Activities
Each class period is 100 minutes long. What follows are specific activities designed for the first six days. Given the breadth and depth of topics, I will likely have to adjust the schedule such that Day Four below may actually be Day Five or Six and so on.
Lesson One-Week One: Hello, New Orleans!
We will begin the unit by locating New Orleans on a map of the United States. We will take a more cursory look at the geography and make some initial speculations about the city's vulnerability to storms. Students will share what they know about New Orleans, and we will draw upon this list as we delve deeper into the social and geographic history. In order to help them understand the cultural wealth of New Orleans, I will show a few short videos of Second Line parades and performances by the Mardi Gras Indians (a quick search on Youtube brings up countless videos). Following the videos, I will have them write down the first words that come to mind as they view the clips; they will then do a Give One/Get One to exchange their reactions to the film, and we will do a whip around the room to hear one unique response from each student.
On this first day, I will do a short lecture on New Orleans' early history, so that students gain a foundation through which to analyze not only the topical maps but also the complicated recent history of the city. My students, at this point in the semester, are skilled in taking Cornell lecture notes and will write a summary on their notes that night. We will do some reading of the Black Code, with special attention to Article III, the following day, to achieve the aim outlined in the Background above.
Lesson Four – Week One: Mapping New Orleans
Using a blow-up version of the map students have, we will start mapping New Orleans pre-Katrina through its cultural, political and economic landmarks, adding symbols across the city to mark specific sites. Students will note the locations of Congo Square, the French Quarter and Treme, specifically, key hospitals and universities, the major highways, levees and wharves, as well as the Central Business District, highlighting sites such as the Superdome, the Convention Center, city hall, etc. We will also make note of the districts that figure most prominently in the coming reading. I will ask students to consider similar major sites in their home cities. *An alternative to the mapping of New Orleans, and which ultimately may serve the students more, is to first discuss such key sites of New Orleans, but actually map sites in the students' own neighborhoods. I would have them look not only at the business sites but also attempt to identify the cultural and community-related spaces, intersections and borders of their city/towns (primarily Pacifica, Daly City and San Francisco).
On this same day, we will scrutinize some of New Orleans' 2005 demographic factors: namely employment, infant mortality, health care access rates and GDP and compare these to those in other parts of the country. Students will do an in-class writing assignment in which they make some predictions about disaster-survivability based on these demographics.
Lesson Six – Start of Week Two: Natural or Unnatural Disaster?
Today we begin our exploration of the "natural disaster" aspect of our New Orleans case study. The SSW prompt for the day will be the following: Wildfires are spreading and coming to your area. You have ten minutes to collect what is valuable to you and then leave. What do you take? After ten to fifteen minutes of writing, students will pair up and share out their responses. In pairs, they will come to a large sheet of paper in the front of the room and list their top three valuable items. My plan is to return to this list at the end of this unit to discover if their lists have changed at all.
I will solicit some student volunteers to help me demonstrate the "bowl" reality. Using a large glass bowl filled with water, with a smaller, empty bowl in the center, we will see just how the bowl of New Orleans could be inundated should the levees not hold. We will again pull out our NOLA maps and remember that the larger "bowl" in which New Orleans sits is made up of land-filled former bayous, a river and a lake, both held back by walls that, like the miniature bowl, are not flood-proof.
At this point we can review the knowledge they've acquired in science class about Hurricane Katrina. Following the review, we will read together excerpts from Dyson's chapter "Hurricane and Hesitation." Students will take notes on this reading in a graphic organizer with the following headings: Problem-Possible Solutions-Outcome-Relevant Quote-Questions I Have. Students will refer to this organizer as they write their essay response to How "natural" was the natural disaster called Katrina?
Today's class will close with an introduction to A.D.: After the Deluge. Students will receive their character assignment (there will be six to seven groups, with two groups covering Denise's and possibly Leo and Michelle's stories). Students will meet in their groups and have time to attach sticky notes to the first page of each new installment on their character. We will begin our reading of the book by studying various images from the first twenty pages. Students will take notes on A.D. by creating organizers in their notebooks, with categories for What I See-Character(s)' Struggles-Their Solutions. Homework will be to read their character(s)' sections "The City" section of the book.
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