Essay Instructions: Assignment: Letter to the Editor
Write a 350-500 word letter to the editor responding to ONE of the two articles: “, “Sex education without guesswork”, or “Empathy in schools”.
You need to focus on developing an effective letter which makes use of the three appeals in a manner which is appropriate for the rhetorical situation.
Because this is a relatively short amount of space in which you have to persuade your reader of your viewpoint, you have to be particularly mindful of your use of language in terms of effective word choice and conciseness.
Audience: Your audience will be the same as the source of your article. Thus, if you choose to respond to the piece from the New York Times, you should consider your audience will also be readers of that paper. This means that you will need to spend time investigating the source’s website to get an idea of the readership.
Requirements
• 350-500 word (minimum)
• Correct “letter to the editor” format
• Appropriate use of ethos, pathos, logos given the rhetorical situation
• Short (1-2 sentence) summary of the issue at hand
• Clearly stated position
• Well-developed, detailed supporting reasons
• Consideration of the opposing viewpoint (keep in mind how you might contribute to your credibility)
• Correct grammar (free of errors, including spelling and typos)
• Language that is appropriate and concise
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- Readings- chose one please
READING TWO
Editorial: Sex education without guesswork
05:31 PM CST on Friday, February 27, 2009
America's most prominent unwed teen mother recently declared what most people already knew about abstinence-only sex education. "It's not realistic at all," Bristol Palin told Fox News.
The daughter of former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin knows from experience something that has yet to sink in among Texas education policymakers: An abstinence-only health curriculum fails our children.
Texas consistently ranks among the top five states for teen pregnancies. According to the latest federal statistics, only Mississippi and New Mexico have higher rates.
According to a new study, up to 96 percent of Texas school districts either teach an abstinence-only health curriculum or avoid talking about sex altogether. The Texas Freedom Network, which favors a comprehensive sex-education curriculum, funded the study, but Texas State University academics did the independent research.
Abstinence is a good message, but teens also must know the dangers of having sex without condoms and contraceptives. Statistics show that when students receive the complete message, they listen.
According to Centers for Disease Control surveys, Texas teens have unprotected sex far more often than the national average. In states and cities with "abstinence-plus" teaching policies, the rate of unprotected sex drops below the national average. Houston, for example, has an abstinence-plus teaching policy, and CDC surveys show Houston teens as below the national average for unprotected sex.
Texas law doesn't preclude discussing protected sex in secondary schools. But according to TSU professor David Wiley, co-author of the new study, health teachers fear they'll be fired if they teach beyond abstinence-only. The prevailing attitude, he found, is that "when it comes to sexuality education, it's best to keep your mouth shut."
Adding to the fear was the Board of Education's decision in 2004 to adopt health textbooks that preached abstinence while downplaying the benefits of condoms and contraceptives.
The Texas Department of State Health Services says that one Texas teenager gets pregnant every 10 minutes, on average. In contrast to the Board of Education, it specifically recommends a multifaceted approach including both abstinence counseling and advice on the use of condoms and contraceptives.
That message clearly isn't getting through to the schools. Texas, it's time to get real. It's time to talk to our teens about abstinence and protected sex.
source: www.dallasnews.com
READING THREE
April 5, 2009
Gossip Girls and Boys Get Lessons in Empathy
By WINNIE HU
SCARSDALE, N.Y. — The privileged teenagers at Scarsdale Middle School are learning to be nicer this year, whether they like it or not.
English classes discuss whether Friar Laurence was empathetic to Romeo and Juliet. Research projects involve interviews with octogenarians and a survey of local wheelchair ramps to help students identify with the elderly and the disabled. A new club invites students to share snacks and board games after school with four autistic classmates who are in separate classes during the day.
And to combat feelings of exclusion, the Parent Teacher Association is trying to curtail a longstanding tradition of seventh graders and eighth graders showing up en masse Monday morning wearing the personalized sweatshirts handed out to the popular crowd at the weekend’s bar or bat mitzvahs.
The emphasis on empathy here and in schools nationwide is the latest front in a decade-long campaign against bullying and violence. Many urban districts have found empathy workshops and curriculums help curb fighting and other misbehavior. In Scarsdale, a wealthy, high-performing district with few discipline problems to start with, educators see the lessons as grooming children to be better citizens and leaders by making them think twice before engaging in the name-calling, gossip and other forms of social humiliation that usually go unpunished.
“As a school, we’ve done a lot of work with human rights,” said Michael McDermott, the middle school principal. “But you can’t have kids saving Darfur and isolating a peer in the lunchroom. It all has to go together.”
Many Scarsdale parents praise the empathy focus, but some students complain that the school has no business dictating what they wear or how they act in their personal lives. Others say that no matter what is taught in the classroom, there is a different reality in the cafeteria and hallways, where the mean girls are no less mean and the boys will still be boys knocking books out of one another’s hands.
Bar mitzvah sweatshirts emblazoned with the name of the honoree, the date and occasionally even the guest list are still commonly worn, if not on the Monday after, then on a Tuesday or Wednesday a month later.
