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The graphic notes worksheet
(I usually provide the class a Chinese version worksheet.)

------Ning Zhang

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1)To sum up a main idea or topic on graphic notes worksheet
2)To keep track things make sense on the graphic notes worksheet
3)To record new vocabs on the graphic notes worksheet

(This picture and graphic notes are used as a during reading activity of lesson of “Jefferson and Barbary pirate war on Mediterranean” based on CDE. Since my class is an immersion class, usually, I provide the reading in Chinese and students need to take notes in Chinese, too.)

-------Ning Zhang

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Activating and assess students prior Knowledge

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Activating and assess students prior Knowledge

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1. How did different countries respond to Somali pirate ransom request differently?

2. Why did pirate keep ask ransom and increase the amount?

3. Make the connection: How did President Washington and John Adams do with Barbary pirate back to 1800?

4. Prediction: If both Washington and John Adams kept paying Barbary pirate, what Barbary pirate would do to President Jefferson?

(This article is designed as a pre-reading activity for lesson of “Jefferson and Barbary pirate war on Mediterranean” based on CDE.)
---------Ning Zhang

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David B. Hudson / US Navy / Reuters

U.S. and European officials insist they don't pay ransoms to pirates. And why would they? Shipping and insurance companies now routinely pay ransoms of millions of dollars, dropping sack-loads of cash from airplanes into the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden, despite assertions from politicians back home that the money is fueling the rampant piracy.

Here is how the system works, according to kidnap-and-ransom experts who agreed to talk to TIME: Within minutes of a vessel being seized by Somali pirates (or foreign oil workers being nabbed in Venezuela or Nigeria) the crew alerts its company headquarters. There, officials call the company's insurer, which then contracts a "response company" — private firms, like Control Risks in London or ASI Global in Houston, which are generally staffed by former military personnel experienced in hostage situations, and whose day rates can run to thousands of dollars, according to insurance brokers. Those companies begin negotiations with the kidnappers or pirates, and are usually authorized to take decisions without agreement from the shipping or oil companies concerned. Since the pirates off Somalia are motivated by money — rather than politics, as in Iraq and Afghanistan — the talks focus on one issue: the ransom amount. ( See pictures of modern-day pirates.)

In negotiations which can drag on for weeks, the sum is agreed — usually more than $2 million for a container ship or oil tanker. Then the cash is air-dropped by private security companies that specialize in delivering ransoms to Somali pirates; insurance brokers say that's only about three companies. "The money is concealed in large floating plastic containers, and flown by air and dropped," says Mike Regester, an insurance broker for the London company Cooper Gay, which covers oil and shipping companies for kidnap and ransom. "Then the pirates go out and pick it up," he says.

That sounds like a scene from an action movie, but in the Gulf of Aden it is legal business practice. That's because the pirates are regarded as criminals, rather than terrorists, under U.S. or international law, which bans money going to individuals or organizations listed as terrorists. Unlike in, say, Iraq, Somali pirates appear to have little interest in killing hostages who are seized along with vessels, and the crews are usually released with the ships when the ransoms are paid. "Paying ransoms is not illegal," says Guillaume Bonnissent, a special risks underwriter for Hiscox Insurance Co. Ltd. in London, which writes about two-thirds of the world's kidnap-and-ransom insurance policies, known in the industry as K&R. In fact, insurance companies never pay ransoms themselves, in part because insurance companies are often banned by law from doing so. Instead, the companies whose workers or vessels are seized pay, and then claim back the money under their insurance policies. "K&R is really reimbursement," says Bonnissent. "We reimburse clients for ransoms paid."

For the U.S. military — as well as the European and NATO officials attempting to smash the pirate networks — the shipping companies' business-as-usual approach works against military strategy. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said as much, when he appealed to companies to stop paying ransoms, during a speech at the naval war college in Newport, Rhode Island on Friday. "Clearly, if they didn't pay the ransoms, we would be in a stronger position," he said.

But Gates' reasoning is unlikely to deter many companies, which simply cannot afford to lose hugely valuable vessels and cargo to seaborne bandits. Indeed, insurance premiums have risen along with the ransom amounts, according to Regester, who estimates that coverage for a single voyage through the Gulf of Aden costs about $20,000. With shipping companies hard-hit by the global downturn, some opt simply to take their chances running the gauntlet of pirates, rather than pay insurance premiums. "I reckon less than 10% of vessels are insured now," says Regester. "K&R policies are considered a luxury." Whether or not they are covered, many companies pay ransoms, calculating that it is cheaper than losing the vessel and its entire cargo. ( Read a brief history of pirates.)

