Eloquence

Rationale

Mt. Pleasant High School is a good place to go to school; for some of our students the profound impact that it has extends well beyond the walls of the classroom. For our students who come to school hungry, it's a promise of a warm meal. For some of my kids who sleep in cars or garages, it's a warm and dry, safe place. To our surrounding community, the school represents free health care regardless of immigration status. And for many, not nearly enough, but for many, it's an opportunity to access skills and knowledge that are the promise to a better future. Enough kids believe that our campus is a safe place in a sea of uncertainty, that they own and respect the school and the adults who populate it. They recognize that the adults on campus care about them and their futures, and many of them in turn care about their teachers.

It was largely this dynamic at work that led students and staff to welcome tech millionaire Steve Poizner on campus a few years ago when he volunteered to be a guest lecturer for a semester in a senior U.S. Government class. Mr. Poizner spent twelve weeks of a spring semester facing many of the challenges of a neophyte teacher. He struggled to engage some kids, some students were content to get by doing just enough to pass the course, and a few failed, despite his best efforts and intentions. Certainly not all failed, though. In his class was our school valedictorian; in fact, most kids left Mr. Poizner's class, graduated and were enrolled in a post-secondary institution the following August. At the end of his short tenure, Mr. Poizner said his farewells, collected a certificate of appreciation, and drove away in a very expensive car. It was to everyone's dismay when he published a memoir a short time later, and simultaneously announced his candidacy for the governorship of California, identifying himself as a teacher with background in education. Within the pages of Mount Pleasant, Mr. Poizner wrote about passing his neighborhood Ferrari dealership and French bakery before crossing the valley to the East Side, exiting the freeway on our side of town and wondering about the "profoundly sad lives" ¹ that lived behind the sound walls. He went on to generalize many of his students, wondering if they were "too busy ducking bullets to worry about their careers." ² The book quickly rose to number five on the New York Times best sellers list ³, and he continued his candidacy supporting the charter school movement while our students and very quickly the entire school community were left in his wake, feeling used and misbranded. And that's when my kids got mad. So mad that they wanted to do something about it; they wanted to tell the truth. To persuade everyone that had been exposed to Poizner's book that he'd gotten it wrong. My kids felt they deserved the opportunity to define themselves, to speak their own truth. And so we worked, with words. We talked about rhetoric; kids learned about crafting a message with intent; they learned about delivery and then they planned a protest and called the local media. When the local television reporters showed up to the planned protest later that week, they were surprised to find so much of the community standing up to defend the school's reputation, but they were dismayed to hear the articulate voices of protest, persuading reporters that M.P. was nothing like the place Poizner had described. This disconnect between the students' voices, many of them who'd been in Poizner's class, and the politician's description became the story. It didn't take long before Ira Glass seized on the story for an episode of his popular NPR radio show and podcast This American Life. ⁴ In the end, Mr. Glass, my students, and I, were able to tell our story, to define ourselves, and to proclaim to the world the truth about Mt. Pleasant, and about Steve Poizner. In the end, the book sales stopped, the candidacy was a failure, and our community was galvanized by the event.

The lesson learned by the kids during this event was that language matters, that words are powerful, but that that power lies in choosing the right words. This is a lesson all our students deserve to learn, and it's at the center of this unit.

William Golding's Lord of the Flies and the study of World War II have independently been embedded in the sophomore curricula for the twenty-four years that I've been at Mt. Pleasant. Both are studied in the spring: one in English II, the other in World History. By focusing our study in English on the speech communities of Lord of the Flies, and by examining the connections between the discourse in the novel and the political discourse leading up to World War II, this unit will enrich the study of both topics. Additionally, by examining the novel through the politics of rhetoric and the rhetoric of politics, students will gain a working knowledge of ethos, pathos, logos, and be able to effectively craft and deliver a message focusing on invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.

The students for whom I am creating this curriculum unit are sophomores enrolled in my English II Honors course at Mt. Pleasant High School. Due to our school's open enrollment policy, some students find themselves in class unprepared for the rigor and pace of the curriculum. Many enroll lacking the foundational reading and writing skills or the academic discipline to meet expectations and be successful as we move through the year preparing them to take the junior level English 3 Advanced Placement course, at the end of which they'll take the AP exam in English Language and Composition. With such a heterogeneous group, the challenge is always to provide sufficient scaffolding to maintain engagement and support learning by kids at either end of the achievement spectrum. The focus on rhetoric at the heart of this unit is intended to better equip students for the deep rhetorical analysis that is central to English 3AP. Another consideration in planning this unit is the additional focus on nonfiction texts. By giving students the skills to apply critical reading strategies to historical documents in the form of speeches, we are responding to shifts dictated by the Common Core at the same time that we are familiarizing them with the type of reading that they'll be expected to deal with in English 3AP.

Mt. Pleasant High School is one of eleven comprehensive public high schools, four "small but necessary" schools, and one continuation high school in the East Side Union High School District. It is located in San Jose, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. Despite our proximity to some of the nation's greatest wealth, most of my students are children of immigrants and many live close to the poverty line.

I was born and raised in the community in which I teach, and I've been at my school for 24 years. Before I began teaching at Mt. Pleasant, my father was a revered English teacher and soccer coach here for more than a decade. So my commitment to this school, to this community, and to these people runs deep. Every year I seem to have students who are the children (or grandchildren) of my father's former students. It's funny when they come back on the second day of school confused but excited to share that I was their grandpa's teacher! Today I still live a few miles from school and am raising my own children among my students and their families. I intend for my own children to attend Mt. Pleasant, so I'm profoundly committed to making it a rich experience for them and every other kid who comes through. The events surrounding the Poizner episode illustrate the disparity between an all-too-common perception of my school and the reality of my campus. It's at the heart of a discussion I often have with parents as I assure them that it is very possible for their students to get a top-notch education at M.P., but that it's also true that kids find what they're looking for. My hope is that this curriculum unit is adopted by my site's English II Professional Learning Community and becomes a part of the English II course, making this powerful teaching and learning part of every student's sophomore experience.

Mt. Pleasant was opened in 1965 and originally built to serve a student body of 1,600. Over the years, as our student population grew to 2,200, twenty-three portables were added. However, due to declining enrollment, only three of these portables were still in use for the 2013-2014 school year. Recent projections calculate that we will continue to experience declining enrollment through 2017. This dramatic decrease in student enrollment has been attributed to the high foreclosure rates in our surrounding community, which are some of the highest in the county, as well as to the opening of Evergreen Valley High School seven years ago. When E.V.H.S. was designed and built to serve a newly constructed community of million-dollar homes nestled in the nearby foothills, the district gerrymandered the borders to steer these children to the brand new school and redirected more kids from a lower socially-economic, predominantly immigrant neighborhood to our school. These changes dramatically altered our demographics and our achievement scores on standardized tests. Due to our initial failure to meet growth targets for our newly increased Latino and Special Education populations, we have been in Program Improvement status since 2009.

For the 2013-2014 school year, Mt. Pleasant had an enrollment of 1504 students. Of this number, 71.2% are Hispanic, 10% are Filipino, 5% are Vietnamese, 4.6% White, 4% Other Asian, 3% are African-American, and other ethnicities comprise 2.2% of the population. Moreover, 16% of our students are Limited English Proficient (LEP), 41% have been Re-classified as Fluent English Proficient (RFEP), and 2.7% are Initially Fluent English Proficient (IFEP). This means that 60% of our student population come from homes where English is not the primary language. In addition, 51% of our student population qualifies for the Free or Reduced Meal Program. ⁵