Jeremy Oertel

TEDU353

Unit Lesson 2

Class: 12th Grade English

Topic: The human cost of war

Set Induction: Students will review their journal entries and share them with either their groups, or in front of the class.  The purpose of this sharing is review, but also to continue the process of learning about some of these tragedies and emphasizing with the human component through the fictionalized role-playing.

Terminal Objective: Students will choose how they wish to interact with this topic.

Enabling objectives: Students will write a journal entry which responds to what they have heard during the first part of class.

Students will review several possible sources involving war and write in their journals about three.

Students will share what they wrote.

Activity: Students will be given a handout indicating several war-related topics, and possible texts they can use to address them.  The handout and/or lecture will briefly summarize each text, with an emphasis on whether the story is fictional or not, and whether it is a primary-source or not.  That way, if they choose, they can read something written by someone involved in the event (a perpetrator, observer, or victim), or they can read analysis of the event from a most distant historical perspective, or they can read a fictionalized account relating to the event.  Students can choose their own level of involvement in this subject.  Students will be encouraged to read passages from two different kinds of writing throughout the unit.  Students will also be offered the opportunity to choose other topics than the ones I have suggested.  They will then be encouraged to find their own materials, though I will also assist them.

Homework: Students will decide on the first text they wish to read.  They will read this story for three classes, and then choose another.  They should write in their journals about the text they have chosen, including the subject, the author, the point-of-view of the text, and the style of writing.  They should also respond to something specific in the text.

Closure: There are many ways we can learn about these subjects, but since our discipline is English, we are going to limit ourselves mostly to writing.  Remember the point of this unit is to get you better acquainted with the reality of these events, so that you are more sensitive to the suffering of the world.  Some historians have argued that we repeat our mistakes because we fail to learn from them.  If we do not forget what has happened, it makes it harder for this to occur.

Handout:

Possible topics –

- WWI

  Poetry, such as Dulce Decorum Est and Survivors by Siegfried Sassoon,

The poems of Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg, etc, and

Trench poetry and songs.

- WWII

  The diary of Anne Frank

  The diaries of Hans and Sophie Scholl, Harper and Row Publishing, San

Francisco, 1984

  The diaries of Joseph Goebbels

- Vietnam

  Various.  Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1969-1975: Volume Two

- Asia

  Chang, Iris.  The Rape of Nanking.  Basic Books, 1997.

- Civil War

  Union and Confederate poetry and songs:

http://users.erols.com/kfraser/

- Fiction

  Shepard, Jim.  Lights Out in the Reptile House.  Norton Fiction, 1990.

- Native American

  Bartolomie de Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies