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Article: The One Book All New Parents Really Should Read

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Article: The One Book All New Parents Really Should Read

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The One Book All New Parents Really Need to Read

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Fifty years from its first publication date, The Giving Tree remains a relevant allegory for modern parenting, says first-time dad and MONEY reporter Taylor Tepper.

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Teacher models evidence-based debate with read-aloud

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Introducing a Class to Text-based Debate (3-5)

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Lucy Calkins and Colleagues at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project present Introducing a Class to Text-based Debate (3-5)

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Slides with text and illustrations

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Full Text (No Illustrations)

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Booklists - Fiction about the Revolutionary War for 4th -10th Grades

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Left in charge when his father leaves their South Carolina home to fight in the Revolutionary War, 13-year-old Joey finds himself tested when General Cornwallis comes to town and chooses their home as his headquarters.

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Newsela | Primary Sources: Martin Luther King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail

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"Standing up for the best in the American dream"

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Excerpts from "Letter From a Birmingham Jail"

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Excerpts from "Letter From a Birmingham Jail"

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Shorter version of the letter

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My Dear Fellow Clergymen,

While confined here in the Birmingham City Jail, I came across your recent statement calling our present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom, if ever, do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas ... But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I would like to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should give the reason for my being in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the argument of "outsiders coming in." I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every Southern state with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some 85 affiliate organizations all across the South ... Several months ago our local affiliate here in Birmingham invited us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: 1) collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive; 2) negotiation; 3) self-purification; and 4) direct action. We have gone through all of these steps in Birmingham ... Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of police brutality is known in every section of the country. Its unjust treatment of Negroes in the courts is a notorious reality. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any city in this nation. These are the hard, brutal, and unbelievable facts. On the basis of these conditions Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the political leaders consistently refused to engage in good faith negotiation.

Then came the opportunity last September to talk with some of the leaders of the economic community. In these negotiating sessions certain promises were made by the merchants-such as the promise to remove the humiliating racial signs from the stores. On the basis of these promises Reverend Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to call a moratorium on any type of demonstrations. As the weeks and months unfolded we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. The signs remained. As in so many experiences in the past, we were confronted with blasted hopes, and the dark shadow of a deep disappointment settled upon us. So we had no alternative except that of preparing for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and national community. We were not unmindful of the difficulties involved. So we decided to go through the process of self-purification. We started having workshops on nonviolence and repeatedly asked ourselves the questions, "are you able to accept the blows without retaliating?" "Are you able to endure the ordeals of jail?"

You may well ask, "Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches, etc.? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.

My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without legal and nonviolent pressure. History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was "well timed," according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This "wait" has almost always meant "never." It has been a tranquilizing Thalidomide, relieving the emotional stress for a moment, only to give birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration. We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that "justice too long delayed is justice denied." We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.

I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say wait. But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your 20 million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see the tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking in agonizing pathos: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?" when you take a cross country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" men and "colored" when your first name becomes "nigger" and your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title of "Mrs." when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tip-toe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"-then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White citizens' "Councilor" or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direst action" who paternistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

You spoke of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I started thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency made up of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, have been so completely drained of self-respect and a sense of "somebodiness" that they have adjusted to segregation, and a few Negroes in the middle class who, because of a degree of academic and economic security, and at points they profit from segregation, have unconsciously become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred and comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up over the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad's Muslim movement. This movement is nourished by the contemporary frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination. It is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man in an incurable "devil."

The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations. He has to get them out. So let him march sometime; let him have his prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; understand why he must have sit-ins and freedom rides. If his repressed emotions do not come out in these nonviolent ways, they will come out in ominous expressions of violence. This is not a threat; it is a fact of history. So I have not said to my people, "Get rid of your discontent." But I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled through the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action.

In spite of my shattered dreams of the past, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership in the community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, serve as the channel through which our just grievances could get to the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed. I have heard numerous religious leaders of the South call upon their worshippers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers say follow this decree because integration is morally right and the Negro is your brother. In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churches stand on the sideline and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard so many ministers say, "Those are social issues with which the Gospel has no real concern," and I have watched so many churches commit themselves to a completely other-worldly religion which made a strange distinction between body and soul, the sacred and the secular.

