Oedipus Rex Unit
Daily Lessons and Assignments
Essential Questions:
Balanced: Students will be asked to reflect between the balance of decision-making and factors outside their control affect their lives.
Students will come to an understanding that in order to discover truth, they need to live balanced lives. Truth can be found spiritually, physically, naturally, or in relationships and different experiences. In order to understand their own identity, just as Oedipus had to, students need to find their own balance.
Inquirers: Students will develop their natural curiosity in terms of both history, literature and within personal reflection. Students will be asked to questions how time, place and a culture’s ideals contribute to a society and its people. Students will need to come to the understanding that the topic of truth is subjective and will need to come to terms with the fact that their questions cannot always be answered. Their questions should only be answered with questions.
Objective focus:
International Mindedness:
Topic: Dictator’s truths: students will receive one dictator to do research on and determine what that person’s “truth” was and how they came to the realization of that truth.
Dictators: Saddam Hussein, Mao Zedong, Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Putin, Kim ll-Jong, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Joseph Stalin, Robert Mugabe, Augusto Pinochet, Bashar al- Assad, Fidel Castro
Questions:
Application to TOK: Students will be analyzing how different philosophers define truth and how each of us as individuals form our own truths based on culture, experience and prior knowledge.
Catholic:We will be discussing Catholicism’s stance on truth.
Common Core Standards:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.2
Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.3
Analyze the impact of the author's choices regarding how to develop and relate elements of a story or drama (e.g., where a story is set, how the action is ordered, how the characters are introduced and developed).
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.5
Analyze how an author's choices concerning how to structure specific parts of a text (e.g., the choice of where to begin or end a story, the choice to provide a comedic or tragic resolution) contribute to its overall structure and meaning as well as its aesthetic impact.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.7
Analyze multiple interpretations of a story, drama, or poem (e.g., recorded or live production of a play or recorded novel or poetry), evaluating how each version interprets the source text. (Include at least one play by Shakespeare and one play by an American dramatist.)
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.11-12.2
Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas, concepts, and information clearly and accurately through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.11-12.7
Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects to answer a question (including a self-generated question) or solve a problem; narrow or broaden the inquiry when appropriate; synthesize multiple sources on the subject, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.11-12.1
Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain.
- How are country’s leaders a reflection on that country?
- When dark secrets are reveled, how does society deal with them? (Catharsis)
- How does someone come to realize truth and how does that truth change based on perspective?
- How are heroic flaws a necessity for a character, especially in tragedies?
- Do we control our own fate?
Balanced: Students will be asked to reflect between the balance of decision-making and factors outside their control affect their lives.
Students will come to an understanding that in order to discover truth, they need to live balanced lives. Truth can be found spiritually, physically, naturally, or in relationships and different experiences. In order to understand their own identity, just as Oedipus had to, students need to find their own balance.
Inquirers: Students will develop their natural curiosity in terms of both history, literature and within personal reflection. Students will be asked to questions how time, place and a culture’s ideals contribute to a society and its people. Students will need to come to the understanding that the topic of truth is subjective and will need to come to terms with the fact that their questions cannot always be answered. Their questions should only be answered with questions.
Objective focus:
- Determine the cause and effect of events in the play as well as events in history.
- Compare and contrast characters to historical figures based on the elements of tragedies
- Analyze how themes are developed throughout the play and how the messages of the themes are affected by events.
- Infer information of a culture based on close reading of the text.
- Critique how the structure of the play affected the reader’s reaction to events.
- Write about connections using evidence form research an the text.
- Flaw of Oedipus compared and contrasted to the flaw of their researched dictator used in international mindedness project and how they both ended in tragedy.
- Students will be asked to compare and contrast one of the following: tragic flaw, tragic end, fate’s role, decisions and connection to fate, societal receptiveness, finding of truth
International Mindedness:
Topic: Dictator’s truths: students will receive one dictator to do research on and determine what that person’s “truth” was and how they came to the realization of that truth.
Dictators: Saddam Hussein, Mao Zedong, Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Putin, Kim ll-Jong, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Joseph Stalin, Robert Mugabe, Augusto Pinochet, Bashar al- Assad, Fidel Castro
Questions:
- What did this dictator base their philosophy upon?
- Why did they believe this philosophy?
- How did culture, religion and time play into their truth?
- How did they help others realize their personal truth?
Application to TOK: Students will be analyzing how different philosophers define truth and how each of us as individuals form our own truths based on culture, experience and prior knowledge.
Catholic:We will be discussing Catholicism’s stance on truth.
Common Core Standards:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.2
Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.3
Analyze the impact of the author's choices regarding how to develop and relate elements of a story or drama (e.g., where a story is set, how the action is ordered, how the characters are introduced and developed).
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.5
Analyze how an author's choices concerning how to structure specific parts of a text (e.g., the choice of where to begin or end a story, the choice to provide a comedic or tragic resolution) contribute to its overall structure and meaning as well as its aesthetic impact.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.7
Analyze multiple interpretations of a story, drama, or poem (e.g., recorded or live production of a play or recorded novel or poetry), evaluating how each version interprets the source text. (Include at least one play by Shakespeare and one play by an American dramatist.)
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.11-12.2
Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas, concepts, and information clearly and accurately through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.11-12.7
Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects to answer a question (including a self-generated question) or solve a problem; narrow or broaden the inquiry when appropriate; synthesize multiple sources on the subject, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.11-12.1
Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain.