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Grades 11-12 –Reading Lolita in Tehran – 2012-2013

Kimberly LoFaso – FacilitatorJessica Edwards- WriterMary Fernandes – WriterCarrie Piombino- Writer

October 20122012-2013

East Meadow School DistrictEnglish

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Table of Contents

Abstract 3Rationale 4Understanding by Design 5Lolita- Lesson #1 6Lolita- Activity #1 7Lolita- Lesson #2 8Lolita- Activity #2 9Gatsby- Lesson #1 12Gatsby- Activity #1 14Gatsby- Lesson #2 20Gatsby- Activity #2 22Gatsby- Lesson #3 23Gatsby- Activity #3 24Joyce- Lesson #1 32Joyce- Activity #1 34Joyce- Lesson #2 36Joyce- Activity #2 37Joyce- Lesson #3 40Joyce- Activity #3 41Austen- Lesson #1 45Austen- Activity #1 46Austen- Lesson #2 50Austen- Activity #2 51Austen- Lesson #3 55Austen- Activity #3 56Works Cited Page 57

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Abstract

This CAP aims to create a comprehensive unit plan for Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar

Nafisi, that will explore diverse techniques designed to engage our students. We will utilize

technology, group activities, current issues and articles, music pieces, and poetry, all while

continually addressing the new Common Core State Standards 2, 3, 5, 6, and 7 through our

lessons, activities, writing assignments, quizzes, etc.

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Rationale

This CAP will relate directly to the new Common Core State Standards as it will

implement non-fiction works of literature and innovative approaches towards creating a love of

literature within our students. We will aim to address the Standard: Content and Instructional

Planning by connecting the concepts and engaging learners; use diverse instructional strategies;

design learning to connect prior knowledge; and use curricular resources to achieve student

goals. We will address the Standard: Instructional Practice by using research-based

practices/evidence of learning; clearly/accurately communicate with students; use a variety of

approaches to meet student needs; and engage students to develop multi-disciplinary skills. We

will also address the Standard: Assessment for Student Learning by using a wide-range of

assessment tools; and preparing students for assessments. We will also strive to meet the

Standard: Professional Responsibilities and Collaboration by upholding professional standards.

Finally, we will meet the Standard: Professional Growth by reflecting on practice to improve

effectiveness.

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Understanding by Design

Stage One – Desired Results

New York State Common Core English Language Arts Standards for 11th and 12th graders:Students will be able to…

a. Establish and use criteria to classify, select, and evaluate texts.b. Develop factual, interpretive, and evaluative questions for further exploration of the

topic(s).c. Interpret, analyze, and evaluate narratives, poetry, and drama, aesthetically and

philosophically by making connections to: other texts, ideas, cultural perspectives, eras, personal events, and situations.

d. Explore and inquire into areas of interest to formulate an argument.e. Explore topics dealing with different cultures and world viewpoints.

Understanding(s)Students will understand that

1. Literature such as Reading Lolita in Tehran can help make them better aware of the world we live in.

2. World issues should be discussed as well as read about to raise awareness and promote tolerance of different cultures.

Essential Question(s):1. How can we better prepare students for

life after high school?2. Are our students aware of the many

facets of oppression still present within our world?

Students will know1. What issues they should be aware of

and focused on dealing with.2. How to identify a dangerous or harmful

situation and solutions to each of them, as a result of the literature they have been exposed to.

Students will be able to1. Identify and understand prevalent

issues many are still forced to face in today’s world.

2. Solutions to such aforementioned problems and scenarios.

Stage 2 – Assessment of Evidence

Performance Task(s):1. Enjoy, understand, and empathize with

the conflicts present in Reading Lolita in Tehran.

2. Complete tasks that show knowledge has been gained regarding such issues and scenarios.

Other Evidence:1. To create and provide a unified and

comprehensive method of teaching students abut the oppression still present in various parts of the world, as presented in Reading Lolita in Tehran, for educators.

Stage 3 – Learning Plan

Learning Activities:1. Assessment activities of the world issues many individuals still deal with.2. Worksheets, articles, activities, lesson plans, and web-sites to help student’s

comprehension of the common issues and solutions to such issues.

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Part One: LolitaLesson #1

AIM: How can the themes in American poetry connect to Nafisi’s novel?

DO NOW: Explain what you believe Nafisi means when she states “This is Tehran for me: its absences were more real than its presences” (5). What absences are pronounced in your own existence?

NYS COMMON CORE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS STANDARDS:Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text.

Analyze a case in which grasping a point of view requires distinguishing what is directly stated in a text from what is really meant (e.g., satire, sarcasm, irony, or understatement).

Lesson:1. Students will complete the ‘Do Now’ upon entering the classroom.2. Students will move into their groups and discuss their responses.3. Students will read and analyze Frost’s poem “Acquainted with the Night” aloud.4. Groups will work on discussion questions.5. Each group will share 2-3 responses with the class, as suggested responses are listed on

the board.6. The use of symbolism will be considered:

a. Why is walking alone at night that much more lonely than walking alone during the day?

b. Why might some be forced to ‘walk at night’? c. What does the night itself symbolize?

7. Students will be asked o consider the following excerpts and their connection to Frost’s poem and the overall concept of oppression and loneliness:

a. “…Mashid, whose long black scarf clashes with her delicate features and retreating smile.” (Page 4)

b. “…reading Lolita in a deceptively sunny room in Tehran.” ()c. “Life in the Islamic Republic was as capricious as the month of April, when short

periods of sunshine would suddenly give way to showers and storms.” (Page 9)

CLOSURE: What symbolizes loneliness in your life? Create a metaphor for loneliness and/or oppression.

HOMEWORK: In a well-written, cohesive essay, show the attitude towards loneliness andoppression as presented in the poem “Acquainted with the Night” and in the novel Reading Lolita in Tehran. Be sure to use at least two literary elements or devices for each.

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“Acquainted with the Night”By Robert Frost

Notes and Literary Elements-I have been one acquainted with the night.I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.I have passed by the watchman on his beatAnd dropped my eyes unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feetWhen far away an interrupted cryCame over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-by;And further still at an unearthly height,One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.I have been one acquainted with the night.

Discussion Questions-1. What do stanzas 3 and 4 suggest about the speaker’s immediate past?2. Why might he be walking so far and so frequently?3. What does the title mean?4. What is nature’s role in his isolation?5. What do you think his future will be like? What do you imagine the women in Tehran’s

future to be like?6. Does he seem to have accepted his aloneness? Why or why not?7. How are the women in Tehran and the speaker of this poem similar?8. How do the women in Tehran deal with their loneliness and oppression?9. What kinds of people handle being alone best? Can someone be alone without being

lonely? Explain.10. What other similarities do you find between Reading Lolita in Tehran and Frost’s poem?

Your Task- In a well-written, cohesive essay, show the attitude towards loneliness and oppression as presented in the poem “Acquainted with the Night” and in the novel Reading Lolita in Tehran. Be sure to use at least two literary elements or devices for each.

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Lesson #2

AIM: Identifying the power literature can hold in an individual’s life

DO NOW: Explain what the following quote means: “Reader’s were born free and ought to remain free.” --Nafisi

NYS COMMON CORE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS STANDARDS:Analyze the impact of the author’s choices regarding how to develop and relate elements of a story or drama (e.g., where a story is set, how the action is ordered, how the characters are introduced and developed).


