This resource aims to generate ideas and possibilities about how to advance student understanding of logic in writing beyond the notion that logic is always a collection of data points or a reference to facts. Instead of reducing logic to numbers and statements, this source hopes to introduce students and teachers to the existential questions that are always involved in the logical appeals of a text: how do we know what we know and why does it matter?

This resource introduces, suggests, and proposes multiple approaches for making Joan Didion's essay more accessible while trying not to oversimplify it.

The student will write a persuasive essay convincing the teacher of who is to blame for the witch hysteria and the subsequent deaths of innocent people.** This performance assessment was developed by a collaborative team of teachers and division staff from Middlesex, Poquoson, and West Point school divisions.

Alternative facts, fake news, and post-truth have become common terms in the contemporary news industry. Today, social media platforms allow sensational news to “go viral,” crowdsourced news from ordinary people to compete with professional reporting, and public figures in offices as high as the US presidency to bypass established media outlets when sharing news. However, dramatic reporting in daily news coverage predates the smartphone and tablet by over a century. In the late nineteenth century, the news media war between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal resulted in the rise of yellow journalism, as each newspaper used sensationalism and manipulated facts to increase sales and attract readers.

This resource intends to help students understand how parallelism is about more than mechanics and actually central to building thematic concepts.

Students will be defending the main character’s hero or villain status by analyzing the author’s choices within a text to create an analysis essay. Students may have the option of selecting the text/author/main character/villain or hero and will have the option of selecting the author’s choices to analyze.** This performance assessment was developed by a collaborative team of teachers and division staff from Middlesex, Poquoson, and West Point school divisions.

This resource provides eight multiple-choice questions which were modeled after question stems frequently appearing on the End of Course (EOC) Reading Standards of Learning (SOL) test. It is designed to be used with the poem "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop.

This lesson remixes an original lesson created by Susan Ketcham entitled "The Poetry of Maya Angelou." In this lesson, students expand on a classroom activity (discussion question number 4) from the original source lesson and will use that as a foundation for learning and preparing for their own oral recitation of a poem. In order to successfully complete this task, students will need to explore one poem for both literal and figurative meaning and then determine how that poem would sound if spoken aloud. This last step requires students to critically explore how oral techniques such as tone, pauses, shifts, etc. help develop meaning.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the poetry of Maya Angelou. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

The activities, assignments, and lessons included here are designed to help students read and write like artists who constantly take apart old ideas and texts in order to repackage them for the sake of contemporary humor, wisdom, and relevance. The activities introduce new vocabulary for discussing how texts work and play, as well as synthesis, analysis, and creativity.

Students research archival material to examine nineteenth and early twentieth century arguments for and against women's suffrage.