3/22/18

Although we had a shortened day, today during class we went over quite a bit on the topic of Capitalization and how it relates to the American Dream. Mr. Rivers started us off by asking the groups to define Capitalization and what does it have to do with the American Dream. The definition for Capitalization that the class came up with today was; Opportunities created for other to succeed. Capitalization relates to the American Dream because essentially the American Dream is that anyone, from any economic and social class, has the opportunity to do/achieve what ever they want to. We then went onto a quote from yesterdays Revisionist History podcast with Malcolm Gladwell. Our job was to decide whether the passage was descriptive or argumentative and then find what parts of the excerpt were explicit and implicit argumentation. The first quote from the podcast was, "And right from the beginning, Americans have told themselves that they're really good at capitalization, really good at social mobility, any kid can grow up to be president. That's what's supposed to set America apart from everywhere else." Each group was then tasked with creating a more explicit argument for this passage and making it more descriptive by using who, what, when, where, why, and how. We then repeated these steps (excluding creating a better argument) for two more additional passages before class time ran out. This lesson relates to the real world because while the majority of the lesson does not revolve around writing per say, the idea of the American Dream and some of the issues that plague it are very important to know and understand in the real world today. If one wants to become a politician in order to change some of the issues plaguing American society as a whole today, you cannot address all of the individual problems such as gun violence, poverty, etc. without first considering what contributes to causing such situations/issues, such as the lack of capitalization, social mobility, and economic opportunities. These issues trace back to the American Dream which, for the majority of Americans is almost unattainable. Without fixing the core issues, how could a politician or an elected official hope to fix/change the individual issues? The part of the lesson that does pertain to argumentative writing clearly connects to the real world because without knowing how to come up with a descriptive, detail, yet clear argument in a paragraph/paper, how could you write a good research paper or thesis in college or even in a job.