Letter to Parents

October 23, 2010

Dear Parent(s),

I am writing to inform you of the exciting new unit your young adult will be partaking in for the next nine weeks! The unit is integrated and includes aspects of American literature and history. The primary focus will be teaching your child about minority literature, culture, and history. It will require a lot of time and effort, but the experience will be rewarding and offer a lot of information that will be new and enlightening for the students.

The unit will be broken into three major pieces, and the topics will center around three novels. The first novel is The Coquette by Hannah Foster. It is a story about a woman living in the late 1700s who wishes to be independent, but faces societal expectations and firmly set gender roles that do not allow her aspirations to be achieved. The next novel that will be covered is Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. It is the most popular of the novels that will be taught, and it is about slavery and abolitionism in the decade preceding the Civil War. The final novel that will be taught is Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko. The novel explores ways in which Native Americans who fought in World War II were both included into American culture and excluded. It also shows the conflict between Native American government and medicine and the majority American form of government and medicine.

As the unit is integrated, special attention will be paid to historical aspects of each of the novels. Social and gender roles, along with laws that prohibited women from being self-supported will be discussed when The Coquette is being read. Slavery, abolitionism, the Fugitive Slave Act, and North and South politics will be discussed when reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Issues of assimilation and keeping a sense of identity and culture separate from the dominant American society will be discussed when reading Ceremony.

Many projects will be completed, including papers of varying length, a Webquest, and other more artistic, creative assignments. I will be explaining each of them in class, but I have also listed explanations for assignments on my blog, which I encourage you to access to stay in touch with what is happening in the classroom. If you have any questions regarding any of the information that has been shared, please feel free to contact me. All of my contact information is listed below. I am looking forward to an exciting, informative unit!
Sincerely,

Heather Peterson

Phone: (785) 492-8512
E-Mail: petersonh@bethanylb.edu