General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Common Core teaches Gettysburg Address with no context or background. Unbelievable. [View all]MineralMan
(146,317 posts)However, the Gettysburg Address is not a passage of text I would choose for that exercise in close reading. It is too familiar, or should be, to students of the age group expected to do that close reading.
I first heard and read Lincoln's speech in fifth grade. We learned it in the context of the Civil War, as a historical document. The teacher helped the students understand the words and the structure of that short speech, so we would understand what was said better. I got a gold star for memorizing and reciting it correctly.
I suspect that today's students, at any age, would encounter this speech and have some difficulty with its words and grammar. Lincoln chose his words carefully and used the English language in a very compact, yet complex way, to say what he had to say. In 2013, the word "score" means many things, but almost never twenty, to most people. And that's just the beginning of the speech. Lincoln's use of parallel structures in his sentences would go unnoticed by most, and most teachers would make corrections in the speech, because they fail to understand how the grammar in it works.
No, I wouldn't use the Gettysburg Address as an exercise in close reading. Instead, I'd pick a passage from some author, perhaps of the same period, for that exercise. Maybe Dickens, for example. A passage from his American Notes would serve nicely for the exercise. There, too, the student would discover words used in ways unfamiliar, and would find that parsing one of Dickens' complex sentences a challenge.
The exercise is useful, and should be done more often with our students. The choice of texts, however, could have been better. If the speech were not so familiar, it would serve nicely, though.
Here is a brief passage from American Notes for your close reading. I wish you all success in the exercise:
astonishment, with which, on the morning of the third of January
eighteen-hundred-and-forty-two, I opened the door of, and put my head
into, a state-room on board the Britannia steam-packet, twelve hundred
tons burthen per register, bound for Halifax and Boston, and carrying Her
Majestys mails.
That this state-room had been specially engaged for Charles Dickens,
Esquire, and Lady, was rendered sufficiently clear even to my scared
intellect by a very small manuscript, announcing the fact, which was
pinned on a very flat quilt, covering a very thin mattress, spread like a
surgical plaster on a most inaccessible shelf. But that this was the
state-room concerning which Charles Dickens, Esquire, and Lady, had held
daily and nightly conferences for at least four months preceding: that
this could by any possibility be that small snug chamber of the
imagination, which Charles Dickens, Esquire, with the spirit of prophecy
strong upon him, had always foretold would contain at least one little
sofa, and which his lady, with a modest yet most magnificent sense of its
limited dimensions, had from the first opined would not hold more than
two enormous portmanteaus in some odd corner out of sight (portmanteaus
which could now no more be got in at the door, not to say stowed away,
than a giraffe could be persuaded or forced into a flower-pot): that this
utterly impracticable, thoroughly hopeless, and profoundly preposterous
box, had the remotest reference to, or connection with, those chaste and
pretty, not to say gorgeous little bowers, sketched by a masterly hand,
in the highly varnished lithographic plan hanging up in the agents
counting-house in the city of London: that this room of state, in short,
could be anything but a pleasant fiction and cheerful jest of the
captains, invented and put in practice for the better relish and
enjoyment of the real state-room presently to be disclosed:these were
truths which I really could not, for the moment, bring my mind at all to
bear upon or comprehend. And I sat down upon a kind of horsehair slab,
or perch, of which there were two within; and looked, without any
expression of countenance whatever, at some friends who had come on board
with us, and who were crushing their faces into all manner of shapes by
endeavouring to squeeze them through the small doorway.