english ii

Unit II A#7---How to Let Go Journal (2) and Further Argument Invention.html

As we move through the documentary, we find greater intersectionality with issues raised by Jacqueline Patterson in the article so central to our current discussions. (If you haven't read that article yet, you may well be lost. Again, it is under Resources/Links.) We discover many topics that relate to our theme of environmental climate justice: income inequality, glaciers, the decline of civilization, the refugee crisis, overpopulation, food insecurity (and food deserts), corporate greed, agriculture, droughts, hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes, bleaching of coral reefs, loss of habitat, endangered species, the Syrian war, security threats, the Paris Accord, ocean acidification, wildfires, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the oil industry's "development" of the Amazonian Rainforests, doublespeak (ex:oil "spills"), deforestation, the carbon sink, and civil disobedience, storm surge and national security, etc. We have also identified how degradation of the environment in any way can impact education, and how stemming from that fact there's a rather long list of issues, any of which may be arguable, leading ultimately to the school-to-prison pipeline.

1.  Identify an arguable issue relevant to our theme. Find at least one current event news article relevant to your discussion in some way. I suggest looking only at major news sources, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, EcoWatch,* or The Guardian, each of which you can easily find online. Make sure you apply your "crap detector," should you use another news source. You want to be sure to avoid, for example, ultra right-wing sources, such as Breitbart News and others that deny the science on climate change. Create a WC page citation for this source and summarize the contents of it in an approximately 200 word paragraph below the WC page entry.

2.  What does #Resistance mean to you? Have you ever had to fight back against something that you felt was unfair? Explain.

3.  How does the film explain that Courage, Creativity, and Resilience are useful tools in a #Resistance movement? Are these human qualities that climate can't change?

4. I am placing the Criteria for Argument under the Criteria tab, so that you can take a look at it and understand where we are going. I am NOT saying your Argument is due at this time.  However, using the 7-steps outlined there, which has been discussed at length in class, create a 7-step outline for your discussion as you envision it at this point in time.

5.  Write a tentative thesis statement, meaning it may change. You've got to start somewhere, though. Take a position on your issue and state is as unambiguously as you possible can, i.e. be crystal clear where you stand on the matter.

Bring all of this work to class on Tuesday, Oct. 24th.

There's a link to EcoWatch under Resources.