1. grammar starter
2. Quick Quiz3. Grammar--Appositive Phrases
4. Go over HF questions
5. Huck Finn Activity--Label this map for slave states.
6. Discussion: Use this Cloze Activity Sheet.
Mark Twain from Notebook #35
"In those old slave-holding days, the whole community was agreed as to one thing--the awful sacredness of slave property. To help steal a horse or a cow was a low crime, but to help a hunted slave, or feed him or shelter him, or hide him, or comfort him, in his troubles, his terrors, his despair, or hesitate to promptly to betray him to the slave-catcher when opportunity offered was a much baser crime, & carried with it a stain, a moral smirch which nothing could wipe away. That this sentiment should exist among slave-owners is comprehensible—there were good commercial reasons for it—but that it should exist & did exist among the paupers, the loafers the tag-rag & bobtail of the community, & in a passionate & uncompromising form, is not in our remote day realizable. It seemed natural enough to me then; natural enough that Huck & his father the worthless loafer should feel it & approve it, though it seems now absurd. It shows that that strange thing, the conscience—the unerring monitor—can be trained to approve any wild thing you want it to approve if you begin its education early and stick to it."
4. Go over HF questions
5. Huck Finn Activity--Label this map for slave states.
6. Discussion: Use this Cloze Activity Sheet.
Mark Twain from Notebook #35
"In those old slave-holding days, the whole community was agreed as to one thing--the awful sacredness of slave property. To help steal a horse or a cow was a low crime, but to help a hunted slave, or feed him or shelter him, or hide him, or comfort him, in his troubles, his terrors, his despair, or hesitate to promptly to betray him to the slave-catcher when opportunity offered was a much baser crime, & carried with it a stain, a moral smirch which nothing could wipe away. That this sentiment should exist among slave-owners is comprehensible—there were good commercial reasons for it—but that it should exist & did exist among the paupers, the loafers the tag-rag & bobtail of the community, & in a passionate & uncompromising form, is not in our remote day realizable. It seemed natural enough to me then; natural enough that Huck & his father the worthless loafer should feel it & approve it, though it seems now absurd. It shows that that strange thing, the conscience—the unerring monitor—can be trained to approve any wild thing you want it to approve if you begin its education early and stick to it."
The Institution of Slavery
As one of the main themes of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain made his feelings of disgust about slavery clearly understood. Twain believed that slavery and religion were tied together in ways that made the abolition of slavery a difficult task. Twain told of religion's support for slavery:
''The local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind and then the texts were read aloud to us to make the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery, they were wise and said nothing…''
Twain felt there was a distinct conflict between what society was doing and what they should have been doing in regard to slavery. He took the opportunity with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to extol the horrors and hypocrisy of the institution of slavery.
In the novel, Twain helped us to see the contradictions inherent in the institution of slavery. The slaveholders made money on the backs of the men and women they owned. They were unable to see that they were exploiting them, abusing them, and oppressing them because they honestly believed that the slaves could not survive in the world without them. The slaveholders thought they were,in effect, doing the slaves a favor by providing for them.
The message here, which is pervasive in this marvelous novel, is that truly moral acts are, often enough, undertaken in defiance of a so-called moral majority. And it is that which this particular member of the sacred brotherhood has chosen to do. If studying "Huckleberry Finn" is in anyway to hurt students at Mark Twain Intermediate School, it can only be because those who teach the book have failed to understand it.
But there is, of course, a larger issue here. When we prevent our children from being exposed in the classroom to the best that has been known and said in our literary tradition, we not only narrow the range of their educational experience, but we also--unintentionally to be sure--help them to grow into individuals, like the members of the Shepherdson and Grangerford families in the novel, who might commit senseless acts of destruction out of a lack of understanding of the complexities of moral life. If "Huckleberry Finn" is, as an administrative aide at the school put it, "poison," then I suspect my own 11- year-old daughter must have a remarkably immune system. She even appears to thrive on it." (The Washington Post)
By chapter: https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-adventures-of-huckleberry-finn/themes/slavery-and-racism
"In his wonderful book An Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis says that this is one of the great powers of literature, a power that it shares with only a handful of art forms: the ability to multiply our experience, to draw us into foreign worlds and allow us to experience them from the safety of our own. “My own eyes are not enough for me,” Lewis says. “I will see through those of others.” I would not have put it in those words as a boy, but I remember feeling that hunger for a broader experience." Adam Andrews
“The people whom Huck and Jim encounter on the Mississippi” — Russell Baker wrote in the New York Times in 1982 — “are drunkards, murderers, bullies, swindlers, lynchers, thieves, liars, frauds, child abusers, numskulls, hypocrites, windbags and traders in human flesh. All are white. The one man of honor in this phantasmagoria is ‘Nigger Jim,’ as Twain called him to emphasize the irony of a society in which the only true gentleman was held beneath contempt.”
Great resource:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/teachers/huck/howto.html
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