Fort Hayes Arts & Academic High School Summer Homework Packet Summer 2017

Transcription

1 Fort Hayes Arts & Academic High School Summer Homework Packet Summer 2017 All assignments are due on the first day of school except Math. Late assignments will not be accepted. Math assignments are due on August 17, Some may require access to a computer with internet access and a printer. Students should arrive on the first day with all assignments prepared (e.g. already printed (if necessary) and ready to submit). Fort Hayes Arts and Academic High School is a college prep high school. Students should follow all directions, submit quality assignments and adhere to due dates. Parents/Students can contact the specific Department for questions about assignments. (Please note that teachers are also on Summer Vacation; responses may not be immediate.) Enclosed and contacts: 1. Math Mrs. Wade-Argus (SWadeArgus@columbus.k12.oh.us) or Mr. Calhoun (mcalhoun5171@columbus.k12.oh.us) 2. Science Ms. Mechling (WMechling9200@columbus.k12.oh.us) 3. English Mr. Saxon (msaxon6129@columbus.k12.oh.us) 4. Social Studies Mr. East (eeast7159@columbus.k12.oh.us 5. Arts (including Foreign Language) Mr. Donavan (mdonavan8053@columbus.k12.oh.us)

2 IMPORTANT MATH SUMMER HOMEWORK! Summer Homework = due by Thurs, August 17th The District will likely reset all ALEKS logins/passwords during the weekend of August 18 th in preparation for the new school year. The Chair has requested that FHAAHS not be included in the reset, but just-in-case the school is included with the other 100+ schools, the due date will be approximately 1 week prior to the first day of school. Continue to next page for assignment

3 Fort Hayes Math Department 2017 Summer Assignment Due Aug 17th ALEKS 1. Students must login: FHHS Math Dept Chair will load all registered students into ALEKS by June 1, New students or students added to the Roster will be added on July and August 1 st and 15th or just send an . Students should be able to log-in using the same log-in information they had in Middle School. Their password is their birthday with no dashes: mmddyyy. If you experience issues logging in, send to: SWadeArgus@columbus.k12.oh.us. IMPORTANT INFORMATION All previous FHHS Students were automatically enrolled into the next class. If you are repeating a course, please contact Wade-Argus. Students were given their log-in before the end of the school year. Students can call the office if they have forgotten it. is an option. All students incoming Freshman/Transfer Students that were on the roster as of May 31 st, are enrolled. If for some reason you are not registered OR to ensure that you do not end up with an entirely new login but are familiar with ALEKS, you can register yourself for a class using the codes listed below: Math I / Incoming Freshmen: 4LEAH-4PFCA Math II / Rising Sophomores: JAMYH-RJRG4 Math III / Rising Juniors: JQEUN-3H4A4 Math IV / All Rising Seniors Even those going to PreCalc or Calc: DAAD3-F4UHN 2. Students must complete the Initial knowledge check for their new/next Math class (Math I (or Math II for a few students)) by the first day of school. If you are not enrolled in the correct ALEKS course, send an to Ms. Wade-Argus immediately. (60 pts for completion of Initial Knowledge Check) 3. Students must complete Lessons Learned by August 17th. (1 pt per lesson learned). Grading Rubric: The assignment is worth 100 points. Students can earn 0 or point based on the number of ALEKS complete(d). Knowledge Check Lessons Learned Grade Earned Knowledge Check - 60% / D- Knowledge Check % / D- to D+ Knowledge Check % / C- to C+ Knowledge Check % / B- to B+ Knowledge Check % / A- to A+

4 Students can do additional lessons. Teachers may assign additional lessons during the school year so students can work ahead and/or teachers may give extra credit.

5 Fort Hayes Arts & Academic High School 2017 Science Summer Assignment Read Screens May Be Terrible For You, and Now We Know Why by Brandon Keim from the March 18, 2015 issue of Wired, available at: Answer these questions in complete sentences. 1. What are circadian rhythms? 2. List four health problems linked to circadian rhythm disruption. 3. How many Americans regularly use screens shortly before bed? 4. How are modern LED and fluorescent bulbs different from incandescent? 5. Name four body functions regulated by circadian rhythms. 6. The retinal cells that control circadian rhythms are particularly responsive to which color of light? 7. Why does even a brief exposure to dim artificial light trigger circadian rhythms? 8. Name the disorder that Takahashi caused in mice by altering a particular gene associated with circadian rhythm. For questions 9-14, think in general terms like elevated or lowered. 9. How is leptin (inhibits hunger) affected by circadian misalignment? 10. How is glucose (blood sugar) affected? 11. How is insulin (regulates blood sugar) affected? 12. How is epinephrine (regulates blood pressure) affected? 13. How is norepineprine (also regulates blood pressure) affected? 14. How is cortisol (the stress hormone) affected? 15. How is melatonin (induces sleep) affected by light? 16. Pose a specific research question (of your own or from the article) generated by this information. There will be an open-note quiz over this material on the first day of school, so be sure to bring your copy of the article and this assignment.

6 SCREENS MAY BE TERRIBLE FOR YOU, AND NOW WE KNOW WHY AUTHO R: B RANDON KEIM Getty Images FOR MORE THAN 3 billion years, life on Earth was governed by the cyclical light of sun, moon and stars. Then along came electric light, turning night into day at the flick of a switch. Our bodies and brains may not have been ready. A fast-growing body of research has linked artificial light exposure to disruptions in circadian rhythms, the light-triggered releases of hormones that regulate bodily function. Circadian disruption has in turn been linked to a host of health problems, from cancer to diabetes, obesity and depression. Everything changed with electricity.

