Reconstruction Narratives were due today. Students completed these self evaluation questions:
Full name? Date? Period?
What aspect(s) of the failure
of Reconstruction did you write about?
Use a highlighter to mark
passages where you show your knowledge of this (if you wrote about multiple
aspects of the failure use different colored highlighters for each).
The assignment calls for
including dialogue and setting description in the narrative, how well did you
meet these requirements?
Mr. Zartler hoped to encourage
empathy through this assignment; empathy is being able to connect with the
feelings of others. Did you experience empathy while working on this
assignment? Is there evidence of that experience in your story?
What general comments do you
have about your success on this assignment?
What grade would you assign to
this paper, why?
Students who did not have their papers wrote the following:
Why my paper isn't in:
My specific plan with concrete (and realistic) dates / timeline.
Next the class listened to this story from NPR's Morning Edition. Students made marginal notes and wrote a response:
For Two Ozarks
Communities, A Stark Contrast In Culture
by FRANK MORRIS National Public
Radio All Things Considered
May 12, 2014 4:21 AM ET First of a two-part report.
The
neo-Nazi charged with killing three people at Jewish centers outside Kansas City
last month drove there from his home in the Ozarks, a hilly, rural, largely
conservative part of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas with a history of
attracting white supremacists.
The
Kansas murders sparked a painful discussion in the shooter's community in
Marionville, Mo., where bigotry is an especially divisive subject.
"I
am not blind to the shortcomings of this area, and I will tell you, as a
native, we are still mired in the past," says Nancy Allen, a professor and
author in nearby Springfield, Mo.
Allen
says most black residents fled Springfield after three black men were lynched
on the town square in 1906. That left it a largely white city in a very white
region endowed with a fiercely independent and insular culture. Allen calls it
the "code of the hills."
Recently,
the former mayor of Marionville was pressured to resign days after delivering
this sound bite on TV: "Things going on in this country that's destroying
us. We've got a false economy, and some of those corporations are run by
Jews."
Visiting
his town, you can see why he might be looking for someone to blame for its
decline. Marionville has lost its university and factories that once employed
hundreds. Downtown is boarded up.
The
neo-Nazi accused of the shootings in suburban Kansas City — a man known here as
Frazier Glenn Miller — bought a house nearby more than 20 years ago and made
some friends.
"Yes
sir, I knew him, real nice guy. He'd help somebody. He helped me quite a few
times. Real nice guy," says Jason Click as he sits behind the wheel of a
big old pickup with a rebel flag on the ceiling. He says bigotry — Miller's or
the former mayor's — doesn't faze him.
"To
each their own, I reckon. If that's how you feel, then that's how you feel. You
shouldn't be mad because their opinion's different than yours," Click
says.
But
the former mayor's comments split this friendly town in half.
"People don't want to have
the brand of being racist, backwards bigots, and when the mayor made his
comments, that's exactly what we are portrayed as," says John Horner, who
lives with his partner in a prominent house in Marionville.
Horner
finds this town very accepting but uncomfortable about addressing its
differences over racism. "It's like poking at an open wound. They don't
want to talk about the issue because the popular sentiment is if we don't talk
about it, it will go away," he says.
And
that holds for many here, even at the Hillbilly Gas Mart. Flora Walker knows
that some of her longtime customers don't come around anymore because they
don't want to be in the same room with those offended by the former mayor's
comments.
"I
liked and cared about everybody involved. They were all my friends. I care
about what happens to them. I don't hate anybody, and it's sad that some of
them now hate one another," Walker says.
Cultures
Coexist
Just
60 miles south of Marionville, there's a town similar in heritage but
culturally on a different planet. One of the most infamous anti-Semites in
American history, Gerald L.K. Smith, retired to Eureka Springs, Ark., 50 years
ago, erected a gigantic seven-story statue of Jesus and established an outdoor
theatrical extravaganza depicting Christ's last days.
Now,
the great Passion Play is scrubbed of its original anti-Semitic message. And
the big Jesus gazes over a town Smith would probably hate. Longtime
resident Michael Walsh says you just can't miss the gay culture here.
"There
are rainbow flags outside of a lot of the gay-owned shops. A lot of us are
movers and shakers in town," Walsh says.
The
town boasts three gay pride weekends annually and a vibrant tourist economy.
It's about the same size as Marionville and just about as white, but Walsh says
in Eureka Springs, old ways and new culture coexist.
"That
statue and the great Passion Play [don't] by any means represent the town. It's
just part of the great mosaic in this little town — so it has its place in this
community, as do rainbow flags," Walsh says.
Parts
of the Ozarks seem to be coming to terms with modern American culture in ways
that might shock earlier generations. But it's not happening quickly or evenly
or without a fight from people who want to preserve a white homeland where the
so-called code of the hills still holds sway.