Otherwise, “what’s the point in getting them?” asked Jess Calamari, 13, an eighth grader who gave out blue hooded sweatshirts to more than 150 guests at her bat mitzvah last year. “I don’t want to offend people, but I like sweatshirts.”
Dana Reegen, a seventh grader who says that she has been talked about behind her back, gave her classmates a C in empathy. “I know a lot of people aren’t very nice to each other,” she said. “They don’t really think it’s the most important thing, they’re more focused on what they look like, what they’re wearing, and who’s going out with who.”
Nationally, some question whether such attempts at social engineering are appropriate for the classroom or should remain the purview of parents, churches and youth groups outside of school hours. “Who could be against teaching empathy?” said Michael Petrilli, a vice president for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy group in Washington. “But there’s a laundry list of seemingly important activities that, when added together, crowd out the academic mission of our schools.”
But Deborah Kasak, executive director of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, said that teaching empathy can seem “artificial or hokey” to some students, but over time can foster a school culture that encourages learning over social distractions. “I don’t know if you can teach everybody to be empathetic,” she acknowledged, “but you can raise awareness.”
Empathy lessons are spreading everywhere amid concerns over the pressure on students from high-stakes tests and a race to college that starts in kindergarten. The Character Education Partnership, a nonprofit group in Washington, said 18 states — including New York, Florida, Illinois, Nebraska and California — require programs to foster core values such as empathy, respect, responsibility and integrity.
This year, Los Angeles is spending nearly $1 million on a nationally known program for its 147 middle schools, called Second Step: Student Success Through Prevention, which teaches empathy, impulse control, anger management and problem solving. In Seattle, seven public elementary schools are using a Canadian-based program, Roots of Empathy, in which a mother and her baby go into the classroom to explore questions like “What makes you cry?”
Within the charter network KIPP, which stands for Knowledge Is Power Program, some schools are focusing more on empathy, with lessons about the Holocaust, role-playing and a “values jingle” sung to the tune of “Jingle Bells.”
And on Long Island, Weber Middle School in Port Washington inducted 300 students — nearly one-quarter of the school — into the Weber Pride club this year as reward for gestures like sitting with a new girl at lunch or helping a panicked classmate on the rock climbing wall.
At Public School 114 in the South Bronx, where David A. Levine, author of “Teaching Empathy,” has been running workshops since 2006, the principal, Olivia Francis-Webber said that the number of fights had dropped to fewer than three a month — from one to three a week — and disciplinary referrals were down to about five a month from nearly 20.
Before, she said, teachers would “immediately admonish the child for bad behavior and send them to the office,” but since the empathy training began, they more often are “sitting down with students and finding out what’s wrong.”
Here in Scarsdale, the middle school has also seen an effect on behavior: Administrators have received three complaints about bullying or harassment on buses this year, compared with an average of two or three a month last year. Counselors have handed out fewer detentions for minor infractions such as chronic tardiness to class or running in the hallways.
The school and P.T.A. have spent $10,000 on empathy workshops with Mr. Levine, and tried to infuse the curriculum and culture with the theme. A photojournalism project showcases students’ work with the homeless, local charities and the environment. This month, the student council is planning a “Mix It Up Day” to break up cafeteria cliques.
Debbie Reegen, an insurance administrator and Dana’s mother, said she believes that empathy is lacking in many Scarsdale children and that the efforts should start in elementary school.
“They should make the parents come as well,” she said. “I think there’s a sense of elitism, and a bit of arrogance, among the parents here.”
At the middle school, there are signs that the lessons are starting to stick.
Sarah Frohman, 13, said that she catches herself when she is about to call someone who annoys her a “retard,” and that she has told her soccer coach in a youth league not to use the word.
Annie Gevertz, 12, said that she is more careful of what she says about other students. “Sometimes, I think about how it would feel if it were said about me, and I’ll keep it to myself instead of sharing,” she said, though she expects gossip will probably never be gone for good “because we’re teenage girls and that’s something we do.”
On the bar mitzvah circuit, students have started handing out alternatives like water bottles and pajama pants. Jason Thurm, 13, collected more than 200 of the personalized sweatshirts from his friends and donated them to a church; for his own party in November, Jason did not have favors, and planned to donate the money his parents would have spent on them to a charity.
In the cafeteria, Alex Primavera, 12, described empathy as putting himself in someone else’s shoes. He said he had been trying not to put down his classmates or call them “moron” and “idiot.” Then he yelled at another student to shut up.
“He tries but he doesn’t get very far,” said Alan Zhong, 12, adding that Alex had just kicked him in English class.
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EXAMPLE:
Here is an article and an example letter response - this is the proper format -
April 5, 2009
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Pregnant (Again) and Poor
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti
For all the American and international efforts to fight global poverty, one thing is clear: Those efforts won’t get far as long as women like Nahomie Nercure continue to have 10 children.
Global family-planning efforts have stalled over the last couple of decades, and Nahomie is emblematic both of the lost momentum and of the poverty that results. She is an intelligent 30-year-old woman who wanted only two children, yet now she is eight months pregnant with her 10th.
