
Emerson shared many of Thoreau’s political views. The America in Class® lesson on individualism in Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” would make an excellent companion piece for this lesson. It is most appropriate for individual work. It also encourages vocabulary building and calls upon students to draw an inference. The second interactive exercise asks students to write a contrast paragraph, which will require pen and paper. The second slide provides the correct responses with textual support. You may want to use its first slide to direct whole class discussion in which you ask students to support their answers with evidence from the text. The first interactive exercise, recommended for use after you have conducted the close reading, reviews the central points of the textual analysis. While most people recognize that in “Civil Disobedience” Thoreau argues against submission to government policies that individuals deem immoral, few note that he also issues a sharp critique of representative democracy.

(understanding of what an author is saying, how an author is saying it, and why an author is saying it)


ELA-LITERACY.RH.11-12.6 (Assessing the authors’ claims, reasoning, and evidence.).ELA-LITERACY.RI.11-12.1 (Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.).