7 Now we can have bright light in the middle of night. And that changes our circadian physiology almost immediately, says Richard Stevens, a cancer epidemiologist at the University of Connecticut. What we don t know, and what so many people are interested in, are the effects of having that light chronically. Stevens, one of the field s most prominent researchers, reviews the literature on light exposure and human health the latest Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. The new article comes nearly two decades after Stevens first sounded the alarm about light exposure possibly causing harm; writing in 1996, he said the evidence was sparse but provocative. Since then, nighttime light has become even more ubiquitous: an estimated 95 percent of Americans regularly use screens shortly before going to sleep, and incandescent bulbs have been mostly replaced by LED and compact fluorescent lights that emit light in potentially more problematic wavelengths. Meanwhile, the scientific evidence is still provocative, but no longer sparse. As Stevens says in the new article, researchers now know that increased nighttime light exposure tracks with increased rates of breast cancer, obesity and depression. Correlation isn t causation, of course, and it s easy to imagine all the ways researchers might mistake those findings. The easy availability of electric lighting almost certainly tracks with various disease-causing factors: bad diets, sedentary lifestyles, exposure to they array of chemicals that come along with modernity. Oil refineries and aluminum smelters, to be hyperbolic, also blaze with light at night. Yet biology at least supports some of the correlations. The circadian system synchronizes physiological function from digestion to body temperature, cell repair and immune system activity with a 24-hour cycle of light and dark. Even photosynthetic bacteria thought to resemble Earth s earliest life forms have circadian rhythms. Despite its ubiquity, though, scientists discovered only in the last decade what triggers circadian activity in mammals: specialized cells in the retina, the light-sensing part of the eye, rather than conveying visual detail from eye to brain, simply signal the presence or absence of light. Activity in these cells sets off a reaction that calibrates clocks in every cell and tissue in a body. Now, these cells are especially sensitive to blue wavelengths like those in a daytime sky. But artificial lights, particularly LCDs, some LEDs, and fluorescent bulbs, also favor the blue side of the spectrum. So even a brief exposure to dim artificial light can trick a night-subdued circadian system into behaving as though day has arrived. Circadian disruption in turn produces a wealth of downstream effects, including dysregulation of key hormones. Circadian rhythm is being tied to so many important functions, says Joseph Takahashi, a neurobiologist at the University of Texas Southwestern. We re just beginning to discover all the molecular pathways that this gene network regulates. It s not just the sleep-wake cycle. There are system-wide, drastic changes. His lab has found that tweaking a key circadian clock gene in mice gives them

8 diabetes. And a tour-de-force 2009 studyput human volunteers on a 28-hour day-night cycle, then measured what happened to their endocrine, metabolic and cardiovascular systems. Changes over 24 hours in metabolic and endocrine function in people with aligned (green lines) and misaligned (red lines) circadian clocks. Scheer et al./pnas Crucially, that experiment investigated circadian disruption induced by sleep alteration rather than light exposure, which is also the case with the many studies linking clock-scrambling shift work to health problems. Whether artificial light is as problematic as disturbed sleep patterns remains unknown, but Stevens thinks that some and perhaps much of what s now assumed to result from sleep issues is actually

9 a function of light. You can wake up in the middle of the night and your melatonin levels don t change, he says. But if you turn on a light, melatonin starts falling immediately. We need darkness. According to Stevens, most people live in a sort of circadian fog. Just how much health risk can be attributed to artificial light rather than sleep disruption? If breast cancer ratesjump 30 percent in women who work at night, and prostate cancer rates nearly triple in men, what proportion of that circadian disruption comes from artificial light rather than sleep cycle problems? And just how much blue light must be absorbed before things get risky: a few minutes a night or a few hours, a few years or a few decades? These are now pressing research questions, yet it may be difficult to know for sure, says Stevens. Conclusively settling the matter would likely require studies both rigorously controlled and terribly unethical. In the meantime, it might make sense to let a little nighttime back into your life. Also Read Mosquitos and Ticks Are Going To Eat Us Alive This Summer by Kendra Pierre-Louis from the April 3, 2017 issue of Popular Science: Answer these questions in complete sentences. 1. Why can we expect an increase in insect populations this spring? 2. Define the term prolific in terms of insect reproduction. 3. Use the symbols on the graphic to describe what to expect in Ohio. 4. How does a warm, wet spring help mosquitos reproduce? 5. Which human body structures are affected by Lyme disease? 6. Explain how this year s conditions can affect agriculture. 7. According to the graphic, which part of New England has the lowest risk for disease? 8. How can you prevent mosquito breeding in your own backyard? 9. How can you protect yourself from Lyme disease? There will be an open-note quiz over this material on the first day of school, so be sure to bring your copy of the article and this assignment.

10 Mosquitoes and ticks are going to eat us all alive this summer Bust out the bug repellant By Kendra Pierre-Louis April 3, 2017 Much of the United States is expecting higher than average mosquito numbers this year. This winter, as occasional cold snaps were outnumbered by weirdly balmy days, we at the PopSci offices had a running theory that come spring time we might be contending with buggy madness enough mosquitoes to keep us firmly indoors, or at least coated in DEET. Whoever bet on bugs made the right choice this year, said Jim Fredericks, the Chief Entomologist & Vice President of Technical and Regulatory Affairs at the National Pest Management Association. It probably will be a pretty buggy spring and summer. The National Pest Management Association recently released its "bug barometer", and the predictions are lousy. This spring and summer, most of the continental United States (apart from the Pacific Northwest) will experience an uptick in insect numbers. In most regions, mosquitoes and ticks will emerge earlier and in greater numbers than usual. The southwest doesn t have to deal with earlier mosquitoes, according to the barometer, but it gets to share in the nation s bitter, buggy bounty: once the insects do emerge, they'll be more prolific than usual. Pexels

11 National Pest Management Association This year's Bug Barometer predicts bugs a lot of them. You may have loved this winter s unusually warm weather, but guess what so did many insects. The winter warmth (this was the sixth-warmest winterand second-warmest February on record in the United States according tonoaa) was pure buggy bliss. Add a warm, wet spring to the mix, and 2017 is creating the perfect breeding ground for some of our least favorite insect pests, including ticks and mosquitoes. Most of the pest insects that we're dealing with are not migrating, said Fredericks. They have to find a way to make it through the winter. When it's a mild winter they tend to do a little bit better. It's pretty straightforward: when the weather is milder, more insects survive the winter, which means there are more insects around to bite us and breed come springtime. Fredericks and his colleagues made their 2017 predictions based on the winter and spring weather coupled with predictions for the rest of spring and summer. More adult mosquitoes live through a warm winter, and more of their larvae survive as well. And since mosquitoes breed in standing water, a wet spring gives them plenty of romantic enclaves to keep the population boom going. Moreover, warm weather speeds up a mosquito s reproductive lifecycle she can lay more eggs and have them hatch more quickly. If this is making you itchy, it should.

