Help Desk

Email Mr. Burke

Consult the State Standards

How to Read a Web Site

Weekly Paper Guidelines

Weekly Paper Scoring Rubric

Reading Images
"Hostility," by Stephen Hinshaw
"First Glimpse," by Ashley Arabian
"Life by the Sea," by Jacob Mainzer
"Censorship," by Cameron Duncan

Reading Words
"Are You a Muckety-Muck?" by Cameron Duncan

Reading a Poem
"Risking It," by Lauren Moore

Reviewing a Web Site
"Learn2.com Review," by Chana-Rivka Foster

Reviewing Comics
"Decisions," by Nicole Snider

Reviewing Lyrics
"Take You Higher," by Molly Choma

UPDATED October 14, 2007

Five Different Students' Responses to "Just Above Water." These five Weekly Papers provide a range of insights and responses to an image taken from Life Magazine's "Picture of the Day." These examples all come from the second week; we are working hard right now to learn how to read and write about these different Weekly Readings.

The Weekly Reader: A Digital Anthology
Mr. Burke/English

INTRODUCTION
This online anthology offers you an array of great reading experiences. The readings included on this page are specifically used, unless otherwise noted, for my Weekly Reading assignment. One final proviso: I do my best to screen and evaluate these sites for their content. If you encounter anything on these web sites you think is inappropriate, please inform me immediately. If you need help reading one of the types of texts you find here, please consult the appropriate section in The Reader's Handbook or ask me.

Click here to review the Weekly Paper Scoring Rubric

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Quick Picks
These links take you to sites where you can quickly find something good to read. As you get more familiar with the assignment, you should try to venture out into the other areas according to your interests.

1. E-Field Trips: This site offers a range of interesting online experiences with impressive support for teachers and students. Each student can choose a different online field trip. As they said in the article about the site, with demands on kids increasing all the time, it's hard to get kids out of the classroom and into the world. This is one way to do it.
2. This I Believe: This I Believe invites people to write about the core beliefs that guide your daily life. NPR airs these personal statements from listeners each Monday. The producers hope to create a picture of the American spirit in all its rich complexity. This I Believe is based on a 1950s radio program of the same name, hosted by acclaimed journalist Edward R. Murrow. In creating This I Believe, Murrow said the program sought "to point to the common meeting grounds of beliefs, which is the essence of brotherhood and the floor of our civilization."
3. Leaders and Success: Investor's Business Daily has run a daily column which examines why one person---an athlete, an inventor, a businessperson, or social leader---is so successful. They have identified ten "Secrets to Success" that they argue explain each individual's success. Click here to read about today's featured leader.
4. Inventor of the Week: Each week MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) profiles a different inventor, from the past or present. Visit the current Inventor of the Week, or Browse the Archives, where you can search for information on a specific inventor or invention. I thought this was a very interesting and nicely designed site.
5. The History of US (Webisodes): Freedom is what has drawn to America countless human beings from around the world; it is what generations of men and women have lived and died for; it is, in a profound sense, our nation's highest calling. This is also the story of the chief obstacles to American freedom -- the "unfreedoms" that have littered our national story, and in some cases have called its very integrity into question. But despite all the mistakes and all the tragic setbacks, there is an overarching positive message to this series. This is a history of the United States as the unfolding, inspiring story of human liberties aspired to and won.
6. Teens and Money: This website offers fun, short, and profitable articles about money. All articles are written specifically for teens. Whether you want to make a million, learn how the stock market works, or how to get more money from your parents, this site if for you.
7. New York Times' "Portraits of Grief": I added this page because these people lead interesting lives. I also include it here so we can honor them so that from their lives and the reminder of their loss, we might better appreciate and live our own.
8. Daily Cartoon: While you can, if you wish, check out other cartoons listed in the left margin, it is the cartoon Zits that inspired me to add this link. The cartoonist explores the life of adolescents and their relationships with parents in a humorous but intelligent way.
9. Poetry 180: This site is devoted to high school students. US poet laureate Billy Collins feels that poetry must be read and enjoyed, not constantly "tied to a chair and beaten with a hose until it says what it means." Here you will find 180 poems, one for each day of the school year, that you will enjoy and want to write about.
10. Daily Word: Every word they choose is worth knowing, but what is interesting is the story behind the word. Every day you get a word and its history. For those who like language or want to improve their vocabulary, this is a fun pick.
11. Daily History: This site is part of the Library of Congress's American Memory Project. Each day they create a remarkable page about an important person or historical event related that date. For those interested in looking further, each page also includes many additional links for further study. Each day you will find an image, a story, and an important piece of information about your own country.
12. Pictures of the Week: Time magazine offers a compelling visual documentation of the week through photographs. The site also includes easily accessible archives of past weeks. Every picture here is worth...well, you guessed it: a thousand words.
13. Biography.com Interested in Jackie Robinson? Julius Caesar? Albert Einstein? Go to Biography.com and type in the name of someone that has always interested you.

