11.0. Language Arts/Mathematics/Social Studies Reading: On Being a Quant

I thought this article was interesting, and am going to put it up on the page of links under "Mathematics" and "Civics," but thought I should be posting when I am doing this stuff. The article refers to the book Moneyball by Michael Lewis, who normally writes about business matters. The book is about changing the way a baseball team is run in order to try and quantify things number. We use the word "quantify" in our logical essays, it means to understand or express something in quantities, or numbers. The word "quant" is a back formation (that's when people take a word and shorten it to make a new word that's faster to say) that means "a person who believes in understanding the world through the sophisticated use of statistics." Here's the link to the article, "The Statisticians on the Bus: How a Nerd Changed Political Reporting Forever," by Andrew Romano, at Newsweek's website.

W10. Written Argument Prompt: "For Whom Would You Have Voted?"

The students here always get into the Presidential election, and it's nice to hear the kind of (sometimes heated) discourse in our classrooms. So, I figured that it made sense to write a piece on which candidate each of us would have voted for, had we attained our majority of eighteen.

Social Studies - Language Arts Interdisciplinary Writing Prompt

This week's essay forces you to assume a role and write from that perspective, so don't forget the RAFT skill - it's our easiest skill, but also easiest to forget doing.
The teachers in eighth grade Social Studies and Language have convened and arrived at a prompt that will test both Writing Skills and Social Studies content knowledge.

Language Arts-Social Studies Activity

This week's current event is taking a quick break from the Presidential campaign to talk about a news story that we thought might be interesting to our middle schoolers.

We're going to write less this week that normally for a current event - instead of the Chain of Main Ideas, we're going to write two central ideas, aka WHO+WHAT+WHY sentences. If you don't know how to write one, there are directions to help you below.

1. Read the informational article here and write a WHO+WHAT+WHY sentence that expresses the central idea of the article.

2. Read this second nonfiction piece on the same topic - how is it different from the first one? How is the author's purpose different? How does that affect what's is in the article? Write a WHO+WHAT+WHY sentence for this one, too.

When you are done, you will have read two articles and have written two (longish) sentences.

Things to Think about/That We May Discuss
Think about these issues - you DON'T need to write or type answers to them.

- You know the difference between facts and opinions. Notice that one of these pieces contains the author's opinions and one does not. Why do you think that is?

- Notice that when writing the directions, I used two different terms to name the readings - one is called an "article" and one is not. What accounts for this?

- This article is about France - so what does it have to do with us? Why care about topics that are concerned with French schoolchildren? Why care?

- Notice that the second article adds something as a "Bonus" meaning that the author didn't think that she wanted to simply make it another paragraph. Why do you feel that she labeled this part "Bonus"?

Current Events Article RI2./RHST2.

We're doing another Current Event Article about the 2012 Presidential Election, which the biggest news story in America during October.
However, the article will be easier to understand if we take a quick check of your understanding of American government. Take this short true/false quiz to check what you know about this topic. You get your credit when you get to the end of the quiz and the form asks for your name.


Once you are done with that, here's this week's article, "Struggling Young Adults Are a Question Mark for Campaigns," which deals with an crucial part of the electorate in the coming election.

Complete your "Chain of Main Ideas" summary according to our format. Remember that in some news articles, there are shorter paragraphs, and if you see a paragraph that is just a quotation, it probably is the proving evidence for the previous paragraph. You don't need to write a main idea sentence for that one, since you already did. For Mr. Holder's classes, complete your chain of main ideas in Google Docs. For Mr. Holder's classes and Ms. O'Mara's, after your summary, write a WHO+WHAT+WHY central idea sentence, because you get credit for that in our class.