As we walked through Cité Soleil, the Haitian slum where she lives, her elementary-school-age children ran stark naked around her. The $6-a-month rental shack that they live in — four sleep on the bed, six on the floor beside it — has no food of any kind in it. The family has difficulty paying the fees to keep the children in school.
There’s simply no way to elevate Nahomie’s family, and millions like it around the world, unless we help such women have fewer children. And yet family-planning programs have been shorn of resources and glamour for a generation now.
Nahomie is one of 200 million women worldwide who, according to United Nations estimates, have what demographers call an “unmet need” for safe and effective contraception. That is, they don’t want to get pregnant but don’t use a modern form of family planning.
This “unmet need” results in 70 million to 80 million unwanted pregnancies annually, the United Nations says, along with 19 million abortions and 150,000 maternal deaths.
The push for contraception was at the center of development efforts in the 1960s and 1970s, but then waned. In part, it was tarnished by its own zealotry, including coercion in China and India. Another reason was abortion politics, which led to a cutoff in American financing for the United Nations Population Fund — even though the upshot was more unwanted pregnancies and more abortions.
In addition, family planning turned out to be harder than many enthusiasts had expected, for it requires far more than condoms or the pill. Haiti has family-planning clinics, spending on contraception is fairly high, and women say they want fewer children — yet only one-quarter of Haitian women use contraceptives.
Nahomie’s story helps explain the enigma. She tried injectables, but she says they caused excess bleeding that frightened her. The clinic had little counseling to explain and reassure her, so she stopped after nine months.
A sexually transmitted infection at the time meant that she couldn’t use an IUD just then, and a doctor told her that the pill would be inappropriate because she has vascular problems. Reluctant to return to a clinic that seemed scornful of poor women, she drifted along with nothing.
A couple of babies later, her first husband left her, and her next husband wanted to have children with her, so she acquiesced. A few children later, she began to push back, but in Haiti’s social structure she felt she had to accede to her husband’s whims. “I asked to use condoms,” Nahomie said, “but he refused.” Last fall, shortly after she became pregnant with her 10th child, her husband ran off.
A book published a few years ago, “Reproducing Inequities,” notes that we are, painstakingly, learning what does work. The effective strategies go beyond the contraceptive devices themselves to include better counseling, more dignity for women in clinics, a greater choice of methods that are completely free — and a broad effort to raise the status of women.
The best way to elevate women, by far, is to educate girls and to give them opportunities to earn income through micro-loans, factory jobs or vocational training. It is sometimes said that the best contraceptive isn’t the pill or the IUD, but education for girls.
(A side note: Whenever I write about efforts to save children from malaria or diarrhea, I get cynical letters from neo-Malthusians who argue that saving children’s lives is pointless until birthrates drop. That’s incorrect. There’s abundant evidence that when parents are confident that their children will live, they will have fewer and invest more in each of them.)
In any case, the mounting academic evidence underscores what is intuitively obvious in Haiti: unless family planning is more successful in poor countries, they won’t be able to overcome poverty. “There’s no other way,” says Tania Patriota, the representative of the United Nations Population Fund in Haiti. “It’s indispensable.”
President Obama has already lifted the ban on aid for the Population Fund, and we now have an opportunity to lead a global effort to regain lost momentum for family planning. And while Nahomie’s story shows that this won’t be easy, it also underscores that there’s simply no alternative.
Here are some responses---
LETTERS
Multiplier Effect: Help Women First
To the Editor:
Re “Pregnant (Again) and Poor,” by Nicholas D. Kristof (column, April 5):
In 1994 at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, the world recognized “the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so.”
This pledge has been honored more in the breach than in the implementation.
You have to look at the small print of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goal 5, “Improve Maternal Health,” under Target 2, to find this language: “An unmet need for family planning undermines achievement of several other goals.”
These “several other” goals include reducing poverty, providing universal access to education, reducing infant and child mortality, empowering women, attaining environmental sustainability, and developing in such a way that improvement is not eaten up by population growth.
Giving women choices and access to education and health is the key to any acceptable future.
Jane Roberts
Redlands, Calif., April 5, 2009
•
To the Editor:
Those of us who are devoting our careers to improving women’s and children’s health were delighted to read Nicholas D. Kristof’s endorsement of our effort. But Mr. Kristof could have been clearer on two points.
First, family planning saves lives. Nahomie Nercure and her children, whom Mr. Kristof writes about, are lucky that they have all survived. Over the time Ms. Nercure had her nine children, several million women died from pregnancy-related causes, often because they lacked access to family planning and safe abortion services. Infant and child mortality are also higher in poor, high-fertility families like Ms. Nercure’s.
Mr. Kristof also points to Ms. Nercure’s problems using current contraceptive methods. He should also say that we need more research to develop new contraceptive methods for women and men. Such work should be a priority for the National Institutes of Health and others.
Peter J. Donaldson
President, Population Council
New York, April 5, 2009
There are faxes for this order.
