Thursday, 4 February

Students turned in their homework on Freedom to Breathe By Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the class discussed.

Students worked in groups on a "Write Around the Block" lesson discussing the following questions:

Night: Write Around the Block #1

Give examples of religion as a beneficial aspect of society.

Then give examples of some horror it has caused.

Do all people hate?

Is hating part of being human?

What other emotion is hate most like?

If Congress considered passing a law so that all people must carry identification with them when traveling between states to help police detect illegal aliens, would you support this idea? Why?

At what point is violence justified to remedy social injustice?

  

Fundamentally what are rights?

How are they established?

To what degree are they absolute?

Are there any rights that apply to all people?

Are there any that should, but don’t?

What motivates people to keep living when in dire straits?

Mr. Zartler provided the following outline for the first part of the unit note it includes several due dates and several different activities:

Night

Night is a difficult story to read. It is the true story of several years in the life of teenager Elie Wiesel. Elie was a young Jewish boy living in Transylvania, Hungary when the Nazi’s invaded that country. We will be reading about several disturbing, true events in his lives, and the lives of all humans.

The book does not have section numbers, but there are breaks. For our purposes we will call each section a chapter. Below are the page numbers and due dates for each section. Note that on two days you are to read two short sections.

	PAGES	DUE DATE		PAGES	DUE DATE
Chapter 1	3-23	Monday, 2/8 &	Chapter 2	24-29	Monday 2/8
Chapter 3	30-46	Wed., 2/10	Chapter 4	47-65	Friday 2/12
Chapter 5	66-84	Wed 2/17	Chapter 6	85-97	Friday, 2/19 &
Chapter 7	98-103	Friday, 2/19	Chapter 8	104-112	Monday 2/22 &
Chapter 9	113-115	Monday 2/22	FINAL EXAM		TBD

You are to keep a journal as you read Night. You should at the very least write a response after each “chapter”, but if you write each time you have a thought or question you will be most successful.

Journal entries can include what the story is making you think about, questions you have, and comments about the story, and the language used to tell the story. You can be creative in your journal; you could write Elie, or other characters a letter, and then write back the way you think the character would respond. It is natural when reading Night to ask a lot of “Big Questions,” you may try to answer some of these, or you might just want to explain why they are so hard to answer. You should use quotes and passages from the book (including page citations) to help explain what you are thinking about.

At the end of the unit you should have six to eight (6-8) pages of journal entries, plus a couple of pages of writing that will be done in class.

The first step in reading this book is for you to make a KWL chart on the Holocaust. Create a chart like the one below; give yourself at least a full page for this chart.

Holocaust

What do I know?	What do I want to learn?	What do I wonder? Have I heard rumors of? Fear? Imagine?	What have I learned (complete this later):

Before reading Chapter 2 make three lists. Each list is about what you would take from your home if you knew there was going to be some huge earthquake, volcano, flood or other disaster that was going to destroy Portland. One list is what you would take with you if you could fill your car; the next is if you could only fill a backpack. The final list is what would you bring if all you could take is what would fit in your pocket.