Hey everyone! Your homework for the weekend is to read and annotate these excerpts from “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” HERE. I will collect the annotations. This is short, but it’s not easy to read, so leave yourself a little time.
Please also fill out the SOAPSTONE worksheet I handed out in class (the one with the monsters. If you lost it, HERE is an extra copy. I’m gonna collect this too!
In case you are interested, here is some background on the speech from TIME magazine.
I have posted the upcoming essay assignment under UNITS (UNIT TWO.) There’s no assignment yet, but start thinking about what topics or questions you’d like to investigate. So far, some of the things we’ve discussed in class are: Police violence (educating cops/ educating citizens/ screening), climate change, domestic violence, immigration, equal pay for genders and races, Empowerment of women, Gandhi—history of nonviolent resistance, history of DR, history of Haitian revolutions, lasting effects of American Revolution (both nationally and internationally), student justice, education, funding for arts education, Family/ Heritage, Albanian tradition, free speech in 2019, The two-party political system, the mental health system, gun violence/ gun control and prison reform.
Keep in mind, if you start with a topic (like domestic violence, let’s say), you’ll need to narrow it down to a question to investigate. For example: Why do women stay in situations in which they’re being abused, or: what are the laws in place regarding domestic abuse, or: what is the correlation between mass shooting and domestic abuse (that is, since domestic abusers are much more likely to commit mass killings, are there any laws in place to restrict their access to firearms? Why or why not?) We will work together in class to come up with a good question for investigation.