I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil rights leader, but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all of their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,

M. L. King, Jr.

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Letter From Birmingham City Jail (Excerpts) | Teaching American History

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My Dear Fellow Clergymen, While confined here in the Birmingham City Jail, I came across your recent statement calling our present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom, if ever, do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas ...

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Argument Analysis of Letter from a Birmingham Jail

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Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter from A Birmingham Jail (CommonLit.org

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Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter from A Birmingham Jail (CommonLit.org

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View the CommonLit collection and filter by grade level, theme, genre, literacy device and common core standard.

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Audio of "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"

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Audio of "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHnKeajhoIw

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We know students in the middle grades can make an argument to throw a pizza party, to get out of detention or to prove a point. So, why do they find it hard to craft strong arguments from text? The skill of argumentative or persuasive writing is a skill that's easier said than done.

Close reading naturally lends itself to teaching argumentative writing. To be sure, it's not the only way to culminate a close-reading lesson, but as students read, reread and break down text, analyzing author's arguments and crafting their own can come naturally.

Argumentative writing isn't persuasion, and it's not about conflict or winning. Instead, it's about creating a claim and supporting that claim with evidence. For example, in this set of writing samples from Achieve the Core, fifth grade students read an article about homework and wrote an argument in response to the question How much homework is too much? One student wrote the claim: I think that students should have enough homework but still have time for fun. Students in third grade should start having 15 minutes a night and work up to a little over an hour by sixth grade. The student goes on to support her claim with evidence from the article she read. It builds responsibility and gives kids a chance to practice.

Here are four ways to build your students' ability to write arguments through close reading.
Choose Text Wisely
I don't think I can say it enough: The most important part of planning close reading is choosing the text. If you want students to be able to create and support an argument, the text has to contain evidence-and lots of it. Look for texts or passages that are worth reading deeply (read: well written with intriguing, worthwhile ideas) and that raise interesting questions that don't have a right or wrong answer.
PEELS: Help Students Structure Their Arguments
Before students can get creative with their writing, make sure they can structure their arguments. In the PEELS approach, students need to:

Make a point.

Support it with evidence (and examples).

Explain their evidence.

Link their points.

Maintain a formal style.

Check out this Teachers Pay Teachers resource (free) for an explanation and graphic organizer to use with students.
Provide Time for Collaboration
When students are allowed to talk about their writing, they craft stronger arguments because they're provided time to narrow and sharpen their ideas. In his book, Translating Talk Into Text (2014) Thomas McCann outlines two types of conversation that help students prepare to write.

Exploratory discussions: These small-group discussions provide space for students to find out what others are thinking and explore the range of possibilities. These conversations should happen after students have read closely, with the goal of building an understanding of what ideas or claims are present within a text.

Drafting discussions: After students have participated in exploratory discussion, drafting discussions are a chance for students to come together as a whole group to share and refine their ideas. Drafting discussions start by sharing arguments that students discussed in the exploratory discussions, then provide time for students to explore the arguments and challenge one another. The goal is for students to end the discussion with a clear focus for their writing.

The Incredible Shrinking Argument: Help Students Synthesize
Once students are writing, probably the biggest challenge becomes whittling an argument down to the essentials. To help students do this, have them write their argument on a large sticky note (or in a large text box). Then, have them whittle it twice by revising it and rewriting it on smaller sticky notes (or text boxes) to get the excess ideas or details out. By the time they're rewriting it on the smallest sticky note (or textbox), they'll be forced to identify the bones of their argument. (See The Middle School Mouth blog for more on this strategy.)

(Photo from The Middle School Mouth)

Every Reader a Close Reader, Samantha Cleaver is an education writer, former special education teacher and avid reader. Her book, is scheduled to be published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2015. Read more at her blog www.cleaveronreading.wordpress.com

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Making a Claim: Teaching Students Argument Writing Through Close Reading - WeAreTeachers

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We know students in the middle grades can make an argument to throw a pizza party, to get out of detention or to prove a point. So, why do they find it hard to craft strong arguments from text? The ...

