Much Obliged
Social Experience - Individual and Social Responsibility
Student Page
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Key Concept:

With every right, comes a responsibility. You are responsible for your own actions and you must consider how your actions affect others. In this lesson, you will have the chance to consider what your responsibilities are to others and what actions you might be willing to take to fulfill those responsibilities.

Objectives:

You will be able to
- write to express understanding
- read to reflect and evaluate
- explore human experiences and values reflected in texts
- understand the ideas, values, and cultures of peoples past and present
- read a wide range of material to extend experience
- analyze and evaluate their own and others' writing for ideas, organization, sentence clarity, word choice, and mechanics
- confer with peers and teachers

Resources:

One of the following pieces of text:

1. "A Certain Night" (Ting Ling, China - World Literature - NTC)
2. "One Soldier" (K. Tayama, Japan - World Literature - NTC)
3. "The Guest" (Albert Camus, Algeria/France - Literature and Language Arts: World)

- True and False quiz
- tutorial - editing in Word
- holistic writing rubric

Teaching-Learning Strategies:

The more rights that a person has, the more responsibilities he/she has to fulfill.

Task One: Map of My World

Whether you realize it or not, you have several responsibilities to contend with every day. Before you begin reading, it is important for you to consider what decisions you make every day as a result of familial and societal responsibilities.

The easiest way to examine your responsibilities is to create a visual map.

Using yourself as a starting point, 'map' your responsibilities.

Not sure where to begin? Start with categories such as family, school, employers, society and community branching off from yourself. Create a map similar to the one seen below.

From each of the categories, create branches that list your responsibilities to the people or group of people to which you are accountable.

For example, did you know that as a student you are responsible for a number of things, such as regular attendance, according to the Education Act? These are the types of responsibilities you should include in your map.

Want to learn more about your responsibilities as a student? Try taking this True and False quiz to see if you know what is expected of you every day as a student in your school.

Task Two: Sacrifice

There are people and causes in our lives for which we would be willing to do anything. In each of these selections, the characters are faced with difficult choices. Ultimately, causes that they believe in and people who need their help, influence the decisions they make.

Read one of the following pieces of text:

1. "A Certain Night" (Ting Ling, China - World Literature - NTC)
2. "One Soldier" (K. Tayama, Japan - World Literature - NTC)
3. "The Guest" (Albert Camus, Algeria/France - Literature and Language Arts: World)

Once you are finished reading, take part in a brief discussion regarding the motivations of the characters in the text.

As you are discussing the characters, try to consider whether there is any belief, organization, or person in your life for which you would be willing to risk your life.

If you were put in a situation where you were forced to choose your own life or standing up to something you believe in, how would you choose? What factors would weigh on your mind as you made the decision? These are the kinds of questions that we must ask ourselves as we consider our individual and social responsibilities.

Task Three: My Responsibility

After you have finished reading the selection, consider the events you have just read about from another angle.

As a reporter, write a newspaper article explaining:
1. the situation you have just 'witnessed'
2. the decisions the characters were forced to make
3. the reasoning behind the character's final decisions

Not sure how to start a newspaper article? Journalism.org provides information regarding the different approaches you can take in drafting a news story.

Once you have drafted a copy of your newspaper article, type the article using Microsoft Word. In previous lessons, you have had a chance to read and peer edit someone else's work. In this lesson, you will learn how to peer edit electronically.

Using this step-by-step tutorial by Education World, highlight problems with your partner's work, make comments regarding what you like and dislike, and learn to track changes on your own and his work.

Tracking changes allows you to look at your first draft and compare it to your final draft to see the improvements.

Once you have edited someone else's work, revise your own work and hand-in a final draft of your article to be evaluated using this rubric.