes sleep but they never
seem to die. Anything, any extraordinary situation, any unnecessary
controversy, may light those fires again and plant in our republic that which
has destroyed every republic which undertook to nurse it."
-William
E. Borah
Question
the students will answer: Think about
what you have just read. Write an expository paragraph to turn in explaining
your response to the text.
Quick
Write: Students will create a fast response paragraph as quickly as possible.
When the students have finished their fast response, they should place it in
their class folder, put their pen/pencil down and remain quiet.
Overview of
main lesson:
The teacher
will
introduce the students to a scenario that will let them examine and make
decisions about how people would be likely to act in that situation, how people
should act in that situation, and how difficult it would be to take certain
actions in that situation.
Step
1: [5 minutes]
Introduction
– This activity will ask you to identify common human
reactions to pressure from peers in order that you can apply the same concepts
to the characters Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
Step
2: [5 minutes]
The
teacher will break the class in to groups of 3 to 4. They will then receive the
handout with directions and the scenario. The teacher will then go over the
directions.
Step
3: [45 minutes]
While the students are working in groups, the teacher will observe
how well the groups are working together, how effectively individual students
are using rational arguments to support their positions, and to what extent the
groups are able to come to consensus. The teacher will make notes about which
groups make particularly good points so that they can be called upon to provide
their arguments during the whole-class discussion, which follows.
Step 4: [20 minutes]
Discussion of the rankings of solutions will follow. Possible
prompting questions will be:
a)
Which of the solutions is the most sensible?
b)
Which of the solutions is the easiest?
c)
Which of the solutions is the most ethical, or
morally right?
d)
Which of the solutions do you think the average "Joe
America" teenager is most likely to try?
e)
Which of the solutions requires the most
courage?
CLOSING:
Remember
this scenario when we start watching and reading The Crucible on Monday,
Think about how Irwin can be compared with John Proctor, and how Rod can be
compared to Abigail Williams.
MATERIALS:
Handout with scenario and instructions--one copy per
student (attached below), dry erase markers for whiteboard
ADDITIONAL
TEACHER NOTES:
The teacher can prompt students to notice patterns they might
otherwise miss and which are relevant to the literary work which will shortly
be undertaken. A main point that should be brought up in discussion by is that
people are not always likely to do what is right--especially in the face of
peer pressure sometimes people have to be willing to make a personal sacrifice
in order to do what is right what is popular is not always what is right.
SUPPLEMENTARY
MATERIALS: Students will need to have paper, pen/pencil.
EVALUATION:
Discussion:
The group work of rankings and the in-class discussion will provide an
assessment of the students understanding. Discussions of The Crucible
will also show how much was learned from participation in this activity.
ACCOMMODATIONS: See accommodation sheet
REFERENCES:
Borah,
William E. Favorite Quotes. 22 Nov 2001.
http://www.lasalle.edu/~smithsc/personal/GreatQuotes.html
Adapted
from:
Henly, Carolyn. “Whether or Not to Come to the Aid of
One's Countryman:
Pre-Reading Group Activity for The Crucible” 22 Nov 2001.
http://www.knowledge.state.va.us/cgi-bin/lesview.cgi?idl=1
HANDOUT
On
Whether or Not to Come to the Aid of One's Countryman:
Pre-Reading
Group Activity for The Crucible
Directions: The following scenario describes a problem. Following
the scenario is a list of possible solutions to that problem. Your mission,
should you choose to accept it, is to read the scenario and the solutions, then
rank the solutions according to the scales provided.
THE SCENARIO:
You are a student at Valley Ville High School. All is calm at
Valley Ville, until one horrible day when a whole row of lockers is vandalized.
Locks are cut open, books and personal items are stolen, destroyed, or scattered
up and down the halls, the locker doors are badly bent so that they cannot be
re-closed, and, to top the whole mess off, red and black spray paint has been
used in a massive display of graffiti which extends from one end of the wall to
the other. It is generally, but quietly, believed that the captain of the
football team, Rod Bigman, and his football buddies were responsible; however,
Rod and his buddies are Important Persons On Campus, and no one wants to get on
their wrong side. Rod is popular and could ruin anyone's social standing in
five minutes if he chose to do so. Circumstantial evidence, furthermore, seems
to show that a very unpopular boy, Irwin P. Schneddlehopfer, was responsible.
(Spray paint cans and several of the stolen items were found in his locker,
which was suspiciously the only locker in that row which was untouched.) Irwin
is not popular; he's the president of the Chess Club and treasurer of the
Calculator Fanatics Club, he's skinny, wears big black-rimmed glasses which
keep sliding down his nose, and pants hiked up to the waist (leaving his argyle
socks and scruffy oxford shoes in plain view of the world) and cinched there
with a belt to keep from falling down. Irwin, in short, is a nerd. A nice boy,
but a nerd.
Since the damage to the lockers was assessed at something over
$2,000, the administrators and the police are naturally anxious to apprehend
the criminal, and Irwin is arrested almost immediately. Over the next two days,
things really heat up. Since this is the first major crime in Valley Ville
history, the papers really get a hold of it. Irwin, who had previously been up
for full-ride scholarships to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Berkeley, is
suddenly suspended from school pending his trial. His family is told he will
not graduate unless he confesses, and that, if he does confess, he will have to
work all summer to pay for the damage, he will forfeit his letters of
recommendation from Valley Ville faculty, and he will have to write an extra
term project on the effect of crime on the small town community. If he
completes all those, he will graduate with a D- average.
One girl, Sally Cawshus, does think about going to the principal
to tell him that the real culprit was Rod Bigman, but word of her intention
gets out. That afternoon, 14 guys from the football team follow her and her
little brother home, chase them into an alley, tear up their books, and
threaten them with physical abuse if any "false charges" are made
against Rod. Sally abandons her plan.
While Sally had been thinking of going to the principal with
rumors she had heard, YOU actually know the truth. You were just passing by the
school on your job delivering pizzas that fatal Friday night, and you saw Rod
and his buddies getting out of their pick-up trucks with spray paint, bolt
cutters, and sledge hammers.
What do you do?
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS:
1. Keep quiet. You're up for election as student body president,
your only chance to go to college is the baseball scholarship you're hoping to
win as a result of your performance in the upcoming season, and Rod is a lot
bigger than you are.
2. Call in an anonymous tip to the police, and hope they follow it
up.
3. Have your parents set up a secret meeting with the authorities
at a neutral spot, which won't be associated with you in any way, and once
you're secretly and safely at the meeting, agree to sign a secret affidavit,
but refuse to testify in public at Irwin's trial.
4. Publicly defend Irwin.
YOUR GROUP'S TASK
Rankings: For each of the following questions, write the number of
all four possible solutions ranked in order from most to least. Then write a
sentence for each solution explaining why you placed it where you did.
NOTE: YOUR GROUP MUST AGREE ON PLACEMENTS!