12 John Flannery via Flickr Deer ticks are also predicted to increase, stoking fears about Lyme disease. Ticks, which carry Lyme disease disease, are also a concern in much of the northeast. The bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi, which causes Lyme disease, can harm the joints, heart, and even the nervous system if left unchecked. "If it's a mild winter, more of the larva and the adult ticks are able to survive through the winter, which just translate to a large population in the spring, said Fredericks. And a mild winter also means more of the animals that the larvae feed on small mammals like mice, squirrels, and chipmunks will survive to get bitten. That sturdy food supply means ticks are more likely to live long enough to encounter (and infect) humans. Scot Nelson via Flickr Corn earworm is also benefitting from the warming climate. Sweet corn farmers? Not so much. The issue isn t just limited to bugs that, well, bug people. The warming weather is also a problem for agricultural crops. In general, with warming winters we are going to see new pests moving north," said Mike Hoffman, an entomologist and executive director of the Cornell Institute for Climate Smart Solutions at Cornell University. "We have one called the corn earworm in New York which is a pest of sweet corn. Historically it came in on storm fronts late in the summer, but now they find it in traps early in the season, suggesting that that the pests are starting to overwinter because of better conditions. The New York State Integrated Pest Management program runs its own version of the bug barometer, only for the corn earworm. It s prediction is similarly grim. Most of the northeast can expect an unusual number of the pests.

13 New York State Integrated Pest Management Program 2017, Corn earworm risk. Hoffman is quick to point out that the relationship between warm weather and bugs isn t straightforward. If you have lots of snow, that's going to insulate the conditions, so the insects living in the ground are probably going to survive. But take away that snow and then the cold can penetrate into the soil, and reach those insects that happen to be in the soil, and potentially increase mortality. Also, with warmer conditions there's more freeze and thaw activity, so water can penetrate and work its way into the soil that are encased in ice, and that's usually not a good thing, but that can cause higher mortality. But still, he said, as the weather warms, The nutshell version is that yes, there's going to be more, and they are going to be moving north, and there are records of that happening already. Bark beetle out west expanded over enormous areas because of a combination of warmer winters, and a longer warming season, and is doing tremendous harm. What should you do with this information?

14 Do a self-assessment of your property of areas that could potentially breed mosquitoes, said Fredericks. You should look for anything that is going to hold water. A lot of people hear about flower pots and old tires, and sure, those are places where water can accumulate. But these mosquitoes can breed in the volume of water that can be held inside of bottle cap. It's time to be mindful debris and trash and children's toys. Make sure that rain gutters are clear and not clogged. In addition, Fredericks recommends wearing any repellant that appears on the CDC approved list, which includes DEET, Piacridin, Oil of lemon eucalyptus (OLE) or (PMD) (which isn t to be confused with the lemon of eucalyptus essential oil). And while dawn and dusk used to be the primetime biting period for mosquitos, newer species such as aedes aegypti are day biters. As for ticks, donning repellant and covering up light colored, long-sleeved pants and long shirts is key in tick areas. That means woods and grassy areas, but even the wild edges of your own property can be perilous when you're out doing yard work. Also

15 English Summer Homework GRADE 9 All Teachers 1) Read and annotate Superman and Me. (The article is provided on the next two pages.) 2) Mark annotations directly on the article to record meaning as you read. 3) Prepare to write a timed short response on Superman and Me on the first day of school. Plan to use your annotations to generate ideas and evidence for the first day essay. 4) Visit a library to obtain a library card or to read the fines off your current card. 5) Be ready to show your library card to your English teacher on the first day of school. 6) Talk to a librarian and then make a list of 10 books you want to read ) Read at least one of these books (we hope you ll read more!). 8) Use the Scholar Mark below as your bookmark, and also to record the page numbers of important passages, sentences, ideas, and events throughout your selected book. 9) Talk about your book with someone, and be prepared to discuss your book with a classmate during the first week of school.

16 Sherman Alexie: Superman and Me I learned to read with a Superman comic book. Simple enough, I suppose. I cannot recall which particular Superman comic book I read, nor can I remember which villain he fought in that issue. I cannot remember the plot, nor the means by which I obtained the comic book. What I can remember is this: I was 3 years old, a Spokane Indian boy living with his family on the Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington state. We were poor by most standards, but one of my parents usually managed to find some minimum- wage job or another, which made us middle- class by reservation standards. I had a brother and three sisters. We lived on a combination of irregular paychecks, hope, fear and government surplus food. My father, who is one of the few Indians who went to Catholic school on purpose, was an avid reader of westerns, spy thrillers, murder mysteries, gangster epics, basketball player biographies and anything else he could find. He bought his books by the pound at Dutch's Pawn Shop, Goodwill, Salvation Army and Value Village. When he had extra money, he bought new novels at supermarkets, convenience stores and hospital gift shops. Our house was filled with books. They were stacked in crazy piles in the bathroom, bedrooms and living room. In a fit of unemployment- inspired creative energy, my father built a set of bookshelves and soon filled them with a random assortment of books about the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, the Vietnam War and the entire 23- book series of the Apache westerns. My father loved books, and since I loved my father with an aching devotion, I decided to love books as well. I can remember picking up my father's books before I could read. The words themselves were mostly foreign, but I still remember the exact moment when I first understood, with a sudden clarity, the purpose of a paragraph. I didn't have the vocabulary to say "paragraph," but I realized that a paragraph was a fence that held words. The words inside a paragraph worked together for a common purpose. They had some specific reason for being inside the same fence. This knowledge delighted me. I began to think of everything in terms of paragraphs. Our reservation was a small paragraph within the United States. My family's house was a paragraph, distinct from the other paragraphs of the LeBrets to the north, the Fords to our south and the Tribal School to the west. Inside our house, each family member existed as a separate paragraph but still had genetics and common experiences to link us. Now, using this logic, I can see my changed family as an essay of seven paragraphs: mother, father, older brother, the deceased sister, my younger twin sisters and our adopted little brother. At the same time I was seeing the world in paragraphs, I also picked up that Superman comic book. Each panel, complete with picture, dialogue and narrative was a three- dimensional paragraph. In one panel, Superman breaks through a door. His suit is red, blue and yellow. The brown door shatters into many pieces. I look at the narrative above the picture. I cannot read the words, but I assume it tells me that "Superman is breaking down the door." Aloud, I pretend to read the words and say, "Superman is breaking down the door." Words, dialogue, also float out of Superman's mouth. Because he is breaking down the door, I assume he says, "I am breaking down the door." Once again, I pretend to read the words and say aloud, "I am breaking down the door" In this way, I learned to read. This might be an interesting story all by itself. A little Indian boy teaches himself to read at an early age and advances quickly. He reads "Grapes of Wrath" in kindergarten when other

