Activities and How They Will Be Assessed, In order they appear in Yearlong Plan.

Preston follows a standards-based grading system.

Above the Line: This is a collaborative activity for mapping behavioral expectations from
day one. Students are given a giant post-it note, with a line drawn halfway through it. As a class,
they collaborate on what behaviors they deem to be “above” and “below” the behavior line. This
gives students agency in creating their own expectations as a class. This paper is then displayed,
and when students are behaving in ways that do not align to their own standards, attention is
called to the standards which they themselves created.
(This is an activity to assess student participation and willingness to
work with peers, students will be graded heavily for those two categories)
This I Believe: This is a very flexible, unscripted essay that can take whatever form a
student desires, as long as it is one page long and reflects the core values of the student. This
activity serves to help the teacher get to know the student on a more personal level, and provides
a baseline for understanding a students previous ideas, and how they change over the course of
the semester. This will be one of the first activities we do in my class, and one of the last. This
will show student growth at the beginning and end of the semester. When presented at the
beginning, students will be encouraged to showcase what led to their beliefs (place of birth,
culture, place grown up, etc).
(This activity will be lightly assessed with regard to grammar rules and
correct use of language, code-switching and home language are welcome in
this essay. Students are supposed to tell their own stories, this is a space for
that. Willingness to participate is key.)
False Advertising/Fake News Creation: Students will create this as part of a larger unit,
having to do with understanding modern propaganda and the effects it has on our lives as global
citizens. After being exposed to examples of advertising, news, etc with a clear bias, that is
uninformed, students will use the concepts at play in the examples to create their own examples.
After basic training with a free website platform (Weebly, Wix, etc) students will be asked to
collaborate to create a webpage with a biased, uninformed piece of fake news, or an
advertisement designed to manipulate someone into buying a fictional product. The more
humorous, the better. Preston is a 1-to-1 school, so this is an achievable activity. The caveat of
this assignment is that the website/advertisement is not allowed to be politically partisan.
Media Unit Quote:
“Articles and books have been made ever shorter (or substituted altogether for videos) in
order to appeal to those who are confused by anything over 500 words. News and debates are
often conducted in soundbites and conveyed in 140-character tweets. Many people shake their
heads at these trends, and act as if they’ve been brought about by shadowy forces and greedy
media corporations. “Those people” over “there” are to blame. It’s true that media companies do
want to make money. But they’re only able to do so by fulfilling what the consumer demands. If
the consumer wants short, dumbed-down content, that’s what is produced. Websites wouldn’t
create clickbait headlines if they weren’t effective in soliciting clicks. The reality is that it isn’t
corporations who are responsible for our media, but the public. You, me, and everyone else.”
-Art of Manliness.
 (This activity will be heavily weighted towards creativity. Persuasion is
important in biased advertising, so it’s key that there are not a large amount
of errors tripping readers up and taking them out of the experience, so this
will be assessed on 50% grammar and syntax, etc, 30% creativity, and 20%
participation).
Dollar Street: To imbue cultural acceptance and start this unit off right, students will be
led to explore Dollar Street, a website put together by Gapminder. Hans Rosling mentioned this
website in his book Factfulness, (a book that we will be reading excerpts from) as a way of
driving home the point that extreme poverty looks different in every place, and that not all the
world is experiencing it. This website lets students see that everything exists on a continuum, and
that not all poverty is extreme, and that not everything outside the U.S. is poverty.

My Personal Lineage Poster/Project Assignment: Students will be asked to interview

someone in their family about their personal history. This project is designed to get students
thinking about how diasporic American culture is, and how we all have a varied history that
makes us the interesting melting pot that we are. Students will be asked to create a poster of the
interview, with pictures representing the cultures they come from. These posters will be
displayed in the classroom to illustrate the diversity present within our own room.
(Creativity is key in this assignment as well, the more visually appealing
the poster is, the higher points will be received. The purpose of this
assignment is to get students to acknowledge the diverse backgrounds they
come from, and get them discussing diversity. Student growth will be assessed
by the extent to which they can listen to their peers and form new perspectives
based on the differences in background).
The Myth of The Self-Made Human In My Family Project: Having gone over the myth
of the self-made man (modern definition, see “human”), students will be assigned to
write/paint/draw/create a graphic novel tracing the myth of the self-made human throughout the
life of someone in their own family. Traditionally, this myth starts with someone doing a manual
labor job, then ends with them as a huge success in some arena. Students will be asked to
examine how true this is, how many of their relatives’ lives followed this path, and how this
myth leaves people disappointed if they don’t live up to a certain standard. The personal lineage
assignment lays the groundwork for this. Students will be asked to interview a different member
of their family than the one they interviewed for the lineage project. Using their knowledge of
the self-made legend, students will trace this myth through the lives of someone they know/are
related to. Did this person’s life follow the same pattern? Is this person on their own personal
hero's journey? Were they helped along the way? Or hindered? Can anyone truly be “self-
made?”
(This is our big midterm assignment, so all parts of writing will be taken
into account. Persuasiveness, correction of errors, the ability to think critically
about the situation, family and life of oneself is crucial in the grand scheme of
life. Preston follows a standards-based grading system, so students will be
given a growth mindset from the beginning).
 Personal Activism Hero: Students will be asked to choose someone that they feel
embodies the spirit of activism. They will write/make a presentation/draw something about that
hero, based on their life, the things they fought against, etc. Students will be asked why they
chose this person.
Personal Activism Quote:
“If you breathe, people will have an opinion on how you drew that breath. Be true to
yourself.”
-Muhammad Ali
(To drive home the importance of the extent to which one is active in
their own community, students will be graded on out-of-school independent
participation. That can take several forms, Mr. Nichols will be happy to work
with students on the grammar, persuasiveness, etc of an essay, but the student
themselves must be the one who addresses the letter/email/tweet to the
congressperson or whomever the recipient is).
Social Media Collaboration Project: Students will be asked to use social media for good,
or to demonstrate understanding of a previous text, etc. This is a very flexible assignment, in
pairs, students will use social media to accomplish this goal. Ideas include: Using Instagram to
show the daily life of a character in a book, snapchat book filters, Youtube channels to talk about
class texts, etc.
(Participation and willingness to work with peers will be taken into
account, this activity is designed to get students working together in a very
modern context).
Persuasive Writing Activity: One of the biggest day-to-day reminders/focuses that we are
going to drive home in this class is that a high level of literacy is the “language of power.” If one
wants to gain power in this life, if they want to be listened to, they have to be able to
communicate at a high level. This activity is the final project. Students are to pick an issue they
are passionate about, write a letter to someone with the power to affect change in that arena, and
then send them the letter through some sort of electronic medium (they can also send a physical
letter if they want to). This is an introduction to modern activism.
(This will be graded almost entirely on the students’ ability to use
standard english to persuade).
Letters to The Dead: This final activity in our Holocaust unit is very heavy. We will be
supplementing the texts in the Holocaust unit with letters written by people who never made it,
and the students will be asked to respond. They can choose from a range of texts, poems, essays,
letters, etc that we have read during the Holocaust unit, but they are assigned to write back. What
would they say if they could look their chosen person in the eye in today’s world? What would
this person need to hear? We will be doing an origami-type activity once the students have
written these letters, and then hanging all of the letters from the ceiling of the classroom. They
will hang there for the entirety of the Activism unit.
 (This is our final project. Students will be assessed on all parts of
writing, syntax, grammar use, spelling, etc. Out of respect for the dead, our
letters should be written in a mature emotional way. Students will be asked to
dig deep, and write from the heart. This is designed to show students how to
pour their hearts out into a letter).