Lesson:1. Students will complete the ‘Do Now’ upon entering the classroom.2. Students will think-pair-share their responses3. A master list of student’s responses will be created on the Smart Board4. The New York Times article entitled “Reading Mom and Dad in Tehran” will be

distributed.5. Students will meet with their groups to read the article collectively.6. Groups will be asked to consider the following:

a. How can one’s memory distort as well as enlighten?b. What is your reaction to her Mother’s punishment when she attempted suicide?c. Nafisi was not permitted any privacies as a child. How do you believe this molded

her into the teacher and author she is today?d. What is meant by the following quote? “To this day having fun, just plain

enjoying myself, comes at the cost of a conviction that I have committed an undetected crime.”

e. How is literature an escape for Nafisi? Has literature ever been an escape in your life?

f. What additional reactions and responses did your group have?7. Each group will share 2-3 responses with the class.

CLOSURE: What is your escape from reality when life gets too overwhelming? What do you take for granted in your day-to-day life?

HOMEWORK: Continue reading the Lolita section of Reading Lolita in Tehran.

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“Reading Mom and Dad in Tehran” January 4, 2009

By ELAINE SCIOLINOTHINGS I’VE BEEN SILENT ABOUT

When Azar Nafisi was a professor of Western literature in Tehran in the 1980s and ’90s, she told her best stories anonymously, sometimes to visiting foreign journalists seeking guidance about Iran’s Islamic Republic. In 1997 she settled for good in the United States and discovered her public voice, turning the volume up high in her 2003 memoir, “Reading Lolita in Tehran.”

That memoir wove her personal stories with those of her former students, using as a touchstone their two years of shared experiences in a reading group at her home focused on banned authors like Nabokov and Fitzgerald. “Reading Lolita” became an international best seller; Nafisi, who is a visiting fellow and lecturer at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, became famous.

Now she has written a second memoir, much more intimate than the first, a dissection of her often difficult family life, recounted against the dramatic sweep and turbulence of recent Iranian history. The idea for the book sprang from a list that she began compiling in her diary sometime after the 1979 Islamic revolution, entitled “Things I Have Been Silent About.” It draws on other sources as well, including diaries her father, a former mayor of Tehran, started when she was 4, and addressed to her; his sanitized published memoirs and his unvarnished unpublished version; and family photographs, some of which she said she took from her mother and which appear in the book. Much of the time she relies on memory, a powerful tool that can distort as well as enlighten.

Nafisi uses the new memoir to flesh out stories left untold or half-told in her earlier work: her upbringing in a prominent family; her education in Switzerland, England and the United States; her impulsive first marriage to a man she didn’t love (for reasons she never fully explains); her return to Iran in the late 1970s, as the Islamic revolution was unfolding; her teaching career under clerical rule; and her second marriage and her two children.

Writing the book was a very un-Iranian thing to do. Most of my Iranian friends were raised never to reveal family secrets to outsiders, certainly not strangers. We don’t air our dirty linen in public, Nafisi’s mother would tell her. But after her parents’ deaths, she found herself determined to erase “the fictions my parents told us — fictions about themselves as well as others.” The memoir, she writes, is “a response to my own inner censor and inquisitor.” The revolution, which destroyed the certainties of her family’s lives, made remembrance more critical. “If the present was fragile and fickle, the past could become a surrogate home,” she writes.

A gifted storyteller with a mastery of Western literature, Nafisi knows how to use language both to settle scores and to seduce. Her family secrets pour forth in a flood of revelations of anger,

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humiliation and deceit. “Most men cheat on their wives to have mistresses,” she writes in the opening line of the book, with a nod to Tolstoy. “My father cheated on my mother to have a happy life.”

The main target of Nafisi’s literary revenge is her mother, who spun fictions about herself as intricate as any Persian miniature. Nezhat Nafisi had wanted to be a doctor and felt cheated because she had not been allowed to finish her education. She clung to the memory of her dead first husband, enveloping him in a web of beautiful lies. Even when she became one of the first women members of the Iranian Parliament in 1963, it was not enough. She decided that her marriage to Ahmad Nafisi had been a mistake, and pushed him away and into the arms of other women and, eventually, a divorce.

Mother and daughter waged a battle of wills from the time Azar was 4. “She did not want rivals,” Nafisi writes. She told Azar how “unnatural” it was for a young girl to spend her time reading. When Nafisi halfheartedly mimicked a suicide she had heard about by trying to slash her wrists, her mother, “unimpressed,” banished her to her room for the rest of the day. Her mother read her diaries and letters and listened in to her phone conversations. Even as Nafisi was heading into exile in the United States and said goodbye to her mother for what would be the last time, her mother turned away from her kiss. “You share the same rotten genes” as your father, her mother would tell Nafisi and her younger brother, a line that recurs throughout the narrative.

To protect herself, Nafisi took her father’s side, developing a “secret language” to communicate their feelings and deceive her mother. He introduced her to Persian classics like Ferdowsi’s epic “Shahnameh,” the Book of Kings, and, later, the Western classics. Thrown into jail as mayor of Tehran in 1963 on trumped-up charges, he used the time to learn new languages, to paint, and to write three children’s books and 1,500 pages of diaries. This was not one of the shah’s torture chambers. There was always a vase of fresh flowers in the room.

So on another level, Nafisi’s memoir is an attempt to pay homage to her father, by bringing his own life story into the open.

Unintentionally, perhaps, the most painful facet of the memoir is Nafisi’s self-revelations. She describes being groped at the age of 6 by a family friend, a man who was considered holy, and the shame she felt afterward. Victims can feel guilty, she writes, both because they keep silent and because they feel “some vague sense of sexual pleasure out of an act that is imposed and feels reprehensible.”

Nafisi deeply missed her father when she and her family moved to the United States, but did not initiate contact with him and at first did not even send him a copy of “Reading Lolita.”At the book’s end, Nafisi remains restless, relentlessly hard on herself for not being a better daughter, for not returning to Iran before her parents died, even though it would have been dangerous for her. In the end, she is grateful to them, not for bringing her happiness, but for arming her for the battle of life. “It was only after their deaths,” she writes, “that I came to realize that they each in their own way had given me a portable home that safeguards memory and is a constant resistance against the tyranny of time and of man.”

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I cannot say that I came away from “Things I Have Been Silent About” with a fuller understanding of Iran. But it gave me a fuller understanding of Nafisi. Shortly after she came to the United States, we met over breakfast in a shopping mall outside Washington. We were brought together by a mutual friend and her distant relation, Haleh Esfandiari, a Washington--based scholar who spent nearly four months in prison after she was arrested in Iran in 2007 during a visit to her elderly mother.

Nafisi and I disagreed about the shape of Iranian politics. A fierce opponent of the Islamic Republic, she was scathing in her criticism of President Mohammad Khatami and his efforts to open up the political system. I was surprised more by her intellectual absolutism and unedited fury than by the substance of her political views. Esfandiari tried in vain to bridge the divide. I now understand why she failed. Perhaps because of who she is and what she experienced, Nafisi cannot imagine compromise.

“To this day having fun, just plain enjoying myself, comes at the cost of a conviction that I have committed an undetected crime,” she writes, describing the enduring effects of her mother’s rages. There seems to be little joy or laughter in the story she has told so far. Perhaps that will be the subject of her next book.

