Originally designed to give students more help in developing their thesis for their Research Paper - this Partner Work was reworked to help students with the idea of what exactly a thesis is, in any case.  I found over the years that having a strong thesis was just about the most important aspect of writing any good essay - and I also sadly found that it was one of the most lacking skills in my students.  This exercise - designed to be completed in one class period by a hard-working, focused set of partners, uses the reading that they did on the Introduction to the Restoration Period.  The handout and questions can be adjusted for any text book background reading on the Restoration Period and most of the over-arching ideas should apply.  And that leads us to the other point of this assignment - to show, to demonstrate - or better yet, to have students discover for themselves, just what it was that made the Enlightenment (Restoration) different from what came before.

For the longest time, I taught "A Modest Proposal" as a Group Work (that Group Work can also be found on this website).  However, given that the following lesson on Swift is also a Group Work - I felt that it was time to break it up - and the last few years that I taught, "A Modest Proposal" was done as a hybrid discussion.  By hybrid, I mean that part of the class time is given to students - after we discuss what satire is - to find search through their "Modest Proposal" texts and find as many examples of satire as they can - and then we discuss, as a class, what they came up with.  Finally we talk about some of the problems of satire - and then listen to Malcolm Gladwell's incredible podcast (from Revisionist History) on "The Satire Paradox".  

Really, I never did both the discussion and the Group Work - but I'm still putting that next because I think it's that good and deserves to be seen (also why I wanted it to have its own page).  So here is the Group Work version of the Swift, Satire, and "A Modest Proposal" lesson.  I usually include Group Works on the same page as the discussion - but in this case, I really believe it deserves a page of its own.  For one thing, I certainly used this approach (Group Work) much more than the previous lesson's Discussion technique. Really, I never did both the discussion and the Group Work - but I'm still putting that next because I think it's that good and deserves to be seen (also why I wanted it to have its own page).  So here is the Group Work version of the Swift, Satire, and "A Modest Proposal" lesson.  I usually include Group Works on the same page as the discussion - but in this case, I really believe it deserves a page of its own.  For one thing, I certainly used this approach (Group Work) much more than the previous lesson's Discussion technique. 

This Group Work is pretty unique for me.  Rather than spending the majority of the time (in fact, there is just one question) on "Gulliver's Travels" - the questions focus on "getting" satire in general.  Consider it a continuation of the previous Swift lesson on "A Modest Proposal" and Malcolm Gladwell's "The Satire Paradox".  The first question has the students go through their reading and find examples of satire - testing their new-found mastery of understanding what Satire is.  And then, and then they look at two modern examples of satire - and the problems that those works encountered when published.  It is always easy to laugh at things from 200 years ago - but, it is (and this is a point that I make throughout the year - much harder to point that finger at ourselves.  If you can't - Satire is doomed from the start.

As with Swift's "A Modest Proposal", for the longest time I did Pope's "A Rape of the Lock" as a Group Work.  I suspect it had a lot to do with the timing of this unit - sometimes it would come much earlier, when the students were doing their Macbeth scenes and it just made sense to have them work in the groups they would be in for that project.  However, unlike "A Modest Proposal" - in this case, I believe a class discussion works much better (with Swift, it's a toss up) with Pope's epic satire.  Besides going over the text itself - and expanding the students mastery of reading and understanding satire - when handled as a discussion (using a Vertext), it also gives the class an opportunity to see just how relevant Pope's work and his disdain of the frailties of the very rich and fashionable - is today.  

There are two partner works here for students to do in class - after they have read the text book excerpt on Johnson and Boswell.  The older one is designed to compliment the research paper.  It has students look at their reading and take notes on it - as though they were writing a Background Research Paper on it.  The more recent handout (lesson) does not require that a research paper is being done concurrently.  This one gives students quotes about Johnson - written by the textbook writers - and asks them to find a supporting quote from Boswell's biography of Johnson (also found in the textbook) to support what the text book editors say.  There is also a chance for students to create the ever-popular Samuel Johnson meme (see the banner above).   Both exercises are worthwhile I believe and there is no reason that you couldn't do both.

When we were forced to learn and teach remotely - due the Pandemic, it took me a long time to consider whether or not I should teach Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year".  I had only taught it a few times in my 30 years of teaching - so there was no compulsion based on it being an invaluable part of the curriculum.  However, this was different.  We were in the middle of a deadly and life-changing Pandemic (much like Defoe's Plague - if perhaps not on the same scale) and it seemed that his words - had at this time - a lot to do with what we all were going through.  On the other hand, it very well might have far too close - too triggering for those students (and myself) who had so recently lost family members to Covid-19.  In the end - I knew that it was such a worthwhile endeavor.  My first class of the year states that we read literature to "know that we're not alone".