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Of course, maybe we're just projecting, but to those who would say that Silverstein's book is a moving, sentimental depiction of the unyielding love of a parent for a child, I'd say, Learn better parenting skills. To those who defend it as a warts-and-all parable lamenting man's inhumanity to man - or, perhaps, man's inhumanity to woman - I'd say that I'm not so sure Silverstein, who dedicated the book to a former girlfriend, "Nicky," was writing an indictment of what men assume they can get way with. The boy uses the tree as a plaything, lives off her like a parasite, and then, when she's a shell of her former self and no longer serves any real purpose, he sits on her - which makes her happy? ("That book is the epitome of male privilege," a friend groused.)

As for the argument that "The Giving Tree" is somehow a commentary on the ways humans ravage the environment, I mean, maybe? The tree of Silverstein's imagination, unlike most other trees felled by humans, suffers mightily but never dies, left to live out her years as a five-fingered stump, abandoned in the grass like the orphaned foot of a gentle sauropod. After a brief consultation with the dinosaur expert Bob Strauss about that analogy, Strauss, without prompting, declared his disgust for the book. "I refuse to read it to my kids or my friends' kids," he wrote in an email. "I think that book has done more damage to fragile young psyches than any other kids' book in the last 50 years. (O.K., maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but you get the idea.)"

It's possible Silverstein was attempting to be subversive, and in that sense, this little Rorschach test of children's literature seems to have succeeded. Readers cite it as a cautionary tale regarding both the social welfare state and the obscenity that is late-stage capitalism. Betsey Stevenson, the economist and Obama administration appointee, reads the book to her children and says it creates a space "to have a conversation about what it means to take, and to give, too much." That said, she doesn't buy the "And the tree was happy" nonsense either. "If she had said no when he wanted her branches, would the boy have gone off and become a better person?" Stevenson wonders. "I don't want to hold the tree accountable," she continued, but she thinks there could have been a happier ending: "If only she'd set limits, she wouldn't be a stump today!"
Anna Holmes has written for numerous publications, including The Washington Post, Salon, Harper's, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated and The New Yorker online. A 2012 recipient of the Mirror Award for Commentary, presented by Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Journalism, she is the editor of two books: "Hell Hath No Fury: Women's Letters From the End of the Affair"; and "The Book of Jezebel," based on the popular women's Web site she created in 2007. ◆ ◆ ◆ By Rivka Galchen "The Giving Tree" is in part a disturbing tale of unconditional love, in part a tender tale of the monsters that we are.

Here we have a story, fewer than 650 words long. What are its adjectives, after the one in the title, "giving," which never appears in the story itself? Little, tired, happy, older, alone, happy, too big, happy, happy, long, sad, happy, too busy, warm, happy, happy, so happy, too old, sad, happy, happy, long, sorry, gone, too weak, gone, too old, gone, too tired, sorry, old, sorry, quiet, very tired, old, good, happy. "Happy" is the last word of the story, and in interviews Shel Silverstein explained that it took him years to find a publisher for "The Giving Tree" - that it had been important to him that he keep what he called the sad ending.

What are we to make of all those happys like poppies dense in a simple, flat field? Each happy alters the happy that follows it. The plain language complexes through each repetition, until it's as insided-out and upsided-down as the language of "Runny Babbit: A Billy Sook," the one book, worked on for more than 20 years, that Silverstein, the prolific writer who gave us the peppermint gale of most every elementary-school literature syllabus, kept not quite finishing. Maybe Silverstein had trouble finishing it because some things are clearly so very difficult to say. Like: "Runny fad a hamily - / Matter of fact, he had / A sother and two bristers, / A dummy and a mad."

I love Silverstein's profoundly playful stuff so much more than "The Giving Tree," but I like playfulness in general best, because I can take it more seriously. In part, the preceding is just an irrelevant fact about this one particular reader, but also humor does guard better against the barbarians of piety than seriousness does. It is rare the reading that mangles "Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout / Would not take the garbage out" into a simple morality play against civil disobedience. Mess with the meter of humor, and it's immediately obvious something is misrepresented. A rabbi and a priest don't just walk into a bar and start tendentious theological debates.