Elaine Sciolino, a correspondent in the Paris bureau of The Times, is the author of “Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran.”

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Part Two: GatsbyLesson #1

AIM: Why does Professor Nafisi decide to conduct a mock trial of the novel, The Great Gatsby?

DO NOW: Why is The Great Gatsby such a controversial novel? Identify three to five topics of controversy mentioned by Professor Nafisi and her students in this section of Reading Lolita in Tehran.

NYS COMMON CORE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS STANDARDS:Analyze the impact of the author’s choices regarding how to develop and relate elements of a story or drama (e.g., where a story is set, how the action is ordered, how the characters are introduced and developed).

Analyze how an author’s choices concerning how to structure specific parts of a text (e.g., the choice of where to begin or end a story, the choice to provide a comedic or tragic resolution) contribute to its overall structure and meaning as well as its aesthetic impact.


Lesson: Students will be instructed to take out their notebooks, turn to their journal sections, and take three to five minutes to read and respond to the “Do Now” prompt written on the board. Several students will then be asked to share their thoughts with the class. As the students share, the teacher will create a list on the board. Next, the class will be divided into three sections. One side will be assigned to play the prosecution, one side will play the defense, and the last will play the jury. Students will then be given the handout entitled, The Trial of Gatsby. (handout attached) Each side (prosecution and defense) will have several minutes to respond to the quotes on the handout. Students must use evidence from the novel, The Great Gatsby to support their points of view. Upon completion of the handout, each side will designate a speaker to share his or her group’s analysis with the class, one point at a time. After one side has made an argument, the other side will be able to offer a counterargument. After each side has concluded, the students who are playing the roles of jurors will have several minutes to deliberate before announcing their verdict.

CLOSURE: What was Professor Nafisi able to teach her students by holding a mock trial of Gatsby? Discuss.

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HOMEWORK: Choose a character from The Great Gatsby and imagine that he or she was called to the witness stand in today’s trial. Type up a two page transcript of his or her testimony and include questions from either the prosecuting attorney or the defense attorney. Be sure to indicate whether your chosen character is a witness for the defense or the prosecution.

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THE TRIAL OF GATSBY

In Part II of the memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi recounts her teaching of The Great Gatsby. The novel is seen as greatly controversial by many of Professor Nafisi’s students, which causes her to suggest a mock trial. As we know, the trial becomes very heated and intense as both the prosecutor (Mr. Nyazi) and the defense (Zarrin) make their points to the judge (Mr. Farzan) and the jury (the other students).

Your Task: You will be split up into three groups. One side will play the prosecutor, one side will play the defense, and the third will play the jury. Remember, it is the novel, The Great Gatsby that is on trial here. The setting from Reading Lolita, The University of Tehran, is the same, as is the time period, just before the revolution. You and your classmates must “get into” your assigned roles and portray your view to the jury by analyzing the quotes from the memoir below and interpreting them in your own words. You will also have to provide sufficient evidence from the novel, The Great Gatsby to support your responses to the quotes from the memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran. If you are on the prosecuting side, be sure to give an explanation as to why the prosecutor, Mr. Nyazi from Reading Lolita, makes this specific point. If you are on the defense, be sure to give an explanation as to why the defense attorney, Zarrin, from Reading Lolita, makes this specific point. After hearing from both the prosecution and the defense, the jury will have time to deliberate before announcing its verdict. Although Professor Nafisi’s jury did not complete the aforementioned task, our jury will. Jurors, you will be asked to prepare a written explanation as to why you came up with your verdict which will then be read aloud by the jury foreperson. The first quote for each side has been done for you as an example.

THE PROSECUTION:1. “This book preaches illicit relations between a man and woman” (Nyazi 126).

Analysis & Interpretation Evidence from Gatsby Explanation of this point

The novel, The Great Gatsby, condones adultery

-Tom and Myrtle-Daisy and Gatsby-Jordan to Nick? possibly

Marriage is a sacred bond in Islamic culture; it is offensive to read about its seeming acceptance in American society

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2. “…Gatsby is the hero of the book – and who is he? He is a charlatan, he is an adulterer, he is a liar…(he is a) destroyer of homes!” (Nyazi 126).


3. “The only sympathetic person here is the cuckolded husband, Mr. Wilson…He is the only victim” (Nyazi 127).


4. “The one good thing about this book…is that it exposes the immorality and decadence of American society, but we have fought to rid ourselves of this trash and it is high time that such books be banned” (Nyazi 127).


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5. “According to Nyazi, there was not a single virtuous woman in the whole novel” (Nafisi 127).


6. “Gatsby is dishonest…He earns his money by illegal means and tries to buy the love of a married woman” (Nyazi 127).


7. “This book is supposed to be about the American dream, but what sort of a dream is this? Does the author mean to suggest that we should all be adulterers and bandits? Americans are decadent and in decline because this is their dream. They are going down!” (Nyazi 127).


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8. “Is it just Gatsby who deserves to die?...No! The whole of American society deserves the same fate.” (Nyazi 127).


THE DEFENSE:1. “…a novel is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it

shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in. If that is true, then Gatsby has succeeded brilliantly” (Zarrin 129).


Gatsby awakens us and causes us to examine our own beliefs and actions

Issues of morality, infidelity, honesty, money, American dream, etc.

Gatsby makes the reader think on many levels due to its controversial topics

2. “Gatsby is being put on trial because it disturbs us – at least some of us” (Zarrin 129).


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3. “It is true that Gatsby recognizes that money is one of Daisy’s attractions…But this novel is not about a poor young charlatan’s love of money” (Zarrin 129).


4. “…this novel is not about ‘the rich are different from you and me,’…It is about wealth but not about the vulgar materialism…” (Zarrin 129-130).


5. “Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels – the biggest sin is to be blind to others’ problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence” (Nafisi 132).


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6. “And if…in real life Fitzgerald was obsessed with the rich and with wealth; in his fiction he brings out the corrupt and decaying power of wealth on basically decent people, like Gatsby…” (Zarrin 132).


7. “I wanted to tell them that this book is not about adultery but about the loss of dreams” (Nafisi 133).


8. “You don’t read Gatsby…to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil” (Nafisi 133).


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Lesson #2

AIM: Why did Professor Nafisi choose the novel, The Great Gatsby and the American dream to discuss with her students at such a volatile time in her country and, in particular, at The University of Tehran?

DO NOW: How would you describe the American dream? Make a list of what you consider to be factors in achieving this dream.

NYS COMMON CORE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS STANDARDS:Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text.

Analyze the impact of the author’s choices regarding how to develop and relate elements of a story or drama (e.g., where a story is set, how the action is ordered, how the characters are introduced and developed).


Lesson: Students will be instructed to take out their notebooks, turn to their journal sections, and take three to five minutes to read and respond to the “Do Now” prompt written on the board. Several students will then be asked to share their thoughts with the class. As the students share, the teacher will create a list on the board. Next, the students will be asked to “recreate” chapter 21 from the memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran by following the directions of Professor Nafisi. Students will be asked to turn to the last page of their Gatsby novels and a volunteer will then be asked to read the last two paragraphs of the novel. Students will then be asked to turn to page eight of their Gatsby novels and a second volunteer will be asked to read the paragraph beginning with, “No – Gatsby…” After both excerpts from Gatsby have been read, the students will be asked to turn to page 140 (chapter 21) in their Reading Lolita memoirs. Chapter 21 will then be reread aloud. Upon completion of the reading, the class will be given a handout with discussion questions pertaining to chapter 21 of Reading Lolita. (handout attached)

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Students will have several minutes to complete the handout.

