Course Recap for February 13

Dr. Seuss' The Lorax
Today at the beginning of class, I collected your Paper 1. I will get these graded and back to you within a week (or a week and a half). Please see the grading rubric on the right hand side of the blog. I will be using this document to evaluate your writing. We then took a short reading quiz over The Lorax. I asked for your initial impressions on Seuss' picture book, and again, brought up some of the nostalgic responses from the blog. I then asked you to break into pairs to work on a series of questions about the text. You can access that document HERE. I asked each group to share their response, using the document camera to project images from the text. Next, I handed out an LA Times article from 1989 in which parents challenged the use of The Lorax in an elementary classroom. You can access that article HERE. I then gave a short presentation on Lisa Lubduska's article "Rethinking Human Need: Suess's The Lorax." You can access that presentation HERE. I then asked for your thoughts on Lubduska's argument.


Homework

• Read op de Beeck's "Speaking for the Trees: Environmental Ethics in the Rhetoric and Production of Picture Books"
• AND I am adding another reading I think will be of interest to you all (especially aspiring teachers): Henderson, Kennedy, and Chamberlin's "Playing Seriously with Dr. Seuss: A Pedagogical Response to The Lorax" (I have added this on the right hand side of the blog)

Each of these articles is about 20 pages long, so be sure to give yourself adequate time to read.