17 children are struggling through "Dick and Jane." If he'd been anything but an Indian boy living on the reservation, he might have been called a prodigy. But he is an Indian boy living on the reservation and is simply an oddity. He grows into a man who often speaks of his childhood in the third- person, as if it will somehow dull the pain and make him sound more modest about his talents. * A smart Indian is a dangerous person, widely feared and ridiculed by Indians and non- Indians alike. I fought with my classmates on a daily basis. They wanted me to stay quiet when the non- Indian teacher asked for answers, for volunteers, for help. We were Indian children who were expected to be stupid. Most lived up to those expectations inside the classroom but subverted them on the outside. They struggled with basic reading in school but could remember how to sing a few dozen powwow songs. They were monosyllabic in front of their non- Indian teachers but could tell complicated stories and jokes at the dinner table. They submissively ducked their heads when confronted by a non- Indian adult but would slug it out with the Indian bully who was 10 years older. As Indian children, we were expected to fail in the non- Indian world. Those who failed were ceremonially accepted by other Indians and appropriately pitied by non- Indians. I refused to fail. I was smart. I was arrogant. I was lucky. I read books late into the night, until I could barely keep my eyes open. I read books at recess, then during lunch, and in the few minutes left after I had finished my classroom assignments. I read books in the car when my family traveled to powwows or basketball games. In shopping malls, I ran to the bookstores and read bits and pieces of as many books as I could. I read the books my father brought home from the pawnshops and secondhand. I read the books I borrowed from the library. I read the backs of cereal boxes. I read the newspaper. I read the bulletins posted on the walls of the school, the clinic, the tribal offices, the post office. I read junk mail. I read auto- repair manuals. I read magazines. I read anything that had words and paragraphs. I read with equal parts joy and desperation. I loved those books, but I also knew that love had only one purpose. I was trying to save my life. Despite all the books I read, I am still surprised I became a writer. I was going to be a pediatrician. These days, I write novels, short stories, and poems. I visit schools and teach creative writing to Indian kids. In all my years in the reservation school system, I was never taught how to write poetry, short stories or novels. I was certainly never taught that Indians wrote poetry, short stories and novels. Writing was something beyond Indians. I cannot recall a single time that a guest teacher visited the reservation. There must have been visiting teachers. Who were they? Where are they now? Do they exist? I visit the schools as often as possible. The Indian kids crowd the classroom. Many are writing their own poems, short stories and novels. They have read my books. They have read many other books. They look at me with bright eyes and arrogant wonder. They are trying to save their lives. Then there are the sullen and already defeated Indian kids who sit in the back rows and ignore me with theatrical precision. The pages of their notebooks are empty. They carry neither pencil nor pen. They stare out the window. They refuse and resist. "Books," I say to them. "Books," I say. I throw my weight against their locked doors. The door holds. I am smart. I am arrogant. I am lucky. I am trying to save our lives

18 English Summer Homework GRADES 10 All Teachers 1) Read and annotate Looking Out the Window 2) Mark annotations directly on the article to record meaning as you read. 3) Prepare to write a timed short response on Looking Out the Window on the first day of school. Plan to use your annotations to generate ideas and evidence for the first day essay. 4) Visit a library to obtain a library card or to read the fines off your current card. 5) Be ready to show your library card to your English teacher on the first day of school. 6) Talk to a librarian and then make a list of 10 books you want to read ) Read at least one of these books (we hope you ll read more!). 8) Use the Scholar Mark below as your bookmark, and also to record the page numbers of important passages, sentences, ideas, and events throughout your selected book. 9) Talk about your book with someone, and be prepared to discuss your book with a classmate during the first week of school.

19 Sam Anderson: Looking Out the Window Our windows keep shrinking. Our vision narrows and narrows. Mine roams, for much of each day, in a space roughly the size of a playing card: the rectangle of my phone s screen. The view through that piece of glass is not out onto the actual world but inward, down a digital depth over which I exercise near- dictatorial control. If I want to see a bird on my phone, I see a bird. If I want to see a manatee captioned by a motivational slogan, I see that. This means, of course, that my phone is not really a window at all. A real window is something that frames our fundamental lack of control. Windows are, in this sense, a powerful existential tool: a patch of the world, arbitrarily framed, from which we are physically isolated. The only thing you can do is look. You have no influence over what you will see. Your brain is forced to make drama out of whatever happens to appear. Boring things become strange. A blob of mist balances on top of a mountain; leafless trees contort themselves in slow- motion interpretive dance; heavy raindrops make the puddles boil. These things are a tiny taste of the bigness of the world. They were there before you looked; they will be there after you go. None of it depends on you. Sometimes what you see can be astonishing. One day, I was taking a nap in the red chair in my office when I woke up to the sound of a car crash. I sat up and looked, immediately, out my window. Across the street, in a parking lot, a car had just backed into a chain- link fence. The car must have been moving fast, because it was in bad shape: Its hood had popped up, its windshield wipers were snapping back and forth under a perfectly clear sky and part of its bumper was sitting on the ground. The fence was mangled, bent out in exactly the shape of the car s back end. I couldn t believe I was seeing this, on an otherwise ordinary weekday morning, out of my office window. I watched the driver get out of the car. He was stocky with a shaved head; he wore cargo shorts and a flannel shirt unbuttoned to expose his chest hair. I disliked him immediately. After a few seconds of assessing the damage, he walked around the car and opened the passenger door from which a very small child scrambled out. A toddler in the front seat! My disdain for this man increased exponentially. As the child ran around the parking lot, the man tried to repair the damage he caused. He attempted to tug the ruined fence back into place, but it wouldn t move. He tried to shove the fallen piece of bumper back onto his car, but that only made the rest of his bumper fall off too. I sat in my red chair, looking out my window, silently cheering. The man tried, a little harder, to fix the fence. He grabbed its vertical support pole, which was wickedly bent, and pulled against it with his full weight. The pole suddenly broke, and the man fell hard onto the blacktop. The entire fence fell on top of him, and one of his sandals flew off and landed 10 feet away on the sidewalk.

20 I think I laughed out loud. This was a slapstick masterpiece. It was brightening my whole day, the failure of this terrible man. He climbed out from under the collapsed fence and limped back to the apartment building above the lot, rubbing his elbow. That, I thought, would be the end of it. The man that villainous man was going to leave all the chaos behind for someone else to clean up. It was only the middle of the morning, but I imagined him sprawled out on his sofa with a case of beer, eating horrible snacks, while his child played with fire and broken glass and battery acid near a malfunctioning electrical socket. But this is the power of windows: They contradict your easy assumptions. They scribble over your mental cartoons with the heavy red pen of reality. The man emerged a few minutes later with some tools. He got to work immediately, detaching one of the fence s bent support bars and hammering it straight on the asphalt. For the next hour, I watched out my window as he doggedly fixed the fence, straightening and reattaching its support bars, scrupulously unbending its bent chain- link. He even improved it. He stole a support bar from another fence farther back in the parking lot and added it to this one. Now the fence would be extra secure, stronger than before, impervious to damage. This odious man was actually a hero. I was the lazy one, with my knee- jerk judgments and distant clichés, my superiority from three stories up. My window had taken a break, that day, from its usual programming crows and squirrels roaming over a dead tree, cars piling up at a stoplight to put on a little passion play for me, an allegory about the nobility of the human spirit. My ugly assumptions, I realized, were all about myself. I would never have fixed that fence; I would have panicked and run away. My window had woken me up from a nap to teach me a lesson in humility. The incident changed my entire day. I went back to my shallow screens with new determination. Years later, I still look out my window at that fence almost every day. It still looks brand new. It makes me wonder what else that man has improved, and how I can make myself more like him. of- recommendation- looking- out- the- window.html

21 English Summer Homework GRADES 11 All Teachers 1) Read and annotate Your Brain on Fiction 2) Mark annotations directly on the article to record meaning as you read. 3) Prepare to write a timed short response on Your Brain on Fiction on the first day of school. Plan to use your annotations to generate ideas and evidence for the first day essay. 4) Visit a library to obtain a library card or to read the fines off your current card. 5) Be ready to show your library card to your English teacher on the first day of school. 6) Talk to a librarian and then make a list of 10 books you want to read ) Read at least one of these books (we hope you ll read more!). 8) Use the Scholar Mark below as your bookmark, and also to record the page numbers of important passages, sentences, ideas, and events throughout your selected book. 9) Talk about your book with someone, and be prepared to discuss your book with a classmate during the first week of school.

22 Annie Murphy Paul: Your Brain on Fiction Amid the squawks and pings of our digital devices, the old- fashioned virtues of reading novels can seem faded, even futile. But new support for the value of fiction is arriving from an unexpected quarter: neuroscience. Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life. Researchers have long known that the classical language regions, like Broca s area and Wernicke s area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive. Words like lavender, cinnamon and soap, for example, elicit a response not only from the language- processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells. In a 2006 study published in the journal NeuroImage, researchers in Spain asked participants to read words with strong odor associations, along with neutral words, while their brains were being scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fmri) machine. When subjects looked at the Spanish words for perfume and coffee, their primary olfactory cortex lit up; when they saw the words that mean chair and key, this region remained dark. The way the brain handles metaphors has also received extensive study; some scientists have contended that figures of speech like a rough day are so familiar that they are treated simply as words and no more. Last month, however, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like The singer had a velvet voice and He had leathery hands roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like The singer had a pleasing voice and He had strong hands, did not. Researchers have discovered that words describing motion also stimulate regions of the brain distinct from language- processing areas. In a study led by the cognitive scientist Véronique Boulenger, of the Laboratory of Language Dynamics in France, the brains of participants were scanned as they read sentences like John grasped the object and Pablo kicked the ball. The scans revealed activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body s movements. What s more, this activity was concentrated in one part of the motor cortex when the movement described was arm- related and in another part when the movement concerned the leg. The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers. Fiction with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond

23 simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people s thoughts and feelings. The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real- life social encounters. Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, performed an analysis of 86 fmri studies, published last year in the Annual Review of Psychology, and concluded that there was substantial overlap in the brain networks used to understand stories and the networks used to navigate interactions with other individuals in particular, interactions in which we re trying to figure out the thoughts and feelings of others. Scientists call this capacity of the brain to construct a map of other people s intentions theory of mind. Narratives offer a unique opportunity to engage this capacity, as we identify with characters longings and frustrations, guess at their hidden motives and track their encounters with friends and enemies, neighbors and lovers. It is an exercise that hones our real- life social skills, another body of research suggests. Dr. Oatley and Dr. Mar, in collaboration with several other scientists, reported in two studies, published in 2006 and 2009, that individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective. This relationship persisted even after the researchers accounted for the possibility that more empathetic individuals might prefer reading novels. A 2010 study by Dr. Mar found a similar result in preschool- age children: the more stories they had read to them, the keener their theory of mind an effect that was also produced by watching movies but, curiously, not by watching television. (Dr. Mar has conjectured that because children often watch TV alone, but go to the movies with their parents, they may experience more parent- children conversations about mental states when it comes to films.) Fiction, Dr. Oatley notes, is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life. These findings will affirm the experience of readers who have felt illuminated and instructed by a novel, who have found themselves comparing a plucky young woman to Elizabeth Bennet or a tiresome pedant to Edward Casaubon. Reading great literature, it has long been averred, enlarges and improves us as human beings. Brain science shows this claim is truer than we imagined. neuroscience- of- your- brain- on- fiction.html

24 English Summer Homework GRADES 12 All Teachers 1) Read and annotate Choose to Be Grateful. It Will Make You Happier. 2) Mark annotations directly on the article to record meaning as you read. 3) Prepare to write a timed short response on Choose to Be Grateful. It Will Make You Happier on the first day of school. Plan to use your annotations to generate ideas and evidence for the first day essay. 4) Visit a library to obtain a library card or to read the fines off your current card. 5) Be ready to show your library card to your English teacher on the first day of school. 6) Talk to a librarian and then make a list of 10 books you want to read ) Read at least one of these books (we hope you ll read more!). 8) Use the Scholar Mark below as your bookmark, and also to record the page numbers of important passages, sentences, ideas, and events throughout your selected book. 9) Talk about your book with someone, and be prepared to discuss your book with a classmate during the first week of school.

25 Arthur C. Brooks: Choose to Be Grateful. It Will Make You Happier Twenty- four years ago this month, my wife and I married in Barcelona, Spain. Two weeks after our wedding, flush with international idealism, I had the bright idea of sharing a bit of American culture with my Spanish in- laws by cooking a full Thanksgiving dinner. Easier said than done. Turkeys are not common in Barcelona. The local butcher shop had to order the bird from a specialty farm in France, and it came only partially plucked. Our tiny oven was too small for the turkey. No one had ever heard of cranberries. Over dinner, my new family had many queries. Some were practical, such as, What does this beast eat to be so filled with bread? But others were philosophical: Should you celebrate this holiday even if you don t feel grateful? I stumbled over this last question. At the time, I believed one should feel grateful in order to give thanks. To do anything else seemed somehow dishonest or fake a kind of bourgeois, saccharine insincerity that one should reject. It s best to be emotionally authentic, right? Wrong. Building the best life does not require fealty to feelings in the name of authenticity, but rather rebelling against negative impulses and acting right even when we don t feel like it. In a nutshell, acting grateful can actually make you grateful. For many people, gratitude is difficult, because life is difficult. Even beyond deprivation and depression, there are many ordinary circumstances in which gratitude doesn t come easily. This point will elicit a knowing, mirthless chuckle from readers whose Thanksgiving dinners are usually ruined by a drunk uncle who always needs to share his political views. Thanks for nothing. Beyond rotten circumstances, some people are just naturally more grateful than others. A 2014 article in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience identified a variation in a gene (CD38) associated with gratitude. Some people simply have a heightened genetic tendency to experience, in the researchers words, global relationship satisfaction, perceived partner responsiveness and positive emotions (particularly love). That is, those relentlessly positive people you know who seem grateful all the time may simply be mutants. But we are more than slaves to our feelings, circumstances and genes. Evidence suggests that we can actively choose to practice gratitude and that doing so raises our happiness. This is not just self- improvement hokum. For example, researchers in one 2003 study randomly assigned one group of study participants to keep a short weekly list of the things they were grateful for, while other groups listed hassles or neutral events. Ten weeks later, the first group enjoyed significantly greater life satisfaction than the others. Other studies have shown the same pattern and lead to the same conclusion. If you want a truly happy holiday, choose to keep the thanks in Thanksgiving, whether you feel like it or not. How does all this work? One explanation is that acting happy, regardless of feelings, coaxes one s brain into processing positive emotions. In one famous

26 1993 experiment, researchers asked human subjects to smile forcibly for 20 seconds while tensing facial muscles, notably the muscles around the eyes called the orbicularis oculi (which create crow s feet ). They found that this action stimulated brain activity associated with positive emotions. If grinning for an uncomfortably long time like a scary lunatic isn t your cup of tea, try expressing gratitude instead. According to research published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, gratitude stimulates the hypothalamus (a key part of the brain that regulates stress) and the ventral tegmental area (part of our reward circuitry that produces the sensation of pleasure). It s science, but also common sense: Choosing to focus on good things makes you feel better than focusing on bad things. As my teenage kids would say, Thank you, Captain Obvious. In the slightly more elegant language of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, He is a man of sense who does not grieve for what he has not, but rejoices in what he has. In addition to building our own happiness, choosing gratitude can also bring out the best in those around us. Researchers at the University of Southern California showed this in a 2011 study of people with high power but low emotional security (think of the worst boss you ve ever had). The research demonstrated that when their competence was questioned, the subjects tended to lash out with aggression and personal denigration. When shown gratitude, however, they reduced the bad behavior. That is, the best way to disarm an angry interlocutor is with a warm thank you. I learned this lesson 10 years ago. At the time, I was an academic social scientist toiling in professorial obscurity, writing technical articles and books that would be read by a few dozen people at most. Soon after securing tenure, however, I published a book about charitable giving that, to my utter befuddlement, gained a popular audience. Overnight, I started receiving feedback from total strangers who had seen me on television or heard me on the radio. One afternoon, I received an unsolicited . Dear Professor Brooks, it began, You are a fraud. That seemed pretty unpromising, but I read on anyway. My correspondent made, in brutal detail, a case against every chapter of my book. As I made my way through the long , however, my dominant thought wasn t resentment. It was, He read my book! And so I wrote him back rebutting a few of his points, but mostly just expressing gratitude for his time and attention. I felt good writing it, and his near- immediate response came with a warm and friendly tone. DOES expressing gratitude have any downside? Actually, it might: There is some research suggesting it could make you fat. A new study in the Journal of Consumer Psychology finds evidence that people begin to crave sweets when they are asked to express gratitude. If this finding holds up, we might call it the Pumpkin Pie Paradox.

27 The costs to your weight notwithstanding, the prescription for all of us is clear: Make gratitude a routine, independent of how you feel and not just once each November, but all year long. There are concrete strategies that each of us can adopt. First, start with interior gratitude, the practice of giving thanks privately. Having a job that involves giving frequent speeches not always to friendly audiences I have tried to adopt the mantra in my own work of being grateful to the people who come to see me. Next, move to exterior gratitude, which focuses on public expression. The psychologist Martin Seligman, father of the field known as positive psychology, gives some practical suggestions on how to do this. In his best seller Authentic Happiness, he recommends that readers systematically express gratitude in letters to loved ones and colleagues. A disciplined way to put this into practice is to make it as routine as morning coffee. Write two short s each morning to friends, family or colleagues, thanking them for what they do. Finally, be grateful for useless things. It is relatively easy to be thankful for the most important and obvious parts of life a happy marriage, healthy kids or living in America. But truly happy people find ways to give thanks for the little, insignificant trifles. Ponder the impractical joy in Gerard Manley Hopkins s poem Pied Beauty : Glory be to God for dappled things For skies of couple- colour as a brinded cow; For rose- moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh- firecoal chestnut- falls; finches wings; Landscape plotted and pieced fold, fallow, and plough; And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. Be honest: When was the last time you were grateful for the spots on a trout? More seriously, think of the small, useless things you experience the smell of fall in the air, the fragment of a song that reminds you of when you were a kid. Give thanks. This Thanksgiving, don t express gratitude only when you feel it. Give thanks especially when you don t feel it. Rebel against the emotional authenticity that holds you back from your bliss. As for me, I am taking my own advice and updating my gratitude list. It includes my family, faith, friends and work. But also the dappled complexion of my bread- packed bird. And it includes you, for reading this column. to- be- grateful- it- will- make- you- happier.html

28 Grade 9 Humanities English/Social Studies Summer Reading Assignment: Study Guide Mr. Merry/Ms. DeLeon Student Name: Date submitted: To be completed and brought with you to the first day of class. Be prepared use this Study Guide on an assessment the first week of class. 1. BEFORE you read the article When the People Cheer: How Hip-Hop Failed Black America, list 3 details you already know about hip-hop and/or Black music. 1) 2) 3) 2. AS YOU READ THE ARTICLE, define the 10 bolded vocabulary words on a separate sheet of paper within the context of the article. In other words, summarize what each term means as it relates to the article. 3. AFTER YOU HAVE READ THE ARTICLE, list 3 details you learned about hip-hop and/or Black music. 1) 2) 3) SOURCING QUESTION for When the People Cheer: How Hip-Hop Failed Black America:

29 SOURCING: 1. Who wrote this? 2. What locations are discussed in the article? What time periods are mentioned? CLOSE READING: 4. What claim(s) does the author make? 5. What evidence does the author use to support his claim(s)? 6. Is this source/author credible? Why or why not? How do you know? 7. Why do you think this article was written? What events, attitudes or beliefs are discussed?

30 Grade 9 Humanities English/Social Studies Summer Reading Assignment: Article Mr. Merry/Ms. deleon When the People Cheer: How Hip-Hop Failed Black America Culture - April 22, :45 a.m. By Questlove Photo: Maya Robinson and Photo by Getty There are three famous quotes that haunt me and guide me though my days. The first is from John Bradford, the 16th-century English reformer. In prison for inciting a mob, Bradford saw a parade of prisoners on their way to being executed and said, There but for the grace of God go I. (Actually, he said There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford, but the switch to the pronoun makes it work for the rest of us.) The second comes from Albert Einstein, who disparagingly referred to quantum entanglement as spooky action at a distance. And for the third, I go to Ice Cube, the chief lyricist of N.W.A., who delivered this manifesto in Gangsta Gangsta back in 1988: Life ain t nothing but bitches and money. Those three ideas may seem distant from one another, but if you set them up and draw lines between them, that s triangulation. Bradford s idea, of course, is about providence, about luck and gratitude: You only have your life because you don t have someone else s. At the simplest level, I think about that often. I could be where others are, and by extension, they could be where I am. You don t want to be insensible to that. You don t want to be an ingrate. (By the by, Bradford s quote has come to be used to celebrate good fortune when people say it, they re comforting themselves with the fact that things could be worse but in fact, his own good fortune lasted only a few years before he was burned at the stake.) Einstein was talking about physics, of course, but to me, he s talking about something closer to home the way that other people affect you, the way that your life is entangled in theirs whether or not there s a clear line of connection. Just because something is happening to a street kid in Seattle or a small-time outlaw in Pittsburgh doesn t mean that it s not also happening, in some sense, to you. Human civilization is founded on a social contract, but all too often that gets reduced to a kind of charity: Help those who are less fortunate, think of those who are different. But there s a subtler form of contract, which is the connection between us all. And then there s Ice Cube, who seems to be talking about life s basic appetites what s under the lid of the id but is in fact proposing a world where that social contract is destroyed, where everyone aspires to improve themselves and only themselves, thoughts of others be damned. What kind of world does that create? Those three ideas, Bradford s and Einstein s and Cube s, define the three sides of a triangle, and I m standing in it with pieces of each man: Bradford s rueful contemplation, Einstein s hair, Ice Cube s desires. Can the three roads meet without being trivial? This essay, and the ones that follow it, will attempt to find out. I m going to do things a little differently, with some madness in my method. I may not refer back to these three thinkers and these three thoughts, but they re always there, hovering, as I think through what a generation of hip-hop has wrought. And I m not going to handle the argument in a straight line. But don t wonder too much when it wanders. I ll get back on track.

31 I want to start with a statement: Hip-hop has taken over black music. At some level, this is a complex argument, with many outer rings, but it has a simple, indisputable core. Look at the music charts, or think of as many pop artists as you can, and see how many of the black ones aren t part of hip-hop. There aren t many hip-hop performers at the top of the charts lately: You have perennial winners like Jay Z, Kanye West, and Drake, along with newcomers like Kendrick Lamar, and that s about it. Among women, it s a little bit more complicated, but only a little bit. The two biggest stars, Beyoncé and Rihanna, are considered pop (or is that pop-soul), but what does that mean anymore? In their case, it means that they re offering a variation on hip-hop that s reinforced by their associations with the genre s biggest stars: Beyoncé with Jay Z, of course, and Rihanna with everyone from Drake to A$AP Rocky to Eminem. It wasn t always that way. Back in the late '80s, when I graduated high school, you could count the number of black musical artists that weren t in hip-hop on two hands maybe. You had folksingers like Tracy Chapman, rock bands like Living Colour, pop acts like Lionel Richie, many kinds of soul singers and that doesn t even contend with megastars like Michael Jackson and Prince, who thwarted any easy categorization. Hip-hop was plenty present in 1989 alone, you had De La Soul and the Geto Boys and EPMD and Boogie Down Productions and Ice-T and Queen Latifah but it was just a piece of the pie. In the time since, hip-hop has made like the Exxon Valdez (another 1989 release): It spilled and spread. So what if hip-hop, which was once a form of upstart black-folk music, came to dominate the modern world? Isn t that a good thing? It seems strange for an artist working in the genre to be complaining, and maybe I m not exactly complaining. Maybe I m taking a measure of my good fortune. Maybe. Or maybe it s a little more complicated than that. Maybe domination isn t quite a victory. Maybe ever-presence isn t quite a virtue. Twenty years ago, when my father first heard about my hip-hop career, he was skeptical. He didn't know where it was all headed. In his mind, a drummer had a real job, like working as music director for Anita Baker. But if I m going to marvel at the way that hip-hop overcame his skepticism and became synonymous with our broader black American culture, I m going to have to be clear with myself that marvel is probably the wrong word. Black culture, which has a long tradition of struggling against (and at the same time, working in close collaboration with) the dominant white culture, has rounded the corner of the 21st century with what looks in one sense like an unequivocal victory. Young America now embraces hip-hop as the signal pop-music genre of its time. So why does that victory feel strange: not exactly hollow, but a little haunted? I have wondered about this for years, and worried about it for just as many years. It s kept me up at night or kept me distracted during the day. And after looking far and wide, I keep coming back to the same answer, which is this: The reason is simple. The reason is plain. Once hip-hop culture is ubiquitous, it is also invisible. Once it s everywhere, it is nowhere. What once offered resistance to mainstream culture (it was part of the larger tapestry, spooky-action style, but it pulled at the fabric) is now an integral part of the sullen dominant. Not to mention the obvious backlash conspiracy paranoia: Once all of black music is associated with hip-hop, then those Who Wish to Squelch need only squelch one genre to effectively silence an entire cultural movement. And that s what it s become: an entire cultural movement, packed into one hyphenated adjective. These days, nearly anything fashioned or put forth by black people gets referred to as hip-hop, even when the description is a poor or pointless fit. Hip-hop fashion makes a little sense, but even that is confusing: Does it refer to fashions popularized by hip-hop musicians, like my Lego heart pin, or to fashions that participate in the same vague cool that defines hip-hop music? Others make a whole lot of nonsense: Hip-hop food? Hip-hop politics? Hip-hop intellectual? And there s even hip-hop architecture. What the hell is that? A house you build with a Hammer? This doesn t happen with other genres. There s no folk-music food or New Wave fashion, once you get past food for thought and skinny ties. There s no junkanoo architecture. The closest thing to a musical style that does

32 double-duty as an overarching aesthetic is punk, and that doesn t have the same strict racial coding. On the one hand, you can point to this as proof of hip-hop s success. The concept travels. But where has it traveled? The danger is that it has drifted into oblivion. The music originally evolved to paint portraits of real people and handle real problems at close range social contract, anyone? but these days, hip-hop mainly rearranges symbolic freight on the black starliner. Containers on the container ship are taken from here to there and never mind the fact that they may be empty containers. Keep on pushin and all that, but what are you pushing against? As it has become the field rather than the object, hip-hop has lost some of its pertinent sting. And then there s the question of where hip-hop has arrived commercially, or how fast it s departing. The music industry in general is sliding, and hip-hop is sliding maybe faster than that. The largest earners earn large, but not at the rate they once did. And everyone beneath that upper level is fading fast. The other day, we ran into an old man who is also an old fan. He loves the Roots and what we do. Someone mentioned the changing nature of the pop-culture game, and it made him nostalgic for the soul music of his youth. It ll be back, he said. Things go in cycles. But do they? If you really track the ways that music has changed over the past 200 years, the only thing that goes in cycles is old men talking about how things go in cycles. History is more interested in getting its nut off. There are patterns, of course, boom and bust and ways in which certain resources are exhausted. There are foundational truths that are stitched into the human DNA. But the art forms used to express those truths change without recurring. They go away and don t come back. When hip-hop doesn t occupy an interesting place on the pop-culture terrain, when it is much of the terrain and loses interest even in itself, then what? Back to John Bradford for a moment: I m lucky to be here. That goes without saying, but I ll say it. Still, as the Roots round into our third decade, we shoulder a strange burden, which is that people expect us to be both meaningful and popular. We expect that. But those things don t necessarily work together, especially in the hiphop world of today. The winners, the top dogs, make art mostly about their own victories and the victory of their genre, but that triumphalist pose leaves little room for anything else. Meaninglessness takes hold because meaninglessness is addictive. People who want to challenge this theory point to Kendrick Lamar, and the way that his music, at least so far, has some sense of the social contract, some sense of character. But is he just the exception that proves the rule? Time will tell. Time is always telling. Time never stops telling.

33 Grade 9 Modern World History and Grade 10 American History Summer Assignment Notes Mr. Martin/Mr. East For your Fort Hayes World History/American History Summer Assignment you will be reviewing and preparing for a formative assessment (quiz) on basic Social Studies skills that will be given on the first day of class. Study the notes below carefully, then take the practice test. Bring these materials with you on the first day of school. The use of primary and secondary sources of information includes an examination of the credibility of each source, that is, whether or not they are believable. This is accomplished by checking sources for: Sourcing 1) the qualifications and reputation of the author 2) agreement with other credible sources 3) perspective or bias of the author (including use of stereotypes) 4) accuracy and internal consistency 5) the circumstances in which the author prepared the source 1. Consider who wrote a document as well as the circumstances of its creation. 2. Before reading a document, ask: a) Who wrote this? b) What is the author s point of view? c) Why was it written? d) When was it written? (A long time or short time after the event?) e) Is this source believable? Why? Why not? Contextualization 1. Locate a document in time and place and to understand how these factors shape its content. 2. When reading a document, ask: a) What else was going on at the time this was written? b) What was it like to be alive at this time? c) What things were different back then? d) What things were the same? e) What would it look like to see this event through the eyes of someone who lived back then? Close Reading 1. Evaluate sources and analyze rhetoric by asking: a) What claims does the author make? b) What evidence does the author use to support those claims? c) How is this document supposed to make me feel? d) What words or phrases does the author use to convince me that he/she is right? e) What information does the author leave out? Corroboration 1. Consider details across multiple sources to determine points of agreement and disagreement. 2. Ask: a) What do other pieces of evidence say? b) Am I finding the same information everywhere? c) Am I finding different versions of the story? If yes, why might that be? d) Where else could I look to find out about this?

34 Being able to correctly identify an author s claim as well as cite the evidence the author uses to support this claim are important skills to master in studying history. Claim: A claim states your position on the issue you have chosen to write about. 1. A good claim is not obvious. Why bother proving a point nobody could disagree with? 2. A good claim is engaging. Consider your audience s attention span and make claims which point out new ideas: teach the reader something new. 3. A good claim is not overly vague. Attacking enormous issues leads only to generalizations and vague assertions; keep it manageable. 4. A good claim is logical; it emerges from a reasonable consideration of the evidence. However, this does not mean that evidence has only one logical interpretation.. Evidence: the facts or data which you cite to support your claim. Like a lawyer presenting evidence to a jury, you must support your claim with facts; an unsupported claim is merely an assertion. Data can include: 1. Facts or statistics: objectively determined data about your topic. (Note: objective may be open to debate.) 2. Expert opinion: Learned opinion, theory, and analysis that you should cite frequently, both to support your argument and to disagree with. Sources must be quoted, paraphrased, and cited appropriately. 3. Primary research: an explanation and discussion of your own research findings and how they relate to your topic.

35 Grade 9 Modern World History/Grade 10 American History Summer Assignment Practice Quiz Mr. Martin/Mr. East Use the image below to answer question 1: "Washington crossing the Delaware: on the evening of December 25th, 1776, previous to the Battle of Trenton," created in 1876 by John B. Cameron. 1. From the choices below choose the statement that best refutes or opposes the following claim: The image, "Washington crossing the Delaware," is a useful resource for historians who wish to understand what happened during the Battle of Trenton of A. This painting was created 100 years after the Battle of Trenton, so it is of limited use to a historian researching the Battle of Trenton. B. This painting is not a primary source, so it is not useful to a historian researching the Battle of Trenton. C. A historian would need more than just this one source to research the Battle of Trenton. D. Paintings are not reliable sources of information and are not useful for historians. 2. Which source on the writing of the Constitution would be considered a primary source? A. A textbook chapter about the Constitution B. A newspaper article written in 1861 C. Notes from the Constitutional Convention written by James Madison D. The book, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, by Charles Beard