Reading Literature

1. Searching for Books that Touched Lives: This article just appeared in the Washington Post. It is about a teacher in Washington, D.C. who read my book I Hear America Reading and asked her students to bring in the books that meant the most to them. Consider writing about the book you would bring in and what it means to you.
2. Favorite Poem Project: This page offers a list of Americans' favorite poems; each poem is available in written form but also as a very cool video (never more than five minutes) based on the poem. This is one of my favorite sites.
3. Daily Poetry: This site features a different poet every day. The poems are usually short and almost always interesting. If you like poetry you will like this site.

Reading Images

1. NEW: National Gallery of Art Virtual Tours: The National Gallery in Washington, D.C. offers excellent virtual tours and exhibits of different artists. Highly recommended.
2. Getty's Art Education Web Site: This site offers ongoing exhibits of interest to anyone interested in art. Because the site is targeted for schools, the contents tend to be of special interest to kids. Very good site whose contents change regularly; so come back often.
3. The Dorothea Lange Photographic Archive: Housed at the Oakland Museum, Lange's photographs provide a powerful and useful set of images for the classroom. Many teachers studying the Depression and authors like John Steinbeck will find this site invaluable.
4. Making Sense of Modern Art: "Focusing on key works in the Museum's permanent collection, the newest version of MSoMA provides an engaging guide to modern and contemporary art." (from SFMOMA web site)
5. Smithsonian Institute Image Gallery: The ultimate American museum offers outstanding collections of photographs from around the world.
6. Walker Evans Photography Exhibit: Arguably the most important photographer in the 20th century, Evans' images will reward your eye. This exhibit has been traveling around the country.
7. Picturing the Century: 100 Years of Photography from the National Archives . The galleries are arranged by broad chronology (A New Century, the Great War, etc.); the portfolios include works by Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange and other great chroniclers of American life.
8. Smithsonian American Art Museum: A site that honors our diverse artistic traditions; includes interactive exhibits and experiences. You will love this site.
9. Time magazine's Pictures of the Week: Time magazine offers a compelling visual documentation of the week through photographs. The site also includes easily accessible archives of past weeks. Every picture here is worth...well, you guessed it: a thousand words.

Reading Letters and Journals

1. Peace Corps Letters: Here you will find some of the letters that have been written by Peace Corps Volunteers to students in the United States. These letters offer "day in the life" views of what it is like to live in other countries. (I was in the Peace Corps (Tunisia, north Africa))
2. NEW: Milestone Documents: The following is a list of 100 milestone documents, compiled by the National Archives and Records Administration, and drawn primarily from its nationwide holdings. The documents chronicle United States history from 1776 to 1965.
3. NEW: Teen Diaries:Since 1996, the Teenage Diaries series has been giving tape recorders to young people around the country to report on their own lives. They conduct interviews, keep an audio journal and record the sounds of daily life usually collecting more than 40 hours of raw tape over the course of a year.

Reading Multimedia Texts

1. NEW: This American Life: Here is how they describe their own wonderful show: "We view the show as an experiment. We try things. There was the show where we taped for 24 hours in an all-night restaurant. And the show where we put a band together from the musicians' classified ads. And the show where we followed a group of swing voters for months, recorded their reactions to everything that happened in the election up through their final decision. And the show where one of our contributors went on a fast to find out if, in fact, fasting leads to enlightenment as promised.We sometimes think of it as a documentary show for people who normally hate documentaries. A public radio show for people who don't necessarily care for public radio. In addition to the radio show, our staff has a movie deal with Warner Brothers which may lead to stories from the radio show being made into motion pictures."
2. Teen Diaries:Since 1996, the Teenage Diaries series has been giving tape recorders to young people around the country to report on their own lives. They conduct interviews, keep an audio journal and record the sounds of daily life usually collecting more than 40 hours of raw tape over the course of a year.
3. America's Story: This well-organized site offers a range of texts that explore people, events, music, and trends in American history. Articles are easy to find and offer interesting information and useful links about people and events worth knowing about.
4. Radio Diaries:Our mission is to find extraordinary stories in ordinary places. We work with people to document their own lives for public radio: teenagers, seniors, prison inmates and others whose voices are rarely heard. We help people share their stories and their lives in their own words, creating documentaries that are powerful, surprising, intimate and timeless
5. Lost and Found Sounds: A very cool site, created and run by The Kitchen Sisters. These radio pieces combine storytelling and history, sounds and images. This site and their work has won many awards. For those who like to hear their stories read by great voices, with rich textures of sound behind them, you can't go wrong. A long menu of pieces to choose from each month. All are short, all are very good.

