The 12th grade learning experience consists of 7 mostly month-long units aligned to the Common Core State Standards, with available course material for teachers and students easily accessible online. Over the course of the year there is a steady progression in text complexity levels, sophistication of writing tasks, speaking and listening activities, and increased opportunities for independent and collaborative work. Rubrics and student models accompany many writing assignments.Throughout the 12th grade year, in addition to the Common Read texts that the whole class reads together, students each select an Independent Reading book and engage with peers in group Book Talks. Language study is embedded in every 12th grade unit as students use annotation to closely review aspects of each text. Teacher resources provide additional materials to support each unit.

Students will consider the different ways that humor can be used by a writer to criticize people, practices, and institutions that he or she thinks are in need of serious reform. Students will read satirists ranging from classical Rome to modern day to examine how wit can be used to make important points about culture.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Students research an aspect of modern life that they would like to lampoon.
Students read from satirists across history to absorb the style and forms of humor and institutions satirized.
Students write their own satire, drawing on techniques of famous satirists to criticize their targets.

GUIDING QUESTIONS

These questions are a guide to stimulate thinking, discussion, and writing on the themes and ideas in the unit. For complete and thoughtful answers and for meaningful discussions, students must use evidence based on careful reading of the texts.

What is satire, and when is it too harsh?
How can humor and irony make you more persuasive?
What do you think is funny? How far would you go to satirize it?
Who gets more reaction—satirists or protestors?

In this lesson, students continue to prepare their presentations for the next lesson. You can assign what’s left to do for homework.

In this lesson, students will begin to study Swift’s famous essay “A Modest Proposal,” and answer the question, what is Swift really arguing?

In this lesson, students will look at how a writer discusses poverty. Everyone knows poverty is devastating, but how can a writer most effectively create a response from his or her audience so people want to take action? And what kinds of evidence are most persuasive?

In this lesson, students will examine stereotypical figures in three pieces of classic literature that often emerge in settings that serve as microcosms for the society at large. They will determine the intent of the satirical nature of each piece as well as the means of achieving it.

In this lesson, students will finish and share their cartoon characters and spend some time analyzing each other’s creations. They’ll look specifically at whether their classmates took a more Juvenalian or Horatian approach.

Great Writers Inspire presents an illuminating collection of Jonathan Swift resources curated by specialists at the University of Oxford. It includes audio and video lectures and short talks, downloadable electronic texts and eBooks, and background contextual resources.

This section brings together resources from the across the Great Writers Inspire site to illustrate how these can be used as a starting point for exploration of or classroom discussion about the political aspects of literature. The 'Approaching Political Literature' essay introduces a series of topics and questions and gives examples of resources to explore. It is aimed at teachers, students and anyone who is interested in literature who wants to put text into context and be inspired by Great Writers.

This section brings together resources from the across the Great Writers Inspire site to illustrate how these can be used as a starting point for exploration of or classroom discussion about genre. The 'Questions of Genre' essay introduces a series of topics and questions and gives examples of resources to explore. It is aimed at teachers, students and anyone who is interested in literature who wants to put text into context and be inspired by Great Writers.

This edition is derived from the Project Gutenberg edition of A Modest Proposal.

This digital textbook was developed through an "open pedagogy" approach with over 100 Austin Community College students contributing footnotes, introductory chapters, digital learning objects, and test bank questions with a student audience in mind. 86 chapters cover 1,000 years of British literature featuring primary source texts commonly assigned for survey courses of British Literature (ENGL 2322). Additionally, assignments and student samples of work are included to help teachers interested in adopting the practices that led to its creation.

Taught by William Flesch at Brandeis University, this course offers a survey of poetry that’s out of favor. But it turns out to be among the most skillful, brilliant, witty, invigorating, funny, sometimes dirty poetry ever written. (The dirty poetry is definitely NSFW. It may not even be safe for consenting adults.) Coverage goes from the urbane civic poetry of Dryden and his contemporaries to the beginnings of the intense subjectivity of Romanticism, with attention to the continuities between these wildly different schools. It’s helpful to have a complete Pope and the Penguin Dryden. We also use the Oxford Anthology of English Literature, ed. Martin Price.

Jonathan Swift's 1729 pamphlet "A Modest Proposal" is a model for satirizing social problems. In this lesson, students complete multiple readings of Swift's essay: a guided reading with the teacher, a collaborative reading with a peer, and an independent reading. The online Notetaker tool helps students restate key ideas from Swift's essay as they read and elaborate upon these ideas postreading. After independent reading, pairs of students develop a mock television newscast or editorial script, like those found on Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update," The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, or The Colbert Report, including appropriate visual images in PowerPoint.