ELA Unit Overview

Grade 11, Quarter 3, 3-5 weeks

Unit Overview: Sin and Redemption: Juxtaposition of Boy Soldiers in
A Long Way Gone and excerpt of The Sunflower (Forgiveness)
Unifying Concept: The Juxtaposition of Boy Soldiers
Overview:A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah and an excerpt of The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal are two memoirs which examine the true-life tragedy of raising boys to hate and kill and the moral dilemmaof seeking redemption both from victims and for themselves for atrocities committed against humanity. Beah is an innocent twelve-year-old boy from a small village in Sierra Leone who loves rap music when his village is attacked by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels. Without family, a home, safety, or sense of belonging, after a year of struggling to survive in the war-torn country, Ishmael is adopted into a breakout group of the Sierra Leone Army, where seeing people mutilated or killed and participating in the inhumanity himself becomes as natural as “drinking a glass of water”. At sixteen, UNICEF workers remove him from the fighting and struggle to rehabilitate him to forgive himself, heal, and return to humanity. He later seeks refuge in America and becomes a member of the Human Rights Watch Children’s Rights Division Advisory Committee and heads the Ishmael Beah Foundation, dedicated to helping former child soldiers reintegrate into society. This text is juxtaposed with an excerpt of Simon Wiesenthal’s memoir, The Sunflower. A Holocaust survivor who lost 89 family members, was imprisoned in 5 different Nazi concentration camps, and at 6’ tall, weighed less than 100 lbs. when liberated at Mauthausen, Simon was once called to the bedside of Karl, a young dying Nazi soldier who wanted to confess his crimes and have Simon forgive him before he died. Simon went on to dedicate his life to tracking down and prosecuting former Nazi criminals, founding the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angles and is credited with the capture of approximately 1,100 Nazi officials, including Adolf Eichmann. Additionally, this unit includes an excerpt of a CNN interview with Ishmael Beal, an excerpt of the documentary, “I Have Never Forgotten You” of Simon Wiesenthal, and “Night and Fog” or “We Must Never Forget”, the poem “To the Little Polish Boy” by Peter Fishel, Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song”, artwork by both Simon and other children in the camps (I Never Saw Another Butterfly) and RUF soldiers, and a Socratic Circle debating reasons why Simon should or should not have forgive the dying SS soldier, Karl.
Purpose:
To explore the possibility of tragedy and restoration, sin and the search for atonement, and nature vs nurture.
To identify similarities and differences in historical situations, the era, in the veracity of and reasons for seeking atonement
To compare and contrast Ishmael’s similarities and differences with both Karl and Simon.
Enduring Understandings:

Literature explores the willingness to face challenges and explore the unknown.
Effective writers use informational writing, including statistics, facts and anecdotes to inform, explain, and report.

/ Essential Questions:

What do we gain when we learn about the lived experiences of other people?
What are the politics and consequences of war, and how do these vary based on an individual or cultural perspective?
Why do some people choose to avoid those who are different from them while others seek out diversity?
What are the enduring struggles for justice throughout history?
Does everyone have an equal responsibility to stand up to injustice?
How are bias and prejudice created? How do we overcome them?

Target Standards are emphasized during the quarter and used in a formal assessment to evaluate student mastery.
Highly-Leveraged1 arethe most essential for students to learn because they have endurance (knowledge and skills are relevant throughout a student's lifetime); leverage (knowledge and skills are used across multiple content areas); and essentiality (knowledge and skills are necessary for success in future courses or grade levels).
11.RI.3 Analyze a complex set of ideas or sequence of events and explain how specific individuals, ideas, or events interact and develop over the course of the text.
11.RI.6 Determine an author’s point of view or purpose in a text in which the rhetoric is particularly effective, analyze how style and content contribute to the power, persuasiveness, or beauty of the text.
11.W.8 Gather relevant information from multiple authoritative print and digital sources, using advanced searches effectively; assess the strengths and limitations of each source in terms of the task, purpose, and audience; integrate information into the text selectively to maintain the flow of ideas, avoiding plagiarism and overreliance on any one source and following a standard format for citation.
11.L.3 Apply knowledge of language to understand how language functions in different contexts, to make effective choices for meaning or style, and to comprehend more fully when reading or listening.
Supporting are related standards that support the highly-leveraged standards in and across grade levels.
11.RL.3 Analyze the impact of the author's choices regarding how to develop and relate elements of a story or drama (e.g., where a story is set, how the action is ordered, how the characters are introduced and developed
11.RL.6 Analyze a case in which grasping a point of view requires distinguishing what is directly stated in a text from what is really meant (e.g., satire, sarcasm, irony, or understatement).
11.W.2 Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas, concepts, and information clearly and accurately through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content.
11.W.7 Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects to answer a question (including a self-generated question) or solve a problem; narrow or broaden the inquiry when appropriate; synthesize multiple sources on the subject, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation.
11.SL.5 Make strategic use of digital media (e.g., textual, graphical, audio, visual, and interactive elements) in presentations to enhance understanding of findings, reasoning, and evidence and to add interest.
Constant Standards are addressed routinely every quarter.
By the end of grade 11, read and comprehend literary nonfiction in the grades 11-CCR text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range.
11.RL.1,10
11.RI.1,10
11.W.4,5,6,10
1.SL.1,2,6
11.L.1,2,6
Selected Readings of Complex Texts
Extended/Short Texts:
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah
Excerpt of “The Sunflower” by Simon Wiesenthal
Additional Instructional Resources
Electronic Resources and Alternative Media:

(interviews of Ismael Beah)
(2 minute excerpt of movie “Blood Diamond” (Blood Diamond 4 Training Soldiers)
(complete Holocaust resource center)
Photo of Little Polish Boy With hands Up and poem “To The Little Polish Boy” by Peter Fischl
Documentary: “I Have Never Forgotten You” (Wiesenthal documentary on Netflix). First 31 minutes only.
Documentary: “We Must Never Forget: The Story of the Holocaust” or “Night and Fog” (documentary)
Performance Assessments
Formative Assessments:
T-chart with concrete evidence from the text for both pro and con forgiveness (minimum of 6 reasons per side), Discussion/Notes, Socratic Seminar, literacy circles, ekphrastic poem, collage, Capture the Chapter. / Summative Assessments:
ABC book or Power Point presentation, quiz on Holocaust terminology, reflection on documentary, small groups charting Venn Diagram comparing Simon and Ishmael, written argumentative essay, and SchoolCity 20 question assessment

1This definition for highly-leveraged standards was adapted from the “power standard” definition on the website of Millis Public Schools, K-12, in Massachusetts, USA.