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John Denver ♥ Take Me Home, Country Roads  (The Ultimate Collection)  with Lyrics

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Sentence Frames: Complete at least one and comment it below!

1. _______ seem(s) to be strong indicator(s) of poverty and this makes me feel ______ because______.

2. Our county is ______ which I find _____ because_____.

3. This graphic is _____ and I know/feel this because _____

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On the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) report, this new report revisits many of the same measures of well-being that ARC researchers examined a half-century ago. This analysis, however, focuses its attention on West Virginia, the one state that exists entirely within the federally designated Appalachian region, and, more specifically, on the children of West Virginia. Read PDF of report

While inflation has dramatically altered the numbers, many of the disparities persist. West Virginia still lags behind most states in educational attainment, employment and per capita income, while remaining a front-runner in poverty. Within West Virginia, age and racial differences in poverty rates continue, with African American children being the poorest residents of all.

Among these discouraging statistics, however, one promising trend line stands out. When the ARC report was published, a staggering 40 percent of seniors (65 and older) in West Virginia lived in poverty. Due largely to Social Security, that rate has dropped by three-quarters to about 10 percent today.

Perhaps the most crucial questions that emerge from the updated graphs are these: if we applied to children the rigorous anti-poverty effort that so stunningly reduced poverty among our seniors, could we achieve the same positive impact on measures of child well-being? And if we can muster the public and political will to take such action, what might West Virginia's economy and quality of life look like in the next 10, 20 or 50 years?

This goal of this report is to provide timely and useful information to help West Virginians reduce child poverty and its tragic effects. It provides an overview of the effects of poverty on children and society (Section 1), an explanation of how poverty is measured (Section 2), an in-depth profile of child poverty in West Virginia (Section 3), and an examination of past and present policy responses to the problem (Section 4).

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Child Poverty in West Virginia: A Growing and Persistent Problem - West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy

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On the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) report, this new report revisits many of the same measures of well-being that ARC researchers examined a half-century ago. This analysis, however, focuses its attention on West Virginia, the one state that exists entirely within the federally designated Appalachian region, and, more [...]

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Create your Appalachian Identity Poster! It can be a collage, infographic, or other design as long as it centers around YOUR Appalachian Identity--the good, the bad, and everything in between! It must have at least five symbols and a small explanation for two of the symbols. The explanation does NOT need to be in full sentences. See model!

Link your posters in the comments below! Don't forget to include your names in your post! If you turn in a physical poster, make sure it is turned in on time with your name!

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Easel.ly is a simple web tool that empowers anyone to create and share powerful visuals (infographics, posters)... no design experience needed! We provide the canvas, you provide the creativity.

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Read this for homework! We will be discussing it next class. Pay attention to the graphics!!!

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Trampoline

A Novel in five acts by

Robert Gipe

≈

Author's Statement: I was born in North Carolina in 1963 and was raised in Kingsport, Tennessee, a child of the Tennessee Eastman Company, Pals Sudden Service, and the voice of the Vols, John Ward. My dad was a warehouse supervisor and my mom a registered nurse. I went to college at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina where I was a DJ for a student radio station I helped start. I went to graduate school at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and got a masters in American Studies. I worked as a pickle packer, a forklift driver, and eventually landed a job as marketing and educational services director for Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky in 1989. At Appalshop I worked with public schoolteachers on arts and education projects. I met my wife, Robin Lambert, at a conference in 1992, and we bonded over an interest in rural communities and an opposition to school consolidation. We married in 1993. She is my heart's delight. Since 1997, I have been the director of the Appalachian Program at Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College in Cumberland, Kentucky. I am one of the producers of Higher Ground, a series of community musical dramas based on oral histories and grounded in discussion of local issues. I am also a faculty coordinator of the Crawdad student arts series. I have had fiction published in Appalachian Heritage and have attended the Appalachian Writers Workshop in Hindman every year since 2006.

I have been working on the characters in Trampoline since 2006. The narrator is Dawn Jewell. She lives in a coalfield county in eastern Kentucky, and is in high school when Escape Velocity takes place. She's having a rough go of it. The sound of people telling one another stories is the most precious sound in the world. Trying to catch that sound on the page is my favorite part of writing. Most of my favorite writing-Flannery O'Connor's stories, the novels of Richard Price and Charles Portis-seems to me written by ear. When writing is going best for me, it's like taking dictation from voices I hear in my head. As far as the drawings go, I have drawn pictures all my life, much longer than I have written stories, and with more compulsion. Escape Velocity is the first time I have seriously tried to integrate fiction and drawing. I love episodic storytelling, especially the great HBO series- The Wire, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, etc.-and have enjoyed thinking about how to break a story into semi-coherent pieces.