CLOSURE: What is the connection between the destruction of Gatsby’s dream to the destruction of the dream of the revolution for Iran?

HOMEWORK: Complete today’s handout and be prepared to share your responses with the class tomorrow.

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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Why did Professor Nafisi choose the novel, The Great Gatsby and the American dream to discuss with her students at such a volatile time in her country and, in particular, at The University of Tehran?

2. How would you describe the American dream? Make a list of what you consider to be factors in achieving this dream.

3. How are Nafisi and her people’s fate similar to that of Gatsby’s?

4. What is the connection between the destruction of Gatsby’s dream to the destruction of the dream of the revolution for Iran?

5. What was Professor Nafisi beginning to discover after class on the day of the last Gatsby discussion? Respond to the following:

When I left class that day, I did not tell them what I myself was beginning to discover: how similar our own fate was becoming to Gatsby’s. He wanted to fulfill his dream by repeating the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future. Was this not similar to our revolution, which had come in the name of our collective past and had wrecked our lives in the name of a dream?

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Lesson #3

AIM: How does The Great Gatsby compare to Fitzgerald’s “new” story, “Thank You for the Light”?

DO NOW: Recall what topics Professor Nafisi’s students found controversial in Gatsby.

NYS COMMON CORE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS STANDARDS:Determine two or more central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to provide a complex analysis; provide an objective summary of the text.

Analyze a complex set of ideas or sequence of events and explain how specific individuals, ideas, or events interact and develop over the course of the text.

Analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of the structure an author uses in his or her exposition or argument, including whether the structure makes points clear, convincing, and engaging.

Integrate and evaluate multiple sources of information presented in different media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively) as well as in words in order to address a question or solve a problem.

Lesson: Students will be instructed to read and discuss the “Do Now” prompt written on the board. As the students respond, the teacher will create a list on the board. Next, the students will be given a copy of the recently published (and formerly rejected) story entitled “Thank You for the Light” by F. Scott Fitzgerald from The New Yorker Magazine, August 6 2012. (story attached) The short story will then be read aloud by several student volunteers. Students will then be given the Newsday article entitled “Another look at a Long Island favorite.” (article attached) The article will then be read aloud. Next, a handout with critical thinking questions pertaining to the short story, “Thank You for the Light;” the Newsday article, “Another look at a Long Island Favorite;” the memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, and the novel, The Great Gatsby will be distributed. Students will have several minutes to complete the handout. Upon completion of the questions, the class will have a discussion that will focus on the third part of the handout.

CLOSURE: What would Professor Nafisi’s students think about today’s lesson?

HOMEWORK: Prepare a one to two page typed response to the question above.

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FICTIONTHANK YOU FOR THE LIGHT

by F. Scott Fitzgerald AUGUST 6, 2012

Mrs. Hanson was a pretty, somewhat faded woman of forty, who sold corsets and girdles, travelling out of Chicago. For many years her territory had swung around through Toledo, Lima, Springfield, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Fort Wayne, and her transfer to the Iowa-Kansas-Missouri district was a promotion, for her firm was more strongly entrenched west of the Ohio.

Eastward, she had known her clientele chattily and had often been offered a drink or a cigarette in the buyer’s office after business was concluded. But she soon found that in her new district things were different. Not only was she never asked if she would like to smoke but several times her own inquiry as to whether anyone would mind was answered half apologetically with “It’s not that I mind, but it has a bad influence on the employees.”

“Oh, of course, I understand.”Smoking meant a lot to her sometimes. She worked very hard and it had some ability to rest

and relax her psychologically. She was a widow and she had no close relatives to write to in the evenings, and more than one moving picture a week hurt her eyes, so smoking had come to be an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road.

The last week of her first trip on the new circuit found her in Kansas City. It was mid-August and she felt somewhat lonely among all her new contacts, so she was delighted to find at the

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outer desk of one firm a woman she had known in Chicago. She sat down before having herself announced and in the course of the conversation found out a little about the man she was going to see.

“Will he mind if I smoke?”“What? My God, yes!” her friend said. “He’s given money to support the law against it.”“Oh. Well, I’m grateful for the advice—more than grateful.”“You better watch it everywhere around here,” her friend said. “Especially with the men over

fifty. The ones who weren’t in the war. A man told me that nobody who was in the war would ever object to anyone smoking.”

But at her very next stop Mrs. Hanson ran into the exception. He seemed a pleasant young man but his eyes fixed with so much fascination on the cigarette that she was tapping on her thumbnail that she put it away. She was rewarded when he asked her to lunch and during the hour she obtained a considerable order.

Afterward, he insisted on driving her to her next appointment, though she had intended to spot a hotel in the vicinity and take a few puffs in the washroom.

It was one of those days full of waiting—everyone was busy, was late, and it seemed that when the clients did appear they were the sort of hatchet-faced men who did not like other people’s self-indulgence, or they were women willingly or unwillingly committed to the ideas of these men.

She hadn’t smoked since breakfast and she suddenly realized that that was why she felt a vague dissatisfaction at the end of each call, no matter how successful it had been in a business way.

She would say, “We think we cover a different field. It’s all rubber and canvas, of course, but we do manage to put them together in a different way. A thirty-per-cent increase in national advertising in one year tells its own story.”

And to herself she was thinking, If I could just get three puffs I could sell old-fashioned whalebone.

She had one more store to visit now but her appointment was not for half an hour. That was just time to go to her hotel but, as there was no taxi in sight, she walked along the street, thinking, Perhaps I ought to give up cigarettes. I’m getting to be a drug fiend.

Before her, she saw the Catholic cathedral. It seemed very tall, and suddenly she had an inspiration: if so much incense had gone up in the spires to God, a little smoke in the vestibule would make no difference. How could the Good Lord care if a tired woman took a few puffs in the vestibule?

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Nevertheless, though she was not a Catholic, the thought offended her. Was it so important that she have her cigarette, when it might offend a lot of other people, too?

Still. He wouldn’t mind, she thought persistently. In His days, they hadn’t even discovered tobacco. . . .

She went into the church; the vestibule was dark, and she felt for a match in the bag she carried but there weren’t any.

I’ll go and get a light from one of their candles, she thought.The darkness of the nave was broken only by a splash of light in one corner. She walked up

the aisle toward the white blur, and found that it was not made by candles and, in any case, it was about to go out—an old man was on the point of extinguishing a last oil lamp.

“These are votive offerings,” he said. “We put them out at night. We think it means more to the people who give them to save them for next day than it would to keep them burning all night.”

“I see.”He struck out the last one. There was no light left in the cathedral now, save an electric

chandelier high overhead and the ever-burning lamp in front of the Sacrament.“Good night,” the sexton said.“Good night.”“I guess you came here to pray.”“Yes, I did.”He went out into the sacristy. Mrs. Hanson knelt down and prayed.It had been a long time since she had prayed. She scarcely knew what to pray for, so she

prayed for her employer, and for the clients in Des Moines and Kansas City. When she had finished praying, she knelt up. An image of the Madonna gazed down upon her from a niche, six feet above her head.

