Objectives
My objectives for this unit are both academic and non-cognitive. Their school experiences have managed to keep most of them from exposure to Common Core State Standards (CCSS or CC) thus far. The Common Core language arts assessment would send most of my students marching right back out of the classroom door in fear and frustration, but they deserve the same chances to succeed as those in traditional high schools. I will introduce them to focused, strategic, and critical reading and thinking skills that allow them, with practice, to seek and form connections among a variety of texts. In this case, maybe a census report, a news story about their neighborhood and a housing study. They will make inferences from individual and collections of documents. As writers, they will hone their skills at reflective writing and develop skills to help them organize complex ideas and to execute them in an appropriate prose form. The minimum product will be measured improvement, comfort and enthusiasm at reading and responding to document-based writing tasks.
I have two main non-cognitive objectives. First, I want them to develop a panoptic view of their community with themselves as an operational center. They should have an awareness of how they are very much a product of their environment but also an agent of activity, whether to degrade it or improve it. I think it is human nature to continue to corrupt something that has fallen into disrepair. Rather than to perpetuate this kind of fatalism, I want them to be inspired to respect their environment. Second, I want them to condition themselves to see the beauty—sometimes obvious, often hidden—around them so that as agents of change they may be more inclined to choose the latter option, to improve it. The artistic Soul of my City maps at the end of the unit will be a final chance for students to demonstrate the "roses" that they encounter personally.
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