-Robert Gipe

≈

Escape Velocity

Part One: Driving Lesson

"That's where they're going to strip," she said, nodding at the crest of Blue Bear Mountain. "They'll start mining on the Drop Creek side. But they'll be on this side before you graduate." She sipped her chocolate milk. "You watch."

Mamaw linked her lean arm through mine and told me about growing up on Blue Bear Mountain. Her stories smelled of sassafras and rang with gunfire, and the sound of her voice was warm as railroad gravel in the summer sun, but the stories flitted through my mind and never lit. I was fifteen.

"The blast shook the whole house, throwed her china plates out on the floor," the man said. "They was stood up in a
cabinet and they busted all over the place." The man shook his head.

Mamaw toed a weed in the gravel. The little dog ran up to me and the boy, dropped the ball and backed off, its tail
wagging. Mamaw told the man to thank his wife for the pound cake, that it was real good. Mamaw drove us back to
Long Ridge.

The state scheduled a meeting the Tuesday before Thanksgiving for people to come and give their testimony about
whether or not the company's permit to mine should be approved. Monday night Mamaw's group had a meeting in town at
the library to talk about what they were going to say at the meeting on Tuesday. That's the way it was that fall.
Meetings about meetings, and then a meeting on top of that. Again, she made me go, and again she wouldn't let me
drive.

I sat at the back of the room in the basement of the public library and looked at pictures of the USS Canard County
in a glass case. It was a navy ship that hauled tanks and trucks to Haiti and the Persian Gulf and Argentina til
the Navy sold it to Spain.

On the way home, Mamaw stopped at the Kolonel Krispy dairy bar and got a double fudge shake with brownies swirled up in it. We sat in the parking lot and watched the redlight and Mamaw said all strip mining ought to be outlawed. I asked her if I could drive home. She said I needed to practice more.

"You come here," Mamaw said, hard as a broomstick to the back of the legs.

Momma kept walking towards the store. I guess Momma didn't think Mamaw would do anything in the Wal-Mart parking lot.

"You don't do me that way," Momma yelled.

"Watch me," Mamaw said.

Then they both went to yelling at the same time. I went in the store, looked dead in the eye of the people coming out, the ones who didn't know yet Cora Redding and her druggie daughter were having it out in the yellow stripes of the crossing zone. I went back to jewelry and asked my dad's niece who worked there to take me home. She said it would be an hour. I wandered through the store, through the Christmas candy and blow-up snowmen and stupid dancing Santas playing the electric slide and stupid reindeer socks. My cousin took me to the snack bar and bought me everything I wanted to eat. Pizza sticks. Two slushies. Then we went to the Chinese restaurant. I ate every fried egg noodle they had in there.

When my cousin dropped me off at Mamaw's, Momma and Mamaw sat at the kitchen table, hundreds of envelopes and flyers saying write the governor to protect Blue Bear on the table between them. Momma helped Mamaw stuff the envelopes like nothing had happened. I was so sick on cookies and pop and hot dogs and Chinese food.

After three minutes, they called the name of the first woman signed up to speak. The state woman brought her a wireless microphone. The first woman said she was proud of her husband, that she had married him because she wanted to be a coal miner's wife. She said she would not be ashamed of what he did and would not allow her children to be ashamed of what he did.

The second person to speak was also a woman. She said the state should consider all the trash that was in the creeks, how terrible a shape the road was in. All the dust from the coal trucks flying up and down the road was terrible. She couldn't even hang her clothes out on the line she said and when she said something to one of the drivers he was just rude.

The third speaker he talked about the ozone layer, how there was holes in it and how we couldn't go on burning coal forever, that we needed to think about the future, about what we were leaving behind for our children. He talked for a while longer and the man from the state had to tell him his time was up. The speaker said he had more to say, and the state man said he could give his paper to him and he would attach it to what all else he had.

Then the man from the state said he wanted to remind everybody that they was only there to consider testimony pertaining to mine permit 848-1080 amendment three and that of course people could use their minutes anyway they wanted to but that that particular permit application was what they were there for.

Mamaw sat stone still in her folding chair and the speeches went on and on. Every speaker tried to talk people into believing what they themselves believed.

A woman I'd seen at Mamaw's meetings called the coal company out by name, said they'd told her mother they weren't going to strip mine her land, that they was just going to build a coal haul road across it and that they wouldn't be out there even a month. She said they'd promised to build a road out to her family's cemetery-widen it. And then when her mother signed her rights away they'd stripmined the shit out of it-that's what the woman said-and they'd mined right up to the cemetery and probably would've mined right through it if she-the daughter-hadn't come back from Georgia. There wadn't no way, that woman said, that company ought to be allowed to mine coal period, much less on Blue Bear. They ought to be put in jail that woman said, everyone of them, and especially you she said, and pointed to a man with a wirebrush moustache standing in the back spitting into a plastic pop bottle, his arms folded across his chest.

