This activity engages students in an analysis of the 2008 speech by Barack Obama on race. Students will then create an annotated version of the speech that has them analyze and comment upon Obama's use of history, rhetoric, and language in his message. Students can also create a hypertext of this assignment in order to publish works in different media.

This lesson-plan focuses on students analyzing, critiquing, and examining the language and meanings of historical and cultural documents such as The Pledge of Allegiance and the First Amendment. Through this activity they will also examine the impact and meaning of language, as well as the relevance of the meaning behind the words of each document. All handouts are downloadable and printable from this site.

Students will go "inside" the NY Times Best Sellers List to explore recent best sellers across categories, then use those lists as models to create their own in categories of their choosing. They will write one-sentence summaries for each book on their lists, then analyze and explain their choices by writing "Inside the List" articles. Ultimately, students will answer the question, "What do best-seller lists tell us about our culture?"

George Orwell's experiences as a policemen for the British Empire in India formed the basis for his early writings, including this essay. After receiving some background information on British rule in Burma as well as on Orwell, students will read the essay in order to analyze its use of metaphors, symbolism and irony.

Students will be able to explain the sources of German nationalism -- including cultural, intellectual, religious, political, and social -- and describe the tensions between nationalism as cultural or linguistic "sameness," e.g. , "German," as well as nationalism as defined by loyalty to a national political institution, e.g. , "Germany." Students will also analyze the creation of the German Empire as constructed "from above" by Prussian leadership through political institutions, economic interest, diplomacy, and war and the consequences of this for political, religious, and nationalistic opponents of German unification. Lastly, students will examine the co-option of traditional political factions such as liberals and conservatives by German unifiers and the emergence of new political groups as various national minority parties, including the Catholic Center Party and the Social Democrats, as a result of unification.

In this fourth unit of eight total, Think Alouds (pages 27-33 of the pdf), students will apply skills to investigate and understand text.

In this multi-day unit students conduct research, work with an interactive Venn diagram tool, and create a museum exhibit that highlights the work of selected artists, musicians, and poets. Critical thinking, creativity, and interdisciplinary connections are emphasized.

This resource provides a lesson designed to assist learners with acquiring skills needed to differentiate between real and fictious, possibly malicious, websites. Students will evaluate hoax sites prior to outlining and designing one of their own. It is expected that this lesson will help students to better recognize trustworthy sites for online reading and research.

This lesson and resource uses headline articles to help students read effectively by distilling main ideas from an informational text.

In this lesson, students will identify how Common's rap song "A Dream" and Walter Dean Myers's short story "Monkeyman" reinterpret Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of nonviolence. Students will delve into a text-based discussion on characterization and conflict, as well as compose an essay on the Six Principles of Nonviolence (rubric available).

This lesson alerts students to the fallacies that surround them every day. In this lesson, students deconstruct fallacious images and messages in advertisements and demonstrate their understanding of the fallacies through multimedia presentations.

This lesson explores the essay Self Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson, focusing on an analysis of individualism. It includes background information on Emerson, sectional analysis of the text, accompanying reading questions and activities, vocabulary terms, and a suggested follow-up assignment.

This lesson on the Japanese tanka encourages students to explore the structure and content of the form and to arrive at a definition of the structure in English.

In this lesson and resource, students evaluate debate claims and examine their own reasoning.

Reading Emily Dickinson's letters alongside her poems helps students to better appreciate a remarkable voice in American literature, grasp how Dickinson perceived herself and her poetry, and perhaps most relevant to their own endeavors consider the ways in which a writer constructs a "supposed person."

This lesson allow students to explore the forces that prompted the literary modernism movement, specifically focusing on modernist poetry. By allowing students to explore the movement independently, they will also be able to develop research and inquiry skills.

In this lesson, students examine the First and Second National Banks and whether or not such a bank's powers are constitutional or unconstitutional.

In this lesson students will participate in a role-play activity that has them become members of a newspaper or magazine editorial board preparing a retrospective report about the NAACP's anti-lynching campaign of the 1930s.

In this lesson, students will explore Dickinson's poem "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers" both as it was published as well as how it developed through Dickinson's correspondence with her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson.

This lesson prompts students to think about a poem's speaker within the larger context of modernist poetry. First, students will review the role of the speaker in two poems of the Romanticism period before focusing on the differences in Wallace Stevens' modernist"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.