LA MESA ONLY: Class 48 - 5/20/15

Today's class began with a writing activity to prepare students to view the classic sci-fi Twilight Zone episode, "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street."  These questions all touched on themes and elements of the episode.  These questions were as follows:

1. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." What does this mean?
   
   
2. How does fear affect the decisions you make?
   
   
3. What fears might be called "universal"; shared by most almost all humans?
   
   
4. Do you think life exists on other planets in our universe?  What makes you think so? Might this life be friendly or hostile?
   
   
5. If you wanted to take over a town--without killing anyone--how might you weaken the people enough to overcome their resistance?
   
   
6. What's a scapegoat?

We then had a class discussion on student responses to these questions.  After the discussion, we began watching "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street."



After viewing the episode, students responded to the following questions:

1. What do the people of Maple Street think the UFO is at first?
   
   
2. Who gets them thinking it might be something else?
   
   
3. What is ironic about Charlie's statement about going back to the "dark ages"?  (What he meant versus another meaning we could get from his statement.)
   
   
4. If you were there, what might you have done?
   
   
5. Why do the people of Maple Street turn into an angry and suspicious mob?
   
   
6. How do the events of the play prove the narrator’s statement,  “The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosives and fallout”?
   
   
7. Who are the real monsters in this play?  Why?
   
   
8. What is the main conflict of “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street”?
   
   
9. What warning should readers take away from this episode?
   
   
10. Can you think of an example of a situation (from history) similar to what happened on Maple Street?
    
    

We spent the remainder of the period discussing student responses to these questions and related issues.

For homework: Read the next 30 pages of The Martian Chronicles, and begin compiling a vocabulary list of ten words you come across in your reading that were previously unfamiliar to you.  For each word, write a definition and a sentence using the word.  I have attached a blank vocabulary sheet below.  The vocabulary list will be due in one week.

vocab-independent_list_2.pdf
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