Vaguely she regarded it. Then she got up from her knees and sank back wearily in the corner of the pew. In her imagination, the Virgin came down, like in the play “The Miracle,” and took her place and sold corsets and girdles for her and was tired, just as she was. Then for a few minutes Mrs. Hanson must have slept.

She awoke at the realization that something had changed, and gradually she perceived that there was a familiar scent that was not incense in the air and that her fingers smarted. Then she realized that the cigarette she held in her hand was alight—was burning.

Still too drowsy to think, she took a puff to keep the flame alive. Then she looked up at the Madonna’s vague niche in the half-darkness.

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“Thank you for the light,” she said.That didn’t seem quite enough, so she got down on her knees, the smoke twisting up from the

cigarette between her fingers.“Thank you very much for the light,” she said. ♦

—1936

ILLUSTRATION: OWEN FREEMAN

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FITZGERALD’S “NEW” STORY, “THANK YOU FOR THE LIGHT”

1. Describe Mrs. Hanson. What does she do for a living? To what social class does she belong?

2. Why is smoking so important to Mrs. Hanson?

3. What is a sign of the changing times?

4. What does Mrs. Hanson decide to do in the Catholic Church?

5. Explain Mrs. Hanson’s experience in the church.

6. What message do you think Fitzgerald was trying to convey through his story? What message was he trying to convey through Gatsby? Discuss the differences.

NEWSDAY ARTICLE “ANOTHER LOOK AT A LONG ISLAND FAVORITE”

7. Why do you think the New Yorker, the same magazine that rejected Fitzgerald’s story “Thank You for the Light” in 1936, decided to publish it in 2012, some 76 years later?

8. How did The New Yorker get its “second chance” at Fitzgerald’s story?

9. According to the author of the article, Nicolaus Mills, why do most writers who have their work published after their deaths have no such luck unlike Fitzgerald?

10. Explain what happened with Ernest Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast” and Ralph Ellison’s “Juneteenth.”

11. Discuss the differences between Mrs. Hanson and Jay Gatsby.

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MAKING CONNECTIONS TO READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN

12. Recall what topics Professor Nafisi’s students found controversial in Gatsby.

13. How does The Great Gatsby compare to Fitzgerald’s “new” story, “Thank You for the Light”?

14. Would Professor Nafisi’s students find anything controversial about Fitzgerald’s, “Thank You for the Light”?

15. How would Mr. Nyazi compare Jay Gatsby to Mrs. Hanson?

16. How would Zarrin compare Jay Gatsby to Mrs. Hanson?

17. Do you think Nyazi and Zarrin would agree on any observations about these two characters? Why or why not? Explain.

18. What would Professor Nafisi’s students think about today’s lesson? Prepare a one to two page typed response to this question.

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QUIZ 1

1. As Azar Nafisi stands in the middle of the Tehran airport, what does she see written on giant posters on the walls?

2. In what ways are things different for Nafisi from the last time she was home, seventeen years earlier?

3. When one of the guards empties the contents of Nafisi’s purse, what are some of the items he uncovers?

QUIZ 2

1. Why do some of Professor Nafisi’s students find The Great Gatsby to be such a controversial novel?

2. Who is Mr. Nyazi? What role does he play in The Gatsby Trial?3. Who is Mr. Farzan? What role does he play in The Gatsby Trial?4. Who is Zarrin? What role does she play in The Gatsby Trial?5. Explain Mr. Nyazi’s viewpoint on gender roles in Gatsby.

QUIZ 3

1. Professor Nafisi agrees to allow Nassrin to sit in on her class at the start of The Gatsby Trial on one condition. What is it?

2. Why do you think the majority of Professor Nafisi’s students did not voice their opinions about Gatsby in class?

3. At the conclusion of the trial, Nafisi recalls feeling good when seeing and hearing her students arguing. Why does she feel this way?

4. How does Bahri defend Professor Nafisi? Why does he choose to do this?5. Compare Professor R to Professor Nafisi. Why were both well liked by the students?

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Part Three: JoyceLesson #1

Aim: What is the difference between being evil and committing evil acts?Do Now: List five people or events, fiction or realistic, that you would consider evil and

explain why. Categorize them into someone or something that is evil or was it just an evil act committed by a “normal” person.

New York State Common Core:Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text.

Interpret, analyze, and evaluate narratives, poetry, and drama, aesthetically and philosophically by making connections to: other texts, ideas, cultural perspectives, eras, personal events, and situations.

Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative, connotative, and technical meanings; analyze how an author uses and refines the meaning of a key term or terms over the course of a text.

Lesson:1. Define “evil”2. Create two lists based on students’ comments of evil actions/persons and lead discussion

as students attempt to place their items into the lists. Sample teacher’s list: Columbine, Darth Vader, Axis of Evil, Taliban, cigarette companies.

3. Why did these events take place? Did the person who committed them start out evil or did something happen to make that person evil?

4. Discuss Nafisi’s definition of evil, “Lack of empathy was to my mind the central sin of the refine, from which the others flowed. My generation tasted individual freedom and lost it; no matter how painful the loss, the recollection was there to protect us from the desert of the present.” (224) Does this definition apply to the evil actions that were previously discussed?

5. Listen to and read the lyrics to the song “Good and Evil” from the musical Jekyll and Hyde. Based on Lucy’s definition, everyone has some form of evil (and good) within him. Do you agree or disagree based on the lists that were established at the beginning of the class and Nafisi’s discussion that evil is a person without empathy. Which do you think applies the most?

Closure: Is it possible that some of the heinous acts that have been committed globally were not truly evil?

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Homework: Clip two articles from the newspaper that discuss an evil act. Determine (in writing) whether or not the action was done with or without empathy and whether it seems like there is any good behind the action/person.

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“Good and Evil” – Jekyll and Hyde

LUCY:Good and evil -And their merits -Men have argued through history -As well they should!My philosophy Any child can see -"Good is evil -And thereforeAll evil is good"

How do you tell evil from good?Evil does well - good not so good!Evil's the one that is free everywhere -Good is the one that they sell!You must decide which is heaven -Which is hell!

Good maintain evil's a curse! -But it is plain good's even worse!Evil's the one that they tell you to shun -Good is the one to embraceSay that and Satan will laugh right in your face!

The battle between good and evilGoes back to the start -Adam and Eve and the apple tore Eden apart!The key thing about good 'n' evil -Each man has to choose! -Heaven 'n' hellIs a helluva gamble to lose! -But as I peruseThis world we abuse -It's hell that we choose -And heaven must lose!

Evil is everywhere -Good doesn't have a prayer!Good is commendable -Evil's dependable!Evil is viableGood's unreliable!Good may be thankable!Evil is bankable!

Evil's for me - you can have good!Doesn't suit me to be Robin Hood!

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S'easier by far, from the way that things are,To remain good 'n' evilThan try to be evil and good!

“Jekyll and Hyde” Runtime DNA Inc. “Good N’ Evil.” St.Lyrics. 08/15/2012.

http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/jekyllandhyde/goodnevil.html

http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/jekyllandhyde/goodnevil.html

http://www.runtimedna.com/images/P/BothB.jpg

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Lesson #2 Aim: Has the Western culture lost its morals in an effort to retain its freedoms? At what cost

has our society paid for our First Amendment rights?Do Now: Show the following images (found on a separate page) and ask students to write their

opinion of the person (see handout).

