Rationale
I want to highlight, for my students, positive or negative situations in biographies at that junction of where we all have been and will continue to be: What do I do now? How should I react to this? More often than not, my students find themselves in terrible situations that would have never happened had they not made one bad decision. Today's society makes that easy. Everywhere they look there is sex, drugs, entertainment, people disrespecting authority, negative behavior praised.
I teach 6 th -8 th grade Reading in Chicago. Many of my students crumble under pressure and react viscerally. So in this unit my students will learn from the experiences of others who overcome obstacles in their lives. The focus will be integrity and perseverance. We will use the following autobiographies and biographies to form and inform the unit:
Hole in My Life by Jack Gantos, Locomotion by Jacqueline Woodson, and Peace, Locomotion also by Jacqueline Woodson.
We have no control over certain situations that arise in our lives, or the families we are born into. But we do have control over how we respond, which is why integrity and perseverance are important. Integrity and perseverance build strong people and make the world a better place. Many of my students come from difficult situations and have no idea how to deal with what they are going through. Exposing them to different people who have overcome difficult circumstances can help them build a toolkit that will aid them in conquering troubled areas of their own lives.
"In order to attain full integrity as an individual, the protagonist must gain, through extreme experience and prolonged suffering, tragic consciousness and the moral character needed to bear up under the burden of that terrible awareness."(3) This quote reminds me that these qualities are built over time, and that some may take longer than others to develop. I can honestly say that I have always had perseverance; integrity on the other hand, came only as I experienced more in life. As the quote from Steve Ressler suggests, I attained my integrity after many experiences; the guilt coupled with the consequences of my actions were great lessons for me; lessons that I often tell to my students, with hopes that they will make a wise decision if placed in a similar situation.
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