James P. Brochin
While the goal will be to teach college bound students, even honors students will not be prepared for the demands, rigor, or boredom of lecture/discussions of a heavily academic focus. The fact is, students of this age must become engaged on a personal level to stimulate an ongoing interest in the material. One must constantly ask oneself as a teacher, and the students: "Why do we give a damn about what happened to a an Iraqi solder, a Vietnamese Buddhist Monk, a Civil War amputee?" The challenge for any teacher of adolescents is how to engage the students. The answer may be to engage their sense of right and wrong, their heightened sense of what is fair, what is just. That is why I chose to design this Unit. So what are the "hooks" for this unit, the strategies will keep even the most disinterested heads off the desks? Well, the images themselves are so compelling that student attention it fairly assured. Of course, that may vary greatly with the teacher's style and preferences, and some techniques are laid out in the lesson plans that follow.