New York State Common Core:Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text.

Interpret, analyze, and evaluate narratives, poetry, and drama, aesthetically and philosophically by making connections to: other texts, ideas, cultural perspectives, eras, personal events, and situations.

Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative, connotative, and technical meanings; analyze how an author uses and refines the meaning of a key term or terms over the course of a text.

Lesson:1. Begin by copying Nafisi’s lesson with the concept of a chair. Place a chair in the center of the room and

ask students to describe the chair. Discuss the color, the height, possible weight, etc. Ask them to identify it by name (“a chair”). Finally ask students to sit in one another’s seats and ask them to repeat their observations about the chair – point out how there are different ways of seeing something.

2. Transcend into discussion or morality. Is there a different way of seeing one’s morals versus another’s? For example, can one determine that a person who dresses in a certain way has very low morals versus a person who dresses in another? (For example, the recent Penn State Scandal – a person who may be in an authoritative role and may not look like someone with little to no morals, can still be that person.)

3. Discuss students’ judgments on the images.4. Define ambiguous. Why does Nafisi want her students to be aware of ambiguity? Is it important that we

are all aware of it too? (pages 198-201)

Closure: How can you pass an absolute judgment on any given individual? Is it possible to base a judgment on someone based on what they are wearing? Does the clothes a person wears give a basis to the morals of that person?

Homework: Collect images of all different types of people and create a collage with two separate sides; one side should create the image of morality; the other immorality.

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Image Is the way the person dressed moral or immoral?

Why? How would another, conservative country, explain the morals of this person?

Image 1

Image 2

Image 3

Image 4

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Image 1 (Bing):

Image 2 (Charles):

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_mA1b1ARvRE/Twb8HKJkEAI/AAAAAAAAChM/323enduGQsY/s1600/nun1

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Image 3 (Charles)

Image 4 (Charles)

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Lesson #3

Aim: Is it possible for everyone to understand the meaning of a word, however apply it to one’s life differently?

Do Now: Reread the Nafasi’s discussion of courage found on pages 248-249. Write down three literary characters that you have read that have courage. How did they demonstrate their courage?

New York State Common Core:Cite strong and thorough textual support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain.

Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text.

Lesson:1. Discuss students’ responses to the Do Now. Ask if everyone agrees with each other’s choices (if

necessary, play devil’s advocate).2. Show clip of Dorothy’s first meeting with the Cowardly Lion. What does it say about a person who

picks on those “meeker” than him? Does that make him a bad person? 3. Look at the following lines that the Cowardly Lion states later on in the movie. He explains what he

thinks is courage. Do you agree/disagree? Why? Why does he choose these particular things?(Show lines on SmartBoard): Cowardly Lion: Courage! What makes a king out of a slave? Courage! What makes the flag on the mast to wave? Courage! What makes the elephant charge his tusk in the misty mist, or the dusky dusk? What makes the muskrat guard his musk? Courage! What makes the sphinx the seventh wonder? Courage! What makes the dawn come up like thunder? Courage! What makes the Hottentot so hot? What puts the "ape" in apricot? What have they got that I ain't got? Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman: Courage! Cowardly Lion: You can say that again! Huh?

4. Compare Nafasi’s story of the young man who sets himself on fire at the end of the Joyce section. Using the class’s discussion of courage, analyze whether or not she was correct in using the young man to illustrate her concept of courage.

Closure: Courage is a major theme in literature, often described and exemplified by authors. Is it possible to understand one’s position on courage, but not necessarily agree with his example?

Homework: Complete the “Courage” worksheet using the research databases that the library offers to support your arguments. Wikipedia is not acceptable. You must cite where you accessed your information for each person.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0481618/





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Research the following people and decide whether or not they carry the trait of courage based on Nafasi’s definition of courage (found on pages 248 – 253) and our class discussion.

Ghandi

John Lennon

Oprah

Hitler

Elie Wiesel

Do these people encompass courage?

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Charles Darwin

Francesco Schettino

George Bush

Paris of Troy

Bashar Assad

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Quiz #1

1. Compare how the Iranian government used the press to try and gain support for the Iraq war to that of how the U.S. government tries to garner support for any of our most recent wars (Iraq or Afghanistan).

2. In what ways do the Iranians cope with the war?3. How do Nafasi and her female colleagues “protest” the government’s crackdown on their

rights? Would you categorize them as aggressive in their protests or passive aggressive or submission? Justify your response.

4. Nafasi uses the term “reality” in this section several times. What is the reality of the Iranian’s situation? Is this something that you can see happening in other parts of the world?

5. Why are the color-coded sirens ironic?

Quiz #2

Directions- Based on our class discussion the novel’s philosophy of morality, analyze how Crawford would feel about today’s society’s morals. Would he be in agreement with America or the Islamic Regime?

Morality.Evil itself may be but good disguised,As many a virtue now was once a vice,

Or held to be such by the moralists;Or as even in the eyes of foreigners

Our virtues may be vices, theirs to usAs vicious too. We make us new laws still,

And hold that finable and barred to-dayThat was but yesterday allowable.

Our neighbours haply no such laws enact,And privilege what we make punitive.

So right and wrong are still conditional,And there's no absolute morality

In all the world; for conscience herself isFull oft but Custom's creature, whom he keeps,

Who sees with him, and hears with him, and actsAs by his power of attorney still.

Robert Crawford

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Quiz #3

*Note- This quiz is to be used at the end of the James’ section. It asks the student to analyze a character’s actions and the purpose of the chapter based on a quote from James.

After reading the dramatic end to the James’ chapter, please turn back to page 215 and read over the following quote:

“I am incapable of telling you not to repine and rebel, because I have so, to at my cost, the imagination of all things, and because I am incapable of telling you how to feel. Feel, feel, I say – fell for all you’re worth, and even if it half kills you, for this is the only way to live, especially to live at this terrible pressure, and the only way to honour and celebrate these admirable beings who are our pride and our inspiration.”Use this quote to explain why Naifisi ends this section with the death of the young man at the university and why this action is important to the central theme of the chapter.

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Part Four: Austen

Lesson #1

Aim: Why do Nafisi and her husband finally decide to leave Iran and immigrate to theUnited States?

Do Now: Write about a time when you did not have the power to change a situation and the only option was to remove yourself from it.

New York State Common Core Standards:

Strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain.

Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text.

Lesson: 1. Watch youtubeclip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlWf34UKVKs “An Evening

with Azar Nafisi at Carpenter Center” Sat, Mar. 3, 2012 1min 33sec2. Discuss: Dr. Nafisi's question on the first day of class was: "What should fiction

accomplish? Why should anyone read at all?" Have students turn to page 282: “Fiction was not a panacea, but it did offer us a critical way of appraising and grasping the world–not just our world but that other world that had become the object of our desires.” What are your own answers now that you have finished Nafisi’s memoir? How does fiction force us to question what we often take for granted?

3. In addition to the authors and works of literature that Nafisi references in her novel, she also has often mentioned her love of Poetry and its power in times of personal/political strife (attached New York Times Article “Words of War”). Have class read the article and discuss, how does this support Nafisi’s purpose in writing Reading Lolita in Tehran?