"Especially you, Mickey Mills that lived right here in this community and lied to my mother. You're a sorry excuse for a man," that woman said and started towards him before her husband stopped her.

Then a woman stood up and said "You aint taking my husband to jail. You're just a busybody. You don't live here no more and don't deserve no say in what goes on here."

The man from the state got on the microphone. "All right. Order. Please."

The next speaker was a man in a sweater vest and a green plaid shirt I didn't know. He talked about the Indiana bats and the Turks-cap lilies and other plants and animals that only lived in Kentucky near the top of Blue Bear Mountain. I didn't know what difference that would make to anybody. Mamaw told me it did.

A thick coal company office man stood up and told how many jobs the company made, about their participation in the youth baseball leagues and their big ads in the high school gymnasium. Another company man talked about how that if they didn't approve these permits that it would likely mean the end of coal mining in Canard County and maybe all of Kentucky. He said people didn't know how the coal industry could fall apart at any minute and then where would Canard County be? When he asked that question he spread out his arms and turned to the crowd and it seemed to me that that was who he was talking to, anyway. He finished up by saying that state should approve the permit and get out of the company's way and let the good working people of Canard County do what they do best-do better than anyone in America-run coal. When he said that there was all kinds of cheering and whistling as he sat down.

The next person to speak was the woman with the pulled-back hair who had been at Mamaw's meeting, the one I'd swore would never have spoke. She was on the other side of Mamaw from me, her paper shaking in her hands. She put her other hand on the back of the folding chair in front of her, barely able to see over the frosted blond head of the miner's wife sitting in front of her.

"My name is Agnes Therapin. I live on Little Drop Creek." Her back straightened when she said the name of the creek. "I am against this here permit. They's people that lives beneath these strip jobs. It aint out in a desert somewheres. It's up the creek from me. This here is the third time you have let them add on to this strip job. I wish you'd never let them start but I don't know why you didn't just let them mine the whole thing to begin with. Then we wouldn't always have been a-hoping that maybe we might have a decent place to stay." Her hands beat restlessly on the back of the chair in front of her. The miner's wife leaned forward, turned to look at Agnes. "My mommy lives with us," Agnes went on. "She has a bad leg and this dynamite has knocked her out of bed more than once. We thought you fellers-you come up here from Frankfort or wherever-and I guess I thought you was there to protect us. To protect our homes and our property. I thought that was what the law was supposed to be there for. To keep the peace. Well you fellers need to know and I don't know if you all have been up there or not but let me tell there aint no peace on Little Drop Creek."

Agnes' neck was stiff. She arched her back like it hurt.

"Young lady," the state man said, "you are speaking out of turn."

I wasn't done. "What do you want us to say? 'Go ahead and tear up the world. We'll just get out of the way while you destroy ever thing our friends ever had? Here take my house; I'll just live in this here hole in the ground. Yeah, go ahead and set that big yellow rock on our heads. We'll be fine.'"

"If I could ask the deputy sheriff..." the state man started.

"Dawn, sit down," Mamaw said. "Sir, she don't mean it..."

I sat down. A buzzing in my head kept me from hearing what was said after that. I wished I hadn't spoken. I wished I hadn't said a word.

Someone held up a jar of dirty water. Somebody brought in a bunch of kids carrying a banner. I'm not sure what side they were on. When it was over Mamaw had to shake me to get me to move. I dreaded walking out. I wasn't invisible anymore.

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Trampoline A Novel in five acts by Robert Gipe ≈ Author's Statement: I was born in North Carolina in 1963 and was raised in Kingsport, Tennessee, a child of the Tennessee Eastman Company, Pals Sudden Service, and the voice of the Vols, John Ward. My dad was a warehouse supervisor and my mom a registered nurse.

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Comment the sentence frame you were assigned in class! Respond to at least one peer's sentence frame.

1. The judgements in this video are ____ and I know this because ____.
2. The video says our class is determined by ____ and I (agree/disagree) because ____.
3. America is ____ in regards to class system because ____.
4. The class title ____ in the video seems (accurate/inaccurate) because ____.

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A Nation of Tribes: How Social Class Divides Us - People Like Us episode #1

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America is a nation of tribes, and we rarely go outside our own comfort zones to interact with others. The opening scenes from the acclaimed documentary PEOPLE LIKE US, SOCIAL CLASS IN AMERICA by Louis Alvarez and Andrew Kolker at http://www.cnam.com Watch instantly or buy the DVD at http://shop.cnam.com

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Consider: Why wouldn't the woman want to share? What did she fear? Did she end up sharing? Why? Is there anything you noticed about Gipe's style of imagery. What is the context of this image and why is it important? Is there anything you notice about Gipe's style in this image?