Manhandling more straightforward prose into platitudes is much easier. "The Giving Tree," I was surprised to discover, is a great book. I didn't remember it that way, because too many people had told me about it since I'd last read it. The actual story doesn't extol the tree, or endorse the boy. The tree and the boy both do the very particular things they do, and say the particular things they say, and, talking tree notwithstanding, their relationship seems emotionally realistic. The story describes honestly something that is, which is very different from proposing what ought to be. To condemn "The Giving Tree" for having a female who gives in a way that destroys her is as invalid as condemning "Mrs. Dalloway" for having a soldier who commits suicide. Conversely, teaching "The Giving Tree" as a model for how a woman (or anyone) should be is like saying that same soldier sets an example. "The Giving Tree" is not a children's book like the useful, humble classic "Hands Are Not for Hitting." The tale is not exemplary.

When the tree suggests to the grown man, who wants a home and family, that he should climb her branches and play, she seems like a nice enough tree but not one who, as the current lingo goes, understands the man she loves. When the man repeatedly fails to be kind, he seems even more limited in his understanding than the tree. The boy and the tree are both "flawed," and in the most old-fashioned way, their flaws, which are also their characters, determine their fates. The sadness one feels in reading this book so full of the word "happy" is not unlike the sadness of knowing just how it's going to end up for poor Oedipus. "The Giving Tree" is in part a disturbing tale of unconditional love, in part a tender tale of the monsters that we are. When I read the book again these 30-some years later, my only brief reservation - that it should somehow have been funny, that funny might have saved it from its destiny of weird co-optings - faded. The book, too, has its fundamental character and fate. Silverstein would have made it funny, if that was what it was meant to be.
Rivka Galchen is a recipient of a William J. Saroyan International Prize for Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award and a Berlin Prize, among other distinctions. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications, including Harper's and The New Yorker, which selected her for their list of "20 Under 40" American fiction writers in 2010. Her debut novel, the critically acclaimed "Atmospheric Disturbances," was published in 2008. Her second book, a story collection titled "American Innovations," was published in May.

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'The Giving Tree': Tender Story of Unconditional Love or Disturbing Tale of Selfishness?

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Of course, maybe we're just projecting, but to those who would say that Silverstein's book is a moving, sentimental depiction of the unyielding love of a parent for a child, I'd say, Learn better parenting skills.

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https://the-giving-tree.weebly.com/why-is-it-banned.html

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http://kidsandhistory.net/paulvm/foyer.html

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http://virtualamericanrevolution.com/

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https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem-day

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http://www.discoveryeducation.com/teachers/free-lesson-plans/the-american-revolution-causes.cfm
http://teachinghistory.org/teaching-materials/ask-a-master-teacher/24378

http://readingandwritingproject.org/news/01-a-protocol-for-argument-work-in-read-aloud

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B404rJALRaGwcmJLUXlOYTA1LUU/view
http://teacher.scholastic.com/writeit/PDF/master_class_king.pdf

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https://www.commonlit.org/texts/the-first-flag
https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Weapons-Revolutionary-Historical-Fiction/dp/1434208486
https://www.commonlit.org/texts/issues-with-the-articles-of-confederation

Readworks
https://www.readworks.org/find-content#!q:revolutionary%20war/g:22/t:0/f:0/pt:/features:/

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https://revolutionarywar1.weebly.com/historical-background.html

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http://www2.needham.k12.ma.us/eliot/technology/lessons/am_rev_bio/loy_pat_argue.pdf

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Simple Facts and Plain Arguments: Revoluntionary War started with gun control

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Simple Facts and Plain Arguments: Revoluntionary War started with gun control

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http://www.simplefactsplainarguments.com/2013/02/the-revolutionary-war-began-with-gun.html

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http://readingandwritingproject.com/public/themes/rwproject/resources/Content%20Support/writing/Looking_at_Students_%20Argument_Essays_to_Plan_Instruction.pdf

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https://dcsms-my.sharepoint.com/personal/ashley_rhodes_dcsms_org/_layouts/15/guestaccess.aspx?docid=1031a22c77a0a4c83a8365e36bb9f3945&authkey=AT9Dtubh9JFOMAtphHxDnYA&expiration=2018-06-03T15%3A51%3A13.000Z&e=f38a5a199ccb4f5da0c122c842ae6e0b

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISQhKxdBnpE

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-9pDZMRCpQ

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http://teachwithpicturebooks.blogspot.com/2009/12/you-say-you-want-revolution.html

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http://readingandwritingproject.com/public/themes/rwproject/resources/Content%20Support/writing/How%20to%20get%20Argument_Protocols_Up_and_Going_in_Reading_Workshop.pdf