Closure:1. Return to Aim, asking students to provide multiple answers that will be listed on the

board.2. Introduce homework: Nafisi’s “Poetry of War” worksheet that provides examples of

the poetry Nafisi mentions in the New York Times article.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlWf34UKVKs

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“Words of War” By Azar Nafisi Published: March 27, 2003

WASHINGTON— These days I am often asked what I did in Tehran as bombs fell during the Iran-Iraq war. My interlocutors are invariably surprised, if not shocked, when I tell them that I read James, Eliot, Plath and great Persian poets like Rumi and Hafez. Yet it is precisely during such times, when our lives are transformed by violence, that we need works of imagination to confirm our faith in humanity, to find hope amid the rubble of a hopeless world. Memoirs from concentration camps and the gulag attest to this. I keep returning to the words of Leon Staff, a Polish poet who lived in the Warsaw ghetto: ''Even more than bread we now need poetry, in a time when it seems that it is not needed at all.''

I think back to the eight-year war with Iraq, a time when days and nights seemed indistinguishable, and were reduced to the sound of the siren, warning us of the next air attack. I often reminded my students at Allameh Tabatabai University that while guns roared and the Winter Palace was stormed, Nabokov sat at his desk writing poetry.

My Tehran classroom at times overflowed with students who ignored the warnings about Iraq's chemical bombs so they could reckon with Tolstoy's ability to defamiliarize (a term coined by the Russian Formalist critics) everyday reality and offer it to us through new eyes. The excitement that came from discovering a hidden truth about ''Anna Karenina'' told me that Iraqi missiles had not succeeded in their mission. Indeed, the more Saddam Hussein wanted us to be defined by terror, the more we craved beauty.

If I felt compelled to keep rereading the classics, it was in order to see the light in the eyes of my students. I remember two young women, clad from head to toe in black chadors, looking as if nothing in the world mattered more than the idea that ''Pride and Prejudice'' was subversive because it taught us about our right to make our own choices.

Among my scribbled notes from those days, I found a quote from Saul Bellow about writers in the Soviet work camps. To my friends in the United States who are skeptical about the importance of imagination in times of war, let me share his words: ''Perhaps to remain a poet in such circumstances is also to reach the heart of politics. The human feelings, human experiences, the human form and face, recover their proper place -- the foreground.''

And so a new war has begun, though this time it is my adopted country and not the country of my birth that is fighting Iraq. Nothing will replace the lives lost. Still, I will take some comfort now as I did then by opening a book.

http://www.nytimes.com/

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Azar Nafisi, a fellow at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, is author of ''Reading Lolita in Tehran.''

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Nafisi’s “Poetry of War”

''Even more than bread we now need poetry, in a time when it seems that it is not needed at all.'' - Leon Staff

Directions: When asked what she did when the war in Iran began, Nafisi mentions reading poetry. In addition to referencing the Persian Poets Rumi and Hafez, Nafisi also mentions several American poets. Read each poem and write a two to three sentence summary, explaining what the poem is about.

Poem 1:

Poem 2:

Poem 3:

For Further thought:

Why do you think Nafisi choose to read poetry, while her homeland was being bombed? Is there anything about the poetry that relates to themes in Reading Lolita in Tehran?

For A Depressed Woman by James A. EmanuelI

My friends do not know.

But what could my friends not know?

About what? What friends?

II

She sleeps late each day,

stifling each reason to rise,

choked into the quilt.

III

“I’ll never find work.”

She swallows this thought with pills,

finds tears in the glass.

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Excerpt from “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath

You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white,

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

“Cousin Nancy” by T.S. Eliot

Miss Nancy EllicottStrode across the hills and broke them,Rode across the hills and broke them—The barren New England hills—Riding to hounds Over the cow-pasture. Miss Nancy Ellicott smokedAnd danced all the modern dances;And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,But they knew that it was modern. Upon the glazen shelves kept watchMatthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,The army of unalterable law.

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Lesson #2

Aim: What role has literature or poetry play during war?Do Now: Have students listen to a protest song, from the Vietnam War period to scaffold

their responses from previous lesson. How does this song illustrate the importance of poetry during a time of war? How does this support Nafisi’s purpose in writing Reading Lolita in Tehran?


Analyze the impact of the author’s choices regarding how to develop and relate elements of a story or drama (e.g., where a story is set, how the action is ordered, how the characters are introduced and developed).

Determine an author’s point of view or purpose in a text in which the rhetoric is particularly effective, analyzing how style and content contribute to the power, persuasiveness or beauty of the text.

Lesson:

1. Ask students to list contemporary issues of war. Use September 11th as a springboard for discussion.

2. Students will read the following poems from the “War Poetry/Prose” worksheets:

"Today is the next day of the rest of your life" by Charles Bernstein "Palestine" by Lorna Dee Cervantes "The Daisy Cutter" by Louise Rill

3. Have students break into small groups to answer the following questions:

A. "Today is the next day of the rest of your life": How would you explain the seemingly contradictory statements in the last 2-4 lines?

B. "Palestine": What images speak to the events of September 11th? C. "The Daisy Cutter": Describe the content of this poem. Based on the allusion,

who do you think is John the Baptist?D. All three poems: Discuss the mood and tone of each of these poems.

4. Have groups “present” their answers

Closure:1. Discuss day’s ‘Aim’.2. Introduce homework:

Write a ten line poem about any aspect of war. Use at least one allusion to strengthen the poem’s meaning.

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War Poetry/Prose

Today is the Next day of the Rest of Your Life By Charles BernsteinIt's 8:23 in New YorkWhat I can't describe is how beautiful the day is in New York; clear skies, visibility all the way to the other side of wherever you think you are looking.Or looking away.After the long and strange Odyssey back from LaGuardia airport this morning, I went to a jammed local upper west side coffee shop. A family was eating, deciding, loudly, whether to get the chicken or tuna salad; the mother expressed great disappointment that there was no skim milk. The coffee shop was packed and the mother said, "Well, it's OK, at least we're not in a rush right now and after all the restaurant probably has more people now than they are used to handling."Outside, two guys with work boots and cell phones strapped to their waist yelled toward the coffee shop, "I can't believe these f-ing people are sitting in a cafe when the city is being blown up."I can't imagine Manhattan without those two towers looming over the south end. As I was walking across the 59th Street bridge I couldn't stop thinking of that Simon and Garfunkel song named after the bridge, "Feeling Groovy" ("Life I love you ... all is ... ").It was hard not to feel like it was a movie and one with an unbelievable plot at that. All the airports closed; the Pentagon bombed; four commercial jets hijacked on suicide missions. The Queensborough bridge was overflowing with people streaming out of Manhattan, a line as wide as the bridge and as long as Manhattan itself. If you looked out to the left, there was a big plume of smoke over downtown Manhattan. You couldn't see that the Towers were not there.And it didn't seem possible that this had happened either.Even with all the people streaming out, and the small clutch of us walking back to the island.The FDR drive below us was empty, with just the occasional emergency vehicle. The UN Secretariat building looked naked, vulnerable. Why wouldn't a plane smash into that while we walked across the East River.The skies unnaturally clear of airplanes, though every once in a while you hear the ominous swoop of a jet overhead, presumably military. Once in Manhattan, the entrance to the bridge was mobbed. But walking west, people were quietly hanging out on street corners. Most of the avenues were cleared of traffic, except for the sirens or an ambulance or fire truck racing downtown.

