Introduction
"When was the last time that I was persuaded?" At first I had a hard time really remembering the last time that I allowed someone to persuade me. I made a joke for my answer but in retrospect, people try to persuade me to get their way throughout the course of the day. It really became clearer to me while reading the book, Thank You for Arguing, by Jay Heinrichs, just how many times a day this happens. Persuasion is a part of our everyday lives. While some may be better at it than others it is something that we cannot escape. Someone is always trying to persuade me, whether it is one of my students trying to get me to reinstate lost recess privileges or my three year old daughter batting her eyes at me while holding up her arms trying to get me to pick her up.
I teach at Ginter Park Elementary School in Richmond, Virginia. Its population is 99% African American. A significant part of the population— around 85% —receive free or reduced lunch. Our school is divided into two buildings. Our annex, Mary Scott, houses grades pre-K through first grade and the main building, Ginter Park has grades 2-5. Ours is a neighborhood school with a large walking population and those who ride the bus have no more than a five or ten minute ride to get to the schools. Most of the students come from single-parent and low-income homes. I teach fifth grade Social Studies, science, and writing. We have four 60 minute blocks and the students switch classes for each of their core subjects. The switching of classes not only gives them the opportunity to have four different teachers but prepares them for middle school by not staying in one class the entire day.
One of the biggest issues that we face is that many of our students are not able to express themselves in written form. Across the board, the writing skills of the majority of my students is very poor and it is a struggle at times to get them to realize that being able to express themselves writing is an essential life skill that will not only help them while in school, but well into their lives after they complete school. Many of them are coming to the fifth grade and are not even able to compose proper sentences or paragraphs. While they may be able to verbalize their thoughts, writing them down in a coherent way has proven to be difficult for a lot of them. One of my driving motivations for this unit is the desire to strengthen their writing skills by analyzing speeches, identifying the components that make a good speech, and writing their own speeches while building oral skills as well as learning about persons in history who have made significant contributions with the use of words both written and spoken.
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