Lesson Plan: Teaching the Industrial Revolution Using William Blake’s poem “London”

I like to teach history through literature. Recently I taught a lesson to High School students on the Industrial Revolution using William Blake's poem "London". We had already been studying the Industrial Revolution in Europe. So students were familiar with the concept - the idea that people began to move to urban centers to work in dirty, factories - without the labor laws we have today. Child labor was common and a general disregard for human life was horrifically rampant. Disease was widespread and a scourge on the populace.

But I like my students to work with primary sources. It's important to show students how historical events mattered to the people living at that time. What would it have been like to live in London at that time? 

So I planned two 45 minute lessons (total of 90 minutes) to look at William Blake's poem "London". I have taught Blake before - but for this lesson, I wanted to show how Blake use poetry to criticize society and the inherent hypocrisy he witnessed in 1790s London when he was living the capital.

We read the poem together and I made sure students see what the poem looked like when Blake published it. One cool thing about Blake is that he was a printmaker and he self-published all of his own books - and illustrated them. 

We look at the illustrated version and I ask students to point out what they notice. We then read the poem together and then using a document camera we work on annotating the text. I have prepared a bunch of my own annotations to guide the process but I make sure that students add their own insights as well! 

After we annotate the text kids work in small groups to work on further diving into the text using 11 reading comprehension questions I prepared. They then report back and we have a class discussion using 9 discussion questions I came up with to help students make more connections from the text to the world.

I'm proud of my students thinking and I'm thinking if you want to try teaching "London" to your student you can download the resource I packaged as a printable PDF on Teachers Pay Teachers.

I hope you enjoy using this resource and of course I'd love to know what you think. Leave your thoughts in the comments section below.

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Aesthetic Thursday: A Dandelion Flower Grows on the Side of the Fall River Road in the Rocky Mountain National Park

I took this photograph back in the Summer of 2008 - I had discovered this field of dandelions on the Fall River Road, a windy road in the Rocky Mountains - west of Fort Collins. I think I got a decent shot of the flower - which I can’t identify but let’s call it a Rocky Mountain Dandelion.

A lone dandelion found off the Fall River Road in the Rocky Mountain National Park, U.S.A.

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Compare and Contrast: How the Song "Teenage Dirtbag" was made into a Choir Version to Advance a Documentary on Bullying in American Schools

"Teenage Dirtbag"
It's a rather heteronormative narrative - but I have a crush on this song - maybe because the song talks about "getting into tube socks" and references "Iron Maiden" - and its an elegy to unrequited love - with a twist at the end. This is to all the teenage dirtbags out there. Also - Wheatus's song was the song attached to the movie Loser - as you can see by the music video.

A couple of years ago I went to a professional development workshop on peer-to-peer bullying in American schools. The presenters screened the documentary film Bully. The opening song is a choir version of "Teenage Dirtbag". I immediately recognized it and I thought it was an apt song to cover the phenomenon of bullying as it relates to school life.

As a teacher, I often encounter bullying. What pains me the most about bullying is that often the targets of bullying are exceptional children, "the teenage dirtbags" that often go unnoticed.

Choral Version of "Teenage Dirtbag"
Watch the following choir version and hearken to the facts. We can be a voice for those who are tormented because they are gay, queer, brown, different, black, non-gender conforming, or just don't fit in (according to whatever social norms are popular right now). 

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Third Grader Channels Pennywise the Clown at the Annual Halloween Parade in Jackson Heights, Queens

Annual Jackson Heights Halloween Parade
In Jackson Heights, every year on Halloween, the local "Beautification Society" hosts a parade on 37th Avenue. My school participates, so I have, for the last several years, marched in the parade. I love seeing the kids and adults who have lined the street, mostly dressed up and in a spirit of "being costumed." I feel like when kids, especially, wear costumes, it can be a moment to channel creative energy and to pretend to be someone you're not. 
Third Grader Channels Pennywise the Clown
One kid I met on the route was dressed up as Pennywise the Clown — there were several permutations of this character, a malevolent force in Stephen King's novel-made-movie IT. I was struck by this Third-grader wild abandon into the role, like the video, posted below, demonstrates. Happy Halloween!

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Two Photographs: Push (推) and Pull (拉)

I was walking on Bowery on a Fall day in Lower Manhattan and I was struck by the simplicity (and pragmatism) of these two opposite facing signs stuck to a store window written in Mandarin Chinese and English.

"Push" 推

"Pull" 拉

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GIF: Teachers Do Lunch Duty!

I don't like doing lunch duty. However, I love the teachers who I share lunch duty responsibilities with every day. One teacher has been a teacher for fifty years. That's an accomplishment. The other teacher is my work wife. We're married according to the holy vows of accredited teacher-marriage. The other teacher is my roommate. We share a room, boo. And the last teacher is a science teacher who enjoys eating his lunch with us. Love Y'all! *besos*

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On a Trip to Mystic, Connecticut I Ran into Versions of American History

Can you see Manhattan?

     I have just returned from a sleep-away trip with Seventh graders. We went to Mystic, Connecticut — me and a couple of teachers and nineteen kids. I had never heard of Mystic — even though I saw the movie Mystic River  —which apparently has no connection to Mystic, Connecticut but there is a B-movie with Brad Pitt called Mystic Pizza - which apparently is real - the pizza. Not the story.

     So, what did we do in Mystic? We stayed at the Mystic Seaport Museum which is really a cool place - much more relaxed than any museum I have been to in a long time. It is a reconstructed nineteenth-century seaport town. It's replete with an apothecary, a maritime general store, a slew of interpreters who pamper you with their stories of sea life, whale blubber stories, and facts about forecastles, moorings, and ghosts. Our crew — including me — slept on the Joseph Conrad — which is a wooden Danish training vessel that at one point sunk — killing twenty-two boys — then resurrected from the sea — then a U.S. President salvaged it and christened it as a National Historic Landmark - so it is permanently moored at the Seaport. I like history, and I like even more how history gets told, gets packaged, and is applied to how we think about the world we live in today. 
     There is the ship Amistad moored at Mystic. It's a slave ship that was the site of a slave rebellion. Today it sits gleaming and speaks of liberty and the promise of change. However, its rewarding story belies the tragedy of the Middle Passage that claimed millions. Mystic also has a reconstructed version of the Mayflower - it is called the Mayflower II, and it is being revamped and polished for a celebration in 2020 celebrating the original ship's voyage four hundred years ago. The kids on our trip know these stories, and they see in these stories a symbol of religious freedom. However, I am confident that the Europeans who came to the New World were not as pure in their pursuit of liberty and the right to equality as we would like to paint them as in the history books. 
     You can also see a whaling ship in Mystic - and if you are a good sailor, you might get to talk to a re-enactor. We met a jolly lady who was presenting herself as an immigrant to Mystic who arrived in the 1870s. She had left Alaska after it was sold by the Russians to the United States. She spoke of her voyage, a trip from the islands of Alaska, down to Panama, through the canal, past Jamaica, and then up the Atlantic coast to Long Island Sound. I liked hanging out with the kids. They're city kids — most of the lot — so they were into running around, kicking a soccer ball on the village green - and feeling the cold October air in their face. It is kinda crazy to be chaperoning twelve-year-old kids for forty-eight hours straight, but I loved their energy. Kids that age are full of energy but no focus. It's refreshing. 
     Hey. If you know all the answers, then you're a fool, right?

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Image Source: Greig Roselli © 2018