While the phones are not working very well (so much of NYC communication is streamed through the World Trade Center), the email is working fine. There are notes of disbelief and worry from people from all over, especially Europe. My friends Misko and Dubravka from Beograd write and I remember their emails when their city was under fire. And various friends we just saw on our recent trip.As I was walking home, about half a mile from our apartment, I stop by the storefront hair salon of Andrew, who lives upstairs in our building. I had been trying for a couple of hours to get Susan on the phone, to see if she had picked up Felix at school. But neither the cell or land phones were working. When I saw Andrew he said Susan and Felix had just walked by and were

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heading home. He said he was going to stay open just because he thought people would want to have him there, standing in front of his shop.At about 6, Felix, Susan and I walked down to the Hudson. I wanted to see New Jersey, to see the George Washington Bridge. The sun gleamed on the water. The bridge was calm. Folks were bicycling and rollerblading. The scene was almost serene; just five miles from the Trade Center.Uncanny is the word.What I can't describe is the reality; the panic; the horror.I keep turning on the TV to hear what I can't take in and what I already know. Over and over. I don't find the coverage comforting but addictive.This could not have happened. This hasn't happened.This is happening.It's 8:23 in New York.(September 11, 2001)

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“The Daisy Cutter” by Louise Rill

Daisy, Daisygive me the head of John the Baptistor another bearded fanatic

The Taliban favor the hirsutebut we are good Christian folkand our chosen are smooth-chinned

Daisy, Daisyimmolate the hairy onescleanse their ethnic dust ofhens, children, terrorists and unseen wivesvaporize their souls, theirspleens, eyeballs, tongues andtender partscollect the charred bone fragmentsfor the charity of the Red Crossfor the Cross is our symbol

We may not get our man,but by God,Daisy,we’ll get someone.

*Note: Daisy Cutter is the name of a 15,000lb bomb used in Afghanistan, which explodes at head height.

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“Palestine” by Lorna Dee Cervantes

A country you carry in your pocketairport to airport, a countrythat exists for you in a rememberedfragrance, an expired stamp, now the sealof blood embossed upon someone'ssunstruck pavement. Who ownsthis property? Who owns the rightto no way out but a busted windowa hundred flights up? Who owns the keyto Heaven's Gate? Did it open?

I open the newspaper, my computer,an account, and need to account for allthe terror in the world, in crossingthe street with my child this morning,our Indian heads and Palestinian shrouds.With what do we pay? For whatattention? I want to draw its shape“scattered in files and surprises....flying on shrapnel and bird's wings....trapped between the dagger and the wind.I want to draw your shapeto find my shape in yours....”

And whatif the source of deathis not the daggeror the lie?But both. Buried deepin the human rubble.Closer to Godthan thee.

Lesson #3 Aim: What connections exist between the characters of the book and those in Jane Austen’s

Pride and Prejudice?Do Now: How does Nafisi use dancing as a way to describe and understand the novel Pride and

Prejudice?


Integrate and evaluate multiple sources of information presented in different media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively) as well as in words in order to address a question or solve a problem.

Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.

Lesson: 1. Discuss do now.2. Break class into small groups. In groups students will review specific passages from Reading

Lolita in Tehran.

Page 265: Page(s) 266-69: Page(s) 304-07:Page 315:

3. For each passage, students must find a specific line or line that supports their answers to the do now.

Closure:1. Whole class share and discussion of passage search.2. Introduce homework: Write a one paragraph answer to today’s “Do Now”.

Quiz #11. What do the women discuss regarding marriage?2. What was the news that Sanaz was excited to share?3. What happened to the two women that had the rank of cabinet minister?4. What makes Persian dance unique?5. According to Nassrim, how does one know they are in love?6. Explain the symbolism of dancing.7. Who is the only girl that does not wish to leave Iran?8. Describe Azin’s nails.

Quiz #21. Why did Sanaz’s fiancé call off the wedding?2. What conflict was there with attaining freedom for the women?3. What flower does Mintra’s suitor compare her to?4. Explain Mrs. Rezvan’s gift.5. Why was Mrs. Rezvan going to Canada?6. Describe the concert that Ramin takes them to.7. What gift did the magician have for Nafisi?

Quiz #31. What did Bijian and Nafisi fight over?2. Why does Nassarim go to London?3. Where does Nafisi seek refuge?4. Who is Daisy?5. What does Nafisi say about the Bill of Rights?

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Works Cited

“An Evening with Azar Nafisi at Carpenter Center." Perf. Azar Nafisi. N.p., 3 Mar. 2012. Web. 30 Aug. 2012.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlWf34UKVKs>.

Bernstein, Charles. "Today is the next day of the rest of your life." N.p., n.d. 30 Aug. 2012.

www.lpsdonline.org/wiki/images…poetry.doc

Bing Images. The Sound of Music.08/21/2012 http://www.bing.com/images/search?

q=images+of+nun+from+The+Sound+of+Music&view=detail&id=F

Cervantes, Lorna Dee. “Palestine.” N.p., n.d. 30 Aug. 2012.

http://poetry.about.com/library/weekly/aa091201c.htm

Charles, Marissa. “And the Award for the Most Eye-Catching Goes to…” Mail Online. Associated Press.

02/13/2012. 08/21/2012. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2100185/Grammys-2012-red-

carpet-Katy-Perry-Taylor-Swift-Kelly-Rowland-lead-glamour.html

Eliot, T.S. “Cousin Nancy.” Web. N.p., n.d. 30 Aug. 2012. http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/21645

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995. Print.

Frost, Robert. “Acquainted With the Night” 1928

James, Emmanuel. "For A Depressed Woman." N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Aug. 2012.

<http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/James-A-Emanuel/4522>.

Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. New York: Random House, 2003. Print.

Nafisi, Azar. "Words of War." The New York Times 27 Mar. 2003: n. pag. Print.

Mills, Nicolaus. "Another look at a Long Island favorite 'New' F. Scott Fitzgerald story raises issue of how to

take posthumously published writing." Newsday [Long Island] 17 Aug 2012, Nassau Edition A46. Print.

Plath, Sylvia. “Daddy.” Web. N.p., n.d. 30 Aug. 2012. http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15291

Rill, Louise. "The Daisy Cutter" N.p., n.d. 30 Aug. 2012. www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/17109

"Thank You for the Light." New Yorker. 06 AUG 2012: n. page. Web. 27 Aug. 2012.

<http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2012/08/06/120806fi_fiction_fitzgerald?currentPage=1>.

The Wizard of Oz. IMD.com 1990-2012. 08/21/2012. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032138/quotes

The Wizard of Oz. YouTube. IHEARTTHE WIZARDOF OZ.COM. 06/27/2012. 08/20/2012

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzD6L8DmE-c

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzD6L8DmE-c

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032138/quotes

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/17109

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2100185/Grammys-2012-red-carpet-Katy-Perry-Taylor-Swift-Kelly-Rowland-lead-glamour.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2100185/Grammys-2012-red-carpet-Katy-Perry-Taylor-Swift-Kelly-Rowland-lead-glamour.html

http://poetry.about.com/library/weekly/aa091201c.htm

http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=images+of+nun+from+The+Sound+of+Music&view=detail&id=F

http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=images+of+nun+from+The+Sound+of+Music&view=detail&id=F

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