Reading Speeches

1. American Rhetoric: Years worth of great speeches are captured here, as well as some interesting exercises for students of speech and American History. Check out the Daily Speech or the Most Requested Speeches or dig deeper and look at the searchable database or the 100 Great Speeches.

Reading the Media

1. American Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame: The title tells you all you need to know. A very good web site with interesting exhibits about musicians and music.
2. Cinema: How Are Hollywood Films Made? Inspired by programs from the American Cinema video series in the Annenberg/CPB Multimedia Collection, "Cinema" explores the creative process of filmmaking from the screenwriter's words to the editor's final cut. Includes interactive activities from writing dialogue for a scene to managing the production of a film.
3. The Newshour Essays: These five-minute video essays appear regularly at the end of The Newshour. They are wonderful commentaries on our society, but more importantly they are good. They incorporate words and images to help us understand art, sports, politics, and ourselves. You can view the actual video-essays through the web site. When you go to this page you see a nicely organized list of topics, complete with descriptions of what they talk about in the essay.
4. Newseum: A very cool site that offers those interested in news an interactive history of...the news. Of special interest are such features as "Capture the Moment: The Pulitzer Prize Photographs," an online exhibit of photographs that show us the images behind the stories we read. You will like this site if you like: images, cultures, news, or technology.

Reading Information

1. The World Question Center 2001 The Edge is a meeting place for thinkers who share their Big Questions and answers to them. Currently, there are responses to "What questions are no longer being asked?"
2. Internet Women's History Sourcebook: For Women's History Month, start with this thorough set of links to primary sources in women's history world wide. For major historical periods and for different continents and countries, you'll find documents on general resources, great women of that time and place, the structure of women's lives, women's agency, feminism (where present), women's oppression, and gender construction.
3. Inventor's Museum: This site includes concise articles about different inventions and inventors. The inventions and inventors are organized into different categories for easy reference. You could look, for example, under "Women Inventors," or under "Medical Inventions." (Note: the previous link for this "died." I am hoping this new link serves as a useful substitute.)

The Most Influential People of the 20th Century
To mark the turn of the century, TIME has profiled 100 individuals -- from five fields of endeavor -- who helped shape the last 100 years.

1. Leaders and Revolutionaries
   Twenty people who helped define the political and social fabric of our times
2. Artists and Entertainers
   Twenty pioneers of human expression who enlightened and enlivened us
3. Builders and Titans
   Twenty innovators who changed how the world works
4. Scientists and Thinkers
   People who overthrew our inherited ideas about logic, language, learning, mathematics, economics and even space and time
5. Heroes and Icons
   Twenty people who articulate the longings of the last 100 years, exemplifying courage, selflessness, exuberance, superhuman ability and amazing grace.
6. Albert Einstein: Person of the Century
   He was the iconic 20th century scientist, the bumbling professor with the German accent, a comic cliché in a thousand films. Instantly recognizable, like Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, Albert Einstein's shaggy haired visage was as familiar to ordinary people as to the matrons who fluttered about him in salons from Berlin to Hollywood. Yet he was unfathomably profound — the genius among geniuses who discovered, merely by thinking about it, that the universe was not as it seemed. Read the full story by Frederic Golden
   

Reading the World: Hard to Categorize

1. Scott McCloud: A brilliant cartoonist whose web site offers a rich array of good stuff. Not limited to those who like cartoons or comics.
2. Visual Thesaurus: Unlike any thesaurus you've ever seen or used; guaranteed to make you think and say, "Wow."
3. San Francisco Exploratorium: An amazing site that features online exhibits, experiences, and resources for those who love science and ideas.