Since companies aren't likely to stop paying ransoms, Hillary Clinton on Wednesday told reporters that the State Department was working with shipping and insurance companies to "address gaps in their self-defense measures," in the hope that they can avoid being seized in the first place. Clinton's strategy announcement came days after U.S. Navy SEAL snipers killed three pirates who were holding Richard Phillips, the captain of the container vessel Maersk Alabama — the first U.S.-flagged ship to be seized off Somalia. The last-resort military rescue plan was put into action after ransom negotiations had broken down. ( Read a brief history of the Navy SEALs,)

Yet insurance brokers say that ships are protecting themselves as best they can: many vessels are encased in barbed wire and crews often use high-powered water hoses to try to ward off oncoming pirates. Kidnap experts say the pirates are increasingly skilled at seizures; they say they were astonished last November when the Saudi supertanker Sirius Star was seized, since its side had been regarded as too high for pirates to scale. The pirates finally released the ship and its crew two months later, after a security company dropped $3 million in cash over the Indian Ocean. "Even with the best protections in the world, you still have the risk because the pirates are very well armed and trained," says risks underwriter Bonnissent. "It is not as easy as it seems from an office in the Western world."

In addition, insurance brokers and some officials say governments themselves sometimes pay ransoms — especially on land in kidnap-heavy countries like Nigeria, Mexico and Venezuela — despite insisting that they do not. In 2001, for example, the Dutch government paid $1 million to free a doctor working for the aid organization Doctors Without Borders (MSF) who had been kidnapped by Chechen rebels; the government later tried to recoup the money from MSF. "Ransoms are certainly being paid," Antonia Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna, said in an e-mail on Friday. "Of course governments do not want to make this public because it violates international standards and signals to bandits and pirates that crime pays."

Rather than governments trying to ban ransom payments — which could be futile — Costa suggests trying to choke off the flow of money pirates and kidnap gangs receive. "They may move some of their money offshore, using the hawala [underground banking] system and through third parties, particularly in financial centers where shipping companies are located." Costa and Clinton have also said that shipping and insurance companies should work on developing Somalia, rather than simply paying ransoms — a suggestion that insurance brokers reject. "It's not down to insurance companies to promote peace in Somalia," says Cooper Gay's Regester. "That is done on a governmental basis." And it is a strategy which has become increasingly urgent for Western governments.

See TIME's Pictures of the Week.

See pictures of dramatic pirate-hostage rescues.

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Breaking News, Analysis, Politics, Blogs, News Photos, Video, Tech Reviews - TIME.com

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U.S. and European officials insist they don't pay ransoms to pirates. And why would they? Shipping and insurance companies now routinely pay ransoms of millions of dollars, dropping sack-loads of cash from airplanes into the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden, despite assertions from politicians back home that the money is fueling the rampant piracy.

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How did Americans feel about asian immigrants and immigrants from Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century?
Why did they feel this way?
Why did this immigrants leave their home nations?
Why did they want to come to the united states.

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What does it mean to be an American? Activating student prior knowledge 

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What does it mean to be an American? Activating student prior knowledge 

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When Donald J. Trump announced he was running for president in a 2015 speech calling Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists, Rachel McCormick declared to her husband, Irvi Cruz, "If he wins, we're leaving."

She was an American-born high school teacher from the Philadelphia suburbs; he was a doting stay-at-home father who had immigrated illegally from Oaxaca, Mexico.

The night after the election, sitting in their Harlem apartment, Irvi was confident about the move south.

"I need to start building something and I think if we wait longer it's going to keep getting harder," he said of the decade they had been together, all along believing that a policy would eventually be enacted allowing him to legalize.

But Rachel was having second thoughts. She looked down at the living room floor, where their daughters' picture books and toys were scattered.

"But is that an environment where I want to go?" she asked. "From New York City, where my kids are in decent public schools, to a place where schools are shut down most of the year because of teacher strikes?"

The question of where to lay down roots looms over the country's estimated nine million families of mixed immigration status, in which legal residents and those here without authorization share the same roof. For them, deportation means a family torn apart.

For decades, politicians have raised and then dashed the hopes of the roughly 11 million undocumented residents in the United States; Mr. Trump's election seems to have pushed off any clear-cut resolution of their status even further. He has vowed to deport large numbers of illegal immigrants but has been fuzzy on the details of how his policies will play out.

