As I began to look for specific source materials for this curriculum unit, I realized that the possibilities are too limitless for me to do much more than suggest a few of my favorite materials for each of the following assignments. So I concluded that it would be more helpful to remind my fellow teachers of some excellent sources for short written pieces on the city (or on any topic).
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1) Books that illustrate good writing and critical thinking skills are a great source for short pieces. In every book of this type that I looked at there were essays ranging in length from a few paragraphs to several pages in all of the voices and dealing with city issues and topics. Since so many writers are city people and writers tend to deal with what they know or like best, innumerable pieces of all kinds will be useful for you to illustrate the points about voice and city writing. The following books are a few that will enable me to illustrate this point:
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Gerald Levin’s “Short Essays: Model for Composition” includes over fifty essays and excerpts and an excellent “Thematic Table of Contents” including “roots,” “growing up,” “people”, “sports,” “values” and “issues and controversies.” Among these topics are several city related themes including Jim Brown’s “Growing Up On Long Island,” and Lewis Yablonsky’s “The Violent Gang” and over ten more works that could help you illustrate the suggested curriculum ideas below.
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Similarly useful collections by Berke, Gere, Mayfield,and McCuen are included in the bibliography of this unit.
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2) Newspapers, most importantly, and magazines are invaluable sources because they have pieces in each of the three basic voices on a daily basis and the most common theme is the city.
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Each section of the newspaper offers rich stores of all kinds of materials. The city or local news sections of both the “New York Times,” “Advocate,” “New Times” and the “New Haven Register” have both current crises and city developments. All of these papers have interviews with local dogooders and heroes nearly on a daily basis. These employ the third person and most often in the quoted lines, the first person. The foods, cooking and living sections have innumerable second person pieces in those how-to types of articles. Speeches of famous people are regularly printed in their entirety in the “Times,” the best source of the we or first person plural voice.
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3) Anthologies of works by types of writers including all the ethnic groups, women and other “minorities” are excellent sources. Several such examples will be referred to below and are included in the bibliography.
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4) Books by writers that you know to be city people are loaded with appropriate examples of all kinds of city writing and in different voices. For example James Baldwin, writes about numerous cities and cities within cites in all his works, as does Chaim Potok, Naipaul, Toni Morrison, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, to name a few (and by way of contrast, how about anti-city writers like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson).
Now, to some more concrete lesson ideas . . .