Last week during a vacation I had the opportunity to re-listen to the LToW tapes and look over the Teacher's Guide. As a result, I have a question.
I was looking at Arrangement Module 4, which is on pp. 48+. This is meant to be taught in lesson 3. You are supposed to have 'on hand' examples of essays that begin with statistics, proverbs, questions, quotations, and anecdotes--two or three of each.
I'm wondering if any of you have gotten this far in teaching, and where you found samples of essays. In the past when I've tried to find essay samples for other purposes, it hasn't been easy.
Last week during a vacation I had the opportunity to re-listen to the LToW tapes and look over the Teacher's Guide. As a result, I have a question.
I was looking at Arrangement Module 4, which is on pp. 48+. This is meant to be taught in lesson 3. You are supposed to have 'on hand' examples of essays that begin with statistics, proverbs, questions, quotations, and anecdotes--two or three of each.
I'm wondering if any of you have gotten this far in teaching, and where you found samples of essays. In the past when I've tried to find essay samples for other purposes, it hasn't been easy. Would love to hear how others are handling this. Patricia
Patricia,
Let's all team up on this. One magazine that is helpful is the Economist because it puts a lot of emphasis on orderly thought in short articles. We will be posting examples as soon as possible.
Somewhere in my bookshop-haunting life, I picked up a copy of the Oxford Book of Essays. It has proved very helpful as a source of examples this year. Surprisingly, it is not only a source of excellent models, but I have also found models of "the wrong way to do it." We read one essay from it a couple of weeks ago that jumped right into the argument without an exordium. We found a couple this week without amplifications. These "bad" models have been particularly useful to help the children see why each part of the essay is important: when they hear a really well written, entertaining argument that just stops without an amplification, even my 12yo notices that the ending seems too abrupt.
I should perhaps mention that I do not always read every example all the way through. If an essay is just one or two pages long, I read the whole thing, but for longer essays, I have just read enough to give the context for our particular lesson. For instance while we were doing amplification this week, I would read the exordium and if necessary enough more to make sure they could figure out the author's thesis, then (after they'd told me what kind of exordium the author had used) I'd skip to the end of the essay and read enough for them to understand the conclusion and discuss the amplification.