Because Irvi had traveled back and forth to Mexico illegally several times, he faced a penalty that prevented him from applying for legal status through Rachel, who is a United States citizen.

So the couple were boxed in by two bad options: take a chance on a new life in the small, struggling town in Mexico where Irvi grew up, or stay here and try to ignore the shaky ground beneath them.

They were as optimistic as can be at their wedding seven years earlier - it was a melding of two cultures that, at the time, felt utterly American.

Inside a barn in the Hudson Valley, Irvi stomped on a glass and their guests, half of them with Mexican accents, shouted "mazel tov!" Friends prepared Oaxacan mole. They danced all night, first the hora, then cumbia.

They had met at a soccer game in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where Rachel had attended college at Vassar and Irvi worked construction. She was studious and shy, taken by Irvi's playfulness. They bonded over feeling invisible, Irvi because of his immigration status and Rachel because she had been overweight all her life.

They always figured that Irvi would be able to legalize eventually - so did the immigration lawyers whose advice they sought every few years. But under a 1996 law, Irvi would have to leave the United States for 10 years in order to apply to re-enter legally. Even then, the family would have to prove they would face extreme hardship without Irvi so he could return, which would be difficult because Rachel was the main breadwinner.

"I guess I just always assumed I could somehow transfer some of my privilege to him," Rachel said.

They had always talked hypothetically about relocating their family to Mexico if Irvi were deported or the pressure became too much. But while they were dating, his status had felt more like an annoying hangnail than an aneurysm that could burst at any time and destroy their lives.

That assessment changed when they had Sara and Ana, their daughters. Rachel earned good money and benefits as a teacher, so Irvi stayed home with the girls, now 2 and 4, during the day and worked nights as a restaurant server. But having an undocumented stay-at-home parent has come with risks.

A testy downstairs neighbor has threatened to call the authorities, annoyed by the girls' playing loudly. One afternoon last summer, Irvi borrowed Rachel's parents' car to take the girls to Coney Island. Distracted by their excitement, he nearly drove straight into a police checkpoint at the park's entrance. He pulled over, shaking and "freaking out," and called Rachel to come and pick them up.

When Rachel told Irvi they would move if Mr. Trump won the election, she was reacting, in part, to the candidate's remarks - but she was also goading her husband. She had often felt guilty that he had sacrificed more than she had for their arrangement, though Irvi would never admit it.

Irvi agreed to Rachel's proposal, a little too eagerly, and in the ensuing weeks, began to joke that he was encouraging friends to vote for Mr. Trump. Rachel took the commitment seriously but never imagined that she would have to follow through.

On Election Day, she voted at 6 a.m., confident, like many others, that Hillary Clinton would prevail. She went to bed early, as she normally does, so she could wake up at 4 a.m. to prepare for the school day.

In the morning, Rachel checked the CNN app on her phone. The results hit her like ice-cold water. When Sara woke, she found her mother on the living room couch, crying into her coffee.

Later that week, the couple began making preparations. They took the girls to the dentist and stopped submitting preschool applications for Ana. Rachel went to Marshalls and bought them each half a dozen new pairs of shoes - which tend to be more expensive in Mexico - in sizes they would need over the next several years. She also began to quietly worry: Would she find work that allowed her to continue paying off her student loans? Would the girls adjust? Would she?

Rachel had struggled the last time she went to San Lorenzo Cacaotepec, the Oaxacan village Irvi is from. Before marriage or children, when an earlier reform plan's failed run through Congress had left the couple feeling despondent, they had moved there for six months.

The village was insular and poor. Women there were expected to spend their days cooking and cleaning - far from what Rachel, a feminist with an elite American education, was used to. Even though she spoke Spanish, she felt an overwhelming sense of loneliness.

"I cried a lot," she remembered. "I spent a lot of time listening to NPR and trying to connect back - the same way that Irvi spends a lot of time listening to the radio, trying to connect to this other place."

After the election, they decided to meet with an immigration lawyer one last time to make sure they had considered every option. As the December appointment drew nearer, tension at home grew.

"I feel like we feel differently," Rachel said to Irvi one evening. "In this weird way there is this weight lifted off your shoulders 'cause you're like, I get to go home."

Irvi tried to defend himself. "I feel like for immigrants the fact that Donald Trump is going to be the new president is really bad," he said. "But on the other hand I feel like it gives me a push to go back."