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Consider: Why did Dawn say this? Is this a positive or negative reaction? Does this seem like a normal reaction to what just happened in the novel? What is the context of this image and why is it important? Is there anything you notice about Gipe's structuring of this image?

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Why was the middle frame included even though it's blank? What does it accomplish? Does it suggest something about Dawn's feelings? How does Dawn's expressions change (or not change) across these images? What is the context of this image and why is it important (WHO is speaking?)? Is there anything you notice about Gipe's style of the image?

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Siaara Freeman "The Drug Dealer's Daughter"

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Siaara Freeman "The Drug Dealer's Daughter"

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Siaara Freeman - "The Drug Dealer's Daughter" (Rustbelt 2014)

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10 things they never tell you about the drug dealer's daughter

1. She loves greek mythology
And by the time she learns
To love anything more than herself
It is long dead

2. She is nine when she realizes
She's got the blessing of being brought up by a contemporary concept
She's the first on her block
To get a stay at home dad
He plays Barbies
And dominoes
And he cooks y'all
We got enough baking soda in my basement
To open 10 bakeries
My daddy is a baker
The cakes they fell so fast you never see them
Just the customers
Looking some kind of hungry
Like they got a sweet tooth
Only my daddy can yank
And I swear yo
We gonna be rich

3. None of her friends believe her
Until they all turn training bra
And things start disappearing and reappearing
In her house
First Tanya's television set
Her older brother's attention
Then Danielle's four finger ring
And her father's retirement fund
Finally
Danielle's whole mother

4. A girl and her father and their family
Disappear into a new neighborhood
The drug dealer, the father
He never misses a play
A pageant
A slam
And they ain't rich
But they no projects no more either

5. By the time I realize what we are
It's already too late
We are an urban novel
You will skim over at Walmart
A four minute smart on FOX 8's face
We work hard
And Spike Lee
And Quentin Tarantino
Made a film under Eazy E's direction
The question black America asks itself every sunday
I am a bakery
With nothing sweet left in it

6. My father is cute
My father is shot
Point-blank range to the back of the left ear
One night
But you probably knew this was going to happen
Staying it out loud makes me feel better
Makes this more real
Less magic makes this poem more
10 things you didn't know about
Sierra Freeman
Less 10 things about a cliche
That you click your fucking teeth at

7. Some nights I put on my father's chalk outline
And I teach it how to walk
My face is a haunted house
My mother screams at
From habit not fear
Most days i am an ally
That no one will enter alone

8. He is found
With no jewelry
Just his pocket watch
My baby tooth is snuggled inside
After his autopsy it is returned to be checked

9. I disappear into my own neighborhood
The suburbs
I got an itch the suburbs just ain't got nails for
I find Danielle
She asked me if i inherited any of my daddy's magic
I shake my head
She abracadabra something in her arms
And says
You know the drug deal is supposed to die, right?

10. I know the stories
How magic can turn black men into myths
That the hood will turn a black man into a monster
And that zeus made an exit wound
Big enough for his daughter to walk out of
Fully armored
And athena
Like most goddesses
Never learned to love anything
More than herself

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THE DRUG DEALER'S DAUGHTER by Siaara Freeman

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10 things they never tell you about the drug dealer's daughter 1. She loves greek mythology And by the time she learns To love anything more than herself It is long dead 2.

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Think you’ll never have to ask for help? Here’s your chance to prove it.

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Play Spent Illustrated Novel Rubric and Example

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Play Spent Illustrated Novel Rubric and Example

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This is how you will be graded!

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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You may create a drawn or digital comic. Don't forget to include your rationale! Narratives may also be added here or may be included on your Canva.

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Ask any questions about the Identity Poster Here!

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Ask any questions about the Identity Poster Here!

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Ask any questions about the Day 2 Comic Analysis here!

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Ask any questions about the Day 2 Comic Analysis here!

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Ask any questions about the videos here!

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Ask any questions about the videos here!

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Ask any questions about the PlaySpent Comic Project here! 

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Ask any questions about the PlaySpent Comic Project here! 

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Urban Ministries of Durham serves over 6000 people every year who struggle with poverty and homelessness. Spent is an interactive game created by McKinney that challenges you to manage your money, raise a child and make it through the month getting paid minimum wage after a stretch of unemployment.

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Post any helpful advice/ideas here for your classmates to utilize!

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Post any helpful advice/ideas here for your classmates to utilize!

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Text reader (TTS) that simplifies vocabulary, translates text, reads inaccessible text (OCR), and captures and cites sources.