Julius Caesar by Shakespeare

This unit takes a critical look at Shakespeare\u27s Julius Caesar as historical fiction, emphasizing that authors sometimes manipulate fact in their writing. It evaluates the power of persuasion and what makes a speech successfully persuasive. It also explores the concepts of honor and friendship, and how both are connected to morality

Macbeth by Shakespeare

This is a five-week unit that explores Shakespearean tragedy using Macbeth. The unit focuses on the literary elements of character motivation, foil, paradox, and the motifs of making decisions and good/moral vs. evil/immoral. The writing focus of the unit is creative and narrative, emphasizing the idea of motives, decision-making, and morality. Students will rewrite the ending of Macbeth by changing the decisions and path of one character. By the end of the unit, students will use their understandings from the unit to apply the lessons learned from the fictional characters to their own lives, and evaluate and recognize the importance of faith in moral decisions

Greek Tragedies: Oedipus the King and Antigone (Grade 10)

This is a four-week unit that introduces Greek tragedy using Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Antigone. The unit explores the elements of Greek tragedy to include the scene of suffering, the unities of time, place, and subject, and catharsis. The unit focuses on the literary elements of dramatic irony, archetype, and the motifs of blindness, and fate vs. free will. The writing focus of the unit is expository emphasizing the idea of justice and decision-making. Students will use non-fiction texts such as Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, the Patriot Act of 2001, and the Freedom Act of 2015 to practice the skills of analysis and evaluation. By the end of the unit, students will use their understandings from the unit to formulate their own meaning of justice, how it relates to the greater good, and when/how they should take action to correct injustices

Pride and Prejudice UbD [9th grade]

This is an eight week unit for freshman students on a daily 45 minute schedule; it is intended for the Pre-AP level. This unit focuses on personal/hidden agendas in writing, using characterization to find theme and purpose, evaluating/changing first impressions, and writing sophisticated literary analysis. The transfer project has students apply the knowledge and skills they have learned to make a first impression of a political candidate, evaluate that first impression by analyzing research consisting of non-fiction literature and videos, and write an analysis of the research and the character of the political candidate

Closed circuits : kinship, neighborhood and incarceration in urban Portugal

The notion that prisons are a ‘world apart’, with their walls severing prisoners from their external relationships, and incarceration an interruption, ‘time away’ spent in a separate social universe, has provided an adequate framework for understanding the social realities of imprisonment in the past. But it has also created an analytical dead angle that prevents us from identifying the ramifying social effects of concentrated incarceration upon both the prison and heavily penalized lower-class neighborhoods. This article addresses these effects with data from an ethnographic revisit of a major women’s prison in Portugal, where the recomposition of the inmate population that has accompanied the rapid inflation of the country’s carceral population is especially pronounced and entails the activation of wide-ranging carceralized networks bringing kinship and neighborhood into the prison as well as the prison into the domestic world. The analysis focuses on the ways whereby these constellations have transformed the experience of confinement and the texture of correctional life, calling for a reconsideration of the theoretical status of the prison as a ‘total institution’ and for exploring anew the boundary that separates it (or not) from outside worlds.Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research

Evidence for bystander signalling between human trophoblast cells and human embryonic stem cells

Maternal exposure during pregnancy to toxins can occasionally lead to miscarriage and malformation. It is currently thought that toxins pass through the placental barrier, albeit bilayered in the first trimester, and damage the fetus directly, albeit at low concentration. Here we examined the responses of human embryonic stem (hES) cells in tissue culture to two metals at low concentration. We compared direct exposures with indirect exposures across a bi-layered model of the placenta cell barrier. Direct exposure caused increased DNA damage without apoptosis or a loss of cell number but with some evidence of altered differentiation. Indirect exposure caused increased DNA damage and apoptosis but without loss of pluripotency. This was not caused by metal ions passing through the barrier. Instead the hES cells responded to signalling molecules (including TNF-α) secreted by the barrier cells. This mechanism was dependent on connexin 43 mediated intercellular ‘bystander signalling’ both within and between the trophoblast barrier and the hES colonies. These results highlight key differences between direct and indirect exposure of hES cells across a trophoblast barrier to metal toxins. It offers a theoretical possibility that an indirectly mediated toxicity of hES cells might have biological relevance to fetal development

Greek Mythology: Understanding the Allusions

This unit focuses on basic Greek myths beginning with the 12 Olympians. It includes myths about creation and stories about heroes. Students explore the elements of myths as well as the purpose of myths. This exploration leads students into the study of Greek mythical allusions, what they are and how they impact literature and everyday life. By the end of the unit, students should understand how Greek myths impact literature and everyday life

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

This three week unit for 10 graders (50 minute daily periods) uses Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe to explore different literary lenses, personal perspectives, and the ideas of change and evalgelization. The unit focuses on students using literary theory to analyze plot, setting and character: Marxist Criticism, Feminist Criticism, New Historicism, and Post-Colonial Criticism