Rachel responded: "But isn't that what he wants? And shouldn't we try to fight that?"

One morning before work, they argued about what would happen if Irvi were deported. Rachel would need to finish out the school year at her job. Irvi said he would want the girls to join him right away in Mexico - which Rachel ruled out.

They both became teary. Rachel had to leave for work, so the discussion was cut off. They never finished it.

Sara began to absorb some of her parents' anxieties. She started asking Rachel to translate words like "slide" and "swing set" as they walked through the city. She changed her favorite color from purple to red because it was easier to say in Spanish - "rojo" versus "morado." When her grandmother asked if she wanted to wear her "Mexico" hat to a protest outside Trump Tower, she began to cry.

The morning of their appointment with the immigration lawyer, Irvi was on edge. Ana was being difficult - yanking off her Velcro sneakers and polka-dot puffer jacket as soon as he got them on her. On the walk to Sara's school he yelled at the girls, then gathered himself and apologized. He sent Rachel a text in their usual Spanglish asking for patience: "I'm a little nervous about today. Please ten mucho paciencia conmigo hoy."

Inside a drab office building in North Harlem, the hallways of the lawyer's office were lined with dozens of worried faces, hoping for walk-in appointments. A receptionist sent the family to wait in an overflow room. While the girls peered out a window, pointing out trains and trees to Rachel, Irvi sat in a chair, elbows resting on his knees. He rubbed his hands together nervously.

"Sometimes I wish that there was no possibilities instead of just a little one," he said. Rachel was more cynical. "I don't think that any lawyer would tell you to leave," she said. "But I want a really compelling reason to stay."

When their names were called, they walked into a noisy one-room office. Cubicle walls carved out not-so-private meeting areas in each corner. Two printers were working nonstop, churning out "know your rights" pamphlets. A sign posted inside the door said: "Get Ready! Immigration Concerns Under Trump," advertising an event to inform people of their options.

Irvi's voice shook as he recounted his immigration history. When he finished speaking, the girls began to whine and squirm, seeming to pick up on their parents' discomfort.

Irvi was still not eligible to apply for legal status through Rachel, the lawyer explained. But since the election, the firm had been experimenting with new strategies to help their clients legalize, fearing that potential avenues could become slimmer under the next administration.

Because Irvi believed that he had been shorted pay at two previous jobs, the lawyer said he could try to apply for a visa that is typically granted to human trafficking victims. According to some interpretations of immigration laws, anyone who worked free in the United States could be eligible.

Rachel huffed, her face becoming red, and asked whether that was a viable option or just more false hope. The lawyer stumbled through an indirect answer. Sara screamed, "I want to go home!"

"In the meantime do you think that he's at risk for deportation?" Rachel asked, and received another unsatisfying response from a second lawyer who joined the meeting, Angela Fernandez. "The government does not have enough resources to go after the 11 million undocumented," she said.

Ana started jumping up and down, crying over her mother, who was asking what would happen if, "God forbid," Irvi were to be arrested when he was alone with the girls during the day. "What would happen to my kids?"

"Take our information," said Ms. Fernandez, handing them business cards with cellphone numbers written on the back. She turned to face Irvi. "You should probably memorize one of those numbers, too."

The girls were yanking on Rachel's arms. She stood up and walked them outside. Irvi thanked the lawyers and left.

The family walked across the street to a Mexican restaurant called Guacamole Taqueria, ordered tortas and enchiladas, and then bickered about what to make of the lawyer's advice.

"Do you want to go to Mexico?" Rachel asked.

"Sometimes I do," Irvi replied, adding through tears that he thought Rachel had never given his country a fair chance.

"If you want to go, then just say it," Rachel shot back. "Then there's no point in crying about it and there's no point in going to these appointments, then just say it."

Irvi said in Spanish that he was afraid Rachel would decide to come back to the United States with the girls and that he would be stuck in Mexico.

"What if in a year you don't like it?" he said.

Rachel replied, "Isn't it my turn to not like something?"

Irvi didn't answer, and the girls were too antsy to eat. They packed up their food in to-go boxes, got into a cab and delayed the decision again.

In the following weeks, they continued making arrangements for a potential move so that if it was forced on them, they would be ready. A few days before Christmas, they went to the Mexican Consulate to apply for dual citizenship for the girls.

A security guard stopped them on their way into the building to warn that they would have to hand over Sara's and Ana's original birth certificates and they would not get them back. He had seen this upset many parents, he said, even though they would receive duplicates in the mail.

