At the Rethinking GAPE institute, I discovered some documents from the Foreign Language Press Survey that compelled me: I realized that the way to infuse my Composition class with something gleaned from GAPE is by crafting an essay assignment on assimilation. Below is a hyperlinked narrative (each link brings you to an assignment on this website) on how my content partner – the other person who teaches freshman Composition, a writing class – and I attempted this infusion. As this essay reaches its conclusion tomorrow, she and I agree that it’s been a successful venture. If you prefer to have all the resources in one place, here’s a DropBox folder with (what I think is) all of them.
Knowing that we would have students interview people about assimilation half-a-year in the future, my content partner and I began our 9th grade Composition course in August with interview techniques and practice, using the almost laughably accessible, get-to-know-you topic of comparison between each student and one classmate. We then saved the idea of assimilation for the end of 3rd quarter while we taught topics ranging from how to write a complete sentence to using subordinating conjunctions (like “while” in this sentence) to join clauses.
In March, we returned to assimilation with a focus on Amy Tan’s “Two Kinds,” on which students wrote and revised two body paragraphs. Over Spring Break, students conducted those aforementioned interviews on assimilation. We then, except for a discussion on the interviews, put aside assimilation to teach demonstratives and the like.
On April 21, we returned to assimilation by having students analyze an editorial, entitled “Italophobia,” which I discovered on the FLPS while at the institute, and a recent article on the kerfuffle over representation in the film Cesar Chavez (day 1 and day 2). Again, we put assimilation on the back burner to deal with such issues as how to reorder sentences logically.
On May 6, after assimilation had been simmering in students’ minds for some time, we had them reflect on assimilation in the present day. They returned to “Italophobia” the next day and chewed on some other resources to consider assimilation in the past. Then, we held a debate on the same question students were later asked to ponder for their essays: Must one assimilate to be American? From that debate, students wrote a paragraph on the counterargument and their response to it. Those three paragraphs became body paragraphs in their essay.
After another break taken to prepare students for the EXPLORE, the freshman version of the ACT, we returned to assimilation and stuck to it until the essay’s due date. On May 21, students reexamined assimilation to compose an introductory paragraph. Students then revised their thesis statements and put their four paragraphs (intro + those three body paragraphs) together. After engaging in writers’ workshop, they uploaded their essays to Google Drive. They wrote a conclusion paragraph at the beginning of this week and, later, carefully analyzed each other’s arguments and revised their own based on that analysis. Tomorrow, the essay is due.
Mr. Rosentel
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