Duration: 15 – 20 minutes iii Writing: A comprehension will be written by my learners concerning Michael ‘story - Comprehension Questions: Where did Michael Chabon’s parents buy a new home in 1969? Who is James Rouse? Where was “the Plan,” displayed? What does Chabon see in the slide show? Find the name of the neighbourhood Chabon’s family moved into. Where does the author say he put the map of Columbia? Chabon states that some critics believe the “grand experiment” of Columbia had failed. What reasons are given for this failure? What does Chabon say about childhood in the essay?
(http://americanenglish.state.gov/files/ae/resource_files/04-42-2-c.pdf)

Learning Outcome: Learners will demonstrate their comprehension of assigned readings by writing concise summaries that identify the author’s main point (thesis) and supporting ideas, paraphrasing and quoting key words and phrases when necessary to avoid plagiarism they require considerable thought to write – it is easy to get them wrong and create a learning strait jacket. Learners will identify the shape of text (e.g. introduction, body, and conclusion) by reading non-fiction essays and articles.
Description of activity and assessment: Since the intent of the unit is to assess writing standards, I know that they needed to provide a well-written product. In this case, I would still provide them with some choice. Additionally, the standards I chose had to do with evidence, and so they needed to do research, cite evidence, and make sure that it aligned to their ideas in their written product, a common, standards-aligned rubric that would be used to assess all the products to ensure that all students were meeting the same outcomes.

Activity 4
Duration: 15 – 20 minutes
Language: I may assign my learners one of the following projects or ask them to choose a project to complete individually or in a group of three or four students. I will ask my learners to complete their projects as written reports by drawing a map of their neighbourhood or the community where their school is located, label the buildings and streets, write a short description of the neighbourhood, explain the street names and why do leaners think these
Names were chosen? For an example, Steve Biko Avenue, and that learners should include a description of any special features they have in the neighbourhood (a statue, a park, a famous landmark, etc.) and tell about their favourite place to visit. Learners will then ask friends to find out what characteristics can create an ideal neighbourhood then decide on common principles and beliefs the residents would live by. Lastly but not least decide what physical characteristics the neighbourhood should have (shops, houses, schools, a religious building, a medical clinic, etc.)
Step 2. Grammar Test:
1. Find the expression deep pockets in paragraph 4. Use the dictionary to find the meaning. Then reread the paragraph and answer the following question: What allowed the men in the Working Group to “experiment on an Enormous scale” and create a plan for building the city of Columbia?
2. Scan paragraph 6 to find the word integration. Use your dictionary to find the best definition for this word as it is used in the paragraph. How is it pronounced? Use your dictionary’s pronunciation guide for help.
3. Find the term loci in paragraph 9. Loci is a plural noun. Use your dictionary to find the singular form. What is the meaning of this word?
4. Find the expression churn up in paragraph 10. What part of speech is? churn up?
5. Find the word pseudo. Look up the definition in your dictionary. How is it pronounced? Use your dictionary’s guide to pronunciation for help.

Learning outcome: Learners will then compose their essays with sentences which display a developing syntactical maturity and whose meaning is not impaired by excessive grammar, usage and proofreading errors. (www.danbadan.com/368679-english-90-student-learning-outcomes) Description of activity and assessment: Oral assessments can be formal and informal. During informal assessments, learners are involved in regular instructional activities and may be assessed by teachers, peers, or self-assessment. Tasks must have clear scoring criteria, so that teachers can fairly, objectively, and, most important, consistently evaluate them; that is, tasks must have reliability.
Homework :
Careful planning and guidance of learners is crucial to success. The most important principle to remember is that successful group assignments are those that can be better done by a group than by an individual learner, the peer group is powerful because it has the capacity to involve the student more intensely in the educational experience. It is crucial that learners should understand why they are participating in a group project rather than completing the assignment on their own. If I do that, the group’s motivation to work together, solve group tensions, and deal effectively with non-participating members will be strong.
(https://uwaterloo.ca/centre-for-teaching-excellence/teaching-resources/teaching-tips/assessing-student-work/grading-and-feedback/learner-centred-assessment)

In activity 1 listening and speaking: my work would be to Seek for the background information about learners, to guide in planning instructional lessons, set instructional goals with learners’ needs, backgrounds, and interests in mind. These goals are purposeful and meaningful from learners’ point of view, and to use a variety of student groupings to encourage target language communication among them and to adjust teaching based on formative assessment results;

Activity 2 reading: as a teacher I will use authentic, practical, and realistic activities for language performance for example, world map. These activities and resources are in addition to the textbook, learners must feel comfortable to ask questions;

Activity 3 writing: By the end of the course, I want my students to be able to …" Concrete verbs such as define, argue, solve, and create as they are more helpful for course planning than vague verbs such as know or understand or passive verbs such as be exposed to, and be sure to teach my learners on how to complete the task at hand; if a literature review is new to them, I will spend some time teaching them how to write one. https://uwaterloo.ca/centre-for-teaching-excellence/teaching-resources/teaching-tips/assessing-student-work/grading-and-feedback/learner-centred-assessment

Activity 4 language: The study of another language and culture deepens understanding of where and how people live and why events occur. Cultural misunderstandings may often occur between immigrants and citizens of a country, as well as between immigrants and their children when perspectives vary. Learners will be able to engage in short conversations about personal experiences or events and describe and narrate in the present and past time frames. After learning task student will be able to use knowledge gained cultural products, practices and perspectives to create a multimedia rich presentation in the target language to be shared face to face and virtually.
(https://startalk.umd.edu/2011/presentations/ACTFL/LearnerCenteredLearningWangYehJensen.pdf)
Resources: – Video recorder, Classroom, Prezi and Podcast, Photocopied material, Laptops and modern if my school has no Wi-Fi to access internet study guide and world maps, Dictionaries etc.
D.
Language especially English as a second language is a tool for thought and communication and learning to use language effