General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Common Core teaches Gettysburg Address with no context or background. Unbelievable. [View all]frazzled
(18,402 posts)curriculum. It's about how to analyze meanings of texts for comprehension. And if you go to the actual proposed draft of the unit (which is clearly marked DRAFT Awaiting review and improvement per the Tri-State quality review rubric), there are suggestions for additional History/Social Studies activities. Teachers, of course, are free to teach these units in any way they wish.
I spent a number of years as a volunteer tutor for high school kids who had problems in precisely these areas. Most were non-native speakers, from a multitude of countries. That's the situation in most of our urban (and even suburban) public schools today, where upwards of 60 languages can be spoken in a district. When I look at the suggested activities, I see some useful strategies for getting students to suss out meanings of texts they are reading (and after understanding the meanings of words like "score" and "conceived" going on to add historical detail). Thus for instance, they have three successive sets of discussion topics for the first sentence of the address alone.
Have students do as much work as they can from the context to determine what is meant by conceived here. The sentence defines one key meaning of conceive: to bring forth something new. This is one way in which the nation is new; it did not exist before. [Thats enough to do with conceive for now. Lincoln uses this word in at least two ways and its meanings will be discussed later in much greater detail.
D What is he saying is significant about America? Is he saying that no one has been free or equal before? So what is new?
Answering this question will force students to pay attention to two things that Lincoln says that this nation is conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Students need to grasp the structure of the sentence: these two phrases modify and describe the new nation.
1. conceived in liberty: Lincoln says the country was conceived in Liberty, that is, the people who founded it freely chose to dedicate themselves to a claim it was not forced upon them. They were able to think freely. During the making of the country our fathers were free to structure it however they wanted and they chose to dedicate it to what?
2. dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal: what does it mean to be dedicated to a claim? One way to help students grasp the force of Lincolns words is to ask them to consider what would be different if the proposition changed what if the nation were dedicated to the opposite, i.e., that some people are better than others?
When it goes on to the second sentence ("Now we are engaged in a great civil war), after discussing four-score and conceived and liberty and the claim that all men are created equal, it goes on to ask more discussion-based questions:
Probe students to clarify their understanding of the shift in time created by beginning the paragraph with nowthat Lincoln is no longer speaking about 1776 but 1863.
C. What is the point including the phrase or any nation so conceived and so dedicated what would the sentence mean without it?
Without the phrase, Lincoln would only be talking about the survival of a specific place, the nation founded in 1776 (that nation). With the phrase or any nation so conceived or dedicated he says the question is not just the survival of that nation but any nation built on the same principles. Lincoln says that what is at stake in this war is not just the freedom and quality in this country, but the possibility that you could build a country on these ideals. What is being tested is not just a specific place, but the viability of a set of ideals.
Okay, it goes on like this for a long time (and then supplementary History and Social Studies activities are suggested). You can read the entire proposed (and as yet unfinished, it seems) lesson at (a Word document):
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=common%20core%20gettysburg%20address&source=web&cd=5&ved=0CDoQFjAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.engageny.org%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2Fresource%2Fattachments%2Fhigh-school-exemplar-lincoln-gettysburg-address.doc&ei=iXeRUrwHp-XZBf7QgbgN&usg=AFQjCNEtiJn6IhdM8ivFj_RoOVOgrD4VhA&sig2=nQ0-47GVQP8Lu6eRzP4_0A&bvm=bv.56988011,d.b2I
If you have never worked with the broad swath of kids, both native and non-native English speakers who have trouble not reading but analyzing such texts, you may not appreciate the approach. Frankly, it's the kind of analysis that scholars themselves do in close readings of historical texts.
I think this article is being rather dismissive without understanding the curricular aims.