It's Going, It's Going...

I've been working with my students on rhetoric. Our state is really big on rhetorical devices and The Three Appeals (not they will so blatantly quote from Aristotle) and analyzing political documents, bla bla bla. Of course, it really is a very useful tool for my students. Of all the craziness we stuff down their throats in language arts, persuasion is the one thing that they will not be able to avoid in their lives. As it is, they are constantly bombarded with persuasive messages: buy this, wear that, go here, don't this, do that. How much better would they be as adults if they could decipher is someone was developing an appeal based on emotion or logic or if the speaker was even credible. How better would their lives as workers be if they were good at selling their particular goods and services to -- well, each other, but still. Imagine a generation would could analyze political commercials. Ahhh, it would be heaven.

Of course, they still resist. They think it's all irrelevant, even the relevant stuff.

But, I put together this whole deal based on the Declaration of Independence. I collected seven other declarations (the Declaration of the Rights of Man the the Citizen, the Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen, the Working Man's Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of Sentiments, the Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Declaration of the Rights of the Child -- I really wanted to use the Convention on the Rights of the Child, but 11 pages is just too long). For each of the seven, I wrote margin questions to guide their reading. In groups, read your declaration, compare to the Declaration of Independence, make a poster, share.

They missed a lot. Many of them just can't read closely. I didn't do a great job getting them to make connections between all seven, but it was a pretty good start. I got the groups to read and work together. A few groups were totally off, but most of them did some solid work. Basic, but good.

And then, the piece de resistance: a little thing I call the Declaration of Independence Redux. Oh yes, my students will write their own declarations. It's perfect for them. It's exactly what their age wants to do. It wants to declare independence and take on the ills of the world. It's brilliant, I tell you, brilliant!

Today, a few of them told me out-right that they thought it was a great idea. Most of them just got to work in class. They were talking to each other about ideas, writing, brainstorming. Oh, I'm no miracle worker. There was some sluffing off and some procrastination, but there was some serious excitement, too. And they weren't just writing about the dress code and the tardy bell; they were writing about the economy and the environment and abortion (they have some pretty close-minded opinions about some of this stuff, but I promise to not hold it against them). This is weighty stuff.


...It's not out of the park, but got at least one RBI out of this unit.