A few things:
- As part of my new lesson plan to teach American culture and history, this week I started teaching the Declaration of Independence to my high school kids. Apparently I couldn’t have timed things worse–after some prompting, my students informed me that this weekend one of the papers ran an entire ad-free issue entitled something like “American Atrocities” that gave a rundown of all the bad things America is doing in the world. This left my students pretty unreceptive to discussing the lofty ideals of the Declaration, but the newspaper did help spark some spirited debate (”It [The Declaration] is a lie.” “America is very bad. But you are very nice.”) and gave me a nice chance to teach them the word hypocrisy.
On the other hand, my classes all really liked that any American can run for President. They also all agreed that Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are fundamental rights. Some also listed freedom of expression (specifically criticism of the government), universal health care, and education as other fundamental rights. There was disagreement over whether availability of work is a fundamental right, but only because some of the students felt very strongly that people should be allowed to stay at home and do nothing if they so wish. If I had to work as hard as they do, I’d probably feel the same way.
My friend Charles rightly pointed out that if I want to talk about American culture I probably should have started with something fun and easy like baseball rather than jumping into the Declaration. Good point, Charles. - On a tangentially related note, LiveJounal is now being blocked by the firewall, so for the time being I can’t keep up with your various lj blogs.
- Shanghai trip stories will start to be posted Wednesday, so you won’t have to hold your breath much longer.
Technorati Tags: Declaration of Independence, LiveJounal, China, teaching
2 responses so far ↓
1 Scott
// Mar 14, 2007 at 11:59 am
Hey bud! Sounds like your kids speak English waaaay better than mine do! –The Declaration of Independence!
By the way, I`m heading your way (well, as much as Mongolia is “your way”) in the last week of July and will probably hop on the trans-siberian sometime during the first week of August. Want to come play in the Gobi Desert with me?
2 Teaching With Source Documents: The Declaration of Independence — Teaching English as a Second Language
// Dec 21, 2007 at 1:40 pm
[...] Instructions: When I’ve taught the Declaration we’ve first gone through the Introduction and Preamble sentence by sentence to talk about the meanings of the words and what the ideas in the document are. Afterwards, we usually discuss the following: 1. The Declaration calls “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” “unalienable rights”. Do you agree that they are rights? What other rights do you think are (or should be) unalienable? 2. What parts of the Declaration do you especially like? What parts do you dislike? 3. The difference between ideals and reality. (Is America living up to the ideals of the Declaration?–This is something my kids love to get to talk about.) [...]
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