At the end of the appointment, the consular officer shook the girls' hands and congratulated them on their new nationality.

"Felicidades. Ahora es Mexicana," she said to each one.

Sara and Ana looked back at their parents, as if to ask what exactly that meant.

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Mexico or America? A Couple, One of Them Undocumented, Weigh the Risks of Where to Live

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When Donald J. Trump announced he was running for president in a 2015 speech calling Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists, Rachel McCormick declared to her husband, Irvi Cruz, "If he wins, we're leaving." She was an American-born high school teacher from the Philadelphia suburbs; he was a doting stay-at-home father who had immigrated illegally from Oaxaca, Mexico.

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How are immigrants to America today treated?
What countries do these immigrants come from?
Why do they leave those countries?
Why do they want to come to America?
Below are some current articles on the topic

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Op-Ed Contributor

Image

Credit Credit Yannis Behrakis/Reuters

This year the United States will take in 85,000 of the world's most vulnerable so they can begin new lives in America, the highest number since 2001. But at a time when 65 million people have been displaced by violence, and 20 million of them are classified as refugees - more than half of them children - it is not enough.

Recently, the Obama administration took a small step forward, raising the number of refugees the country will let in to 110,000 for the next fiscal year. The next step is for Congress to allocate resources for resettlement - something it has always done, in a bipartisan fashion, since the refugee crisis after World War II.

Unfortunately, this time, a vocal minority in Congress, the states and the public are arguing that we should respond to this humanitarian crisis by pulling up the welcome mat, even for families fleeing the civil war in Syria and the brutality of the Islamic State. Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, called the administration's increase " reckless and extreme."

Fear of refugees is not new. In 1939, the United States turned awaymore than 900 Jews fleeing Hitler's Germany because of worries that some might be Nazi conspirators or Communists. More than a quarter of those refugees died in the Holocaust.

Some say we should be as fearful of refugees today, especially in an era of terrorist attacks. Yet since 2001, more than 800,000 refugees have been resettled in the United States, and none have been convicted of an act of domestic terrorism. Compassion and security can coexist.

My organization, World Relief, has settled more than a quarter of a million refugees in this country over the past 40 years, working with thousands of congregations to welcome others who have no place to call home, creating a place not just to live, but a place to belong. We're an evangelical charity, and our motivations for this work come from what we believe about Jesus, who was himself a refugee who fled with his mother and father to Egypt, and told us to "do for others as we would want done for us."

We are joined in this work by many other agencies, religious and secular. They act out of their own traditions and conviction, but all see the need to take bold action to end human suffering.

My group's resettlement efforts began in 1979, when a couple who had returned from two decades of ministry in Vietnam searched for a local church to welcome a refugee family. Over the next decade, the federal government, resettlement agencies and thousands of local churches resettled more than 700,000 refugees from Asia, most from Vietnam. Today, Vietnamese-Americans are a resounding success story: Compared with the country as a whole, they are more likely to be employed and less likely to live in poverty, and they earn slightly higher wages.

Some have argued that countries in the Middle East accept too few refugees, and should take more. But two of Syria's neighbors, Jordan and Lebanon, host more refugees per capita than any European country.

Even comparing the United States with other Western countries, our contributions are modest. Canada resettled more than double the number of Syrian refugees America received, even though their population is roughly a tenth of the United States population. The United States takes in less than half of 1 percent of the world's refugees.

Refugee resettlement has always received bipartisan support because the quest for freedom and safety embodied in refugees' stories represents the values that make America great, and because our national security is actually strengthened when we respond with wisdom and compassion. Jihadists hate our compassion for refugees, because it disproves the claims about Americans they use to sow hatred and violence. Acting according to the best angels of our nature may produce our greatest long-term strength and security.

The president has called for greater commitments from all nations, and this higher quota is meant to lead by example. Congress must now do its part. It can offer - and I pray will offer - a response that combines the best of our wisdom, compassion and courage. Organizations like mine stand ready to work with our political leaders to keep the welcome mat out.

Virtually every day, in quiet corners of airports across the country, refugees are being welcomed and cared for by teams from churches and community groups. It is in scenes like these, unseen by most, where we recapture the spirit of which we as American citizens have been justifiably proud for most of our nation's history.

This is our new Ellis Island. It is the expression of our faith and our humanity, and it is a worthy response to the legacy we have inherited.

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Opinion | America's Duty to Take In Refugees

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With 65 million displaced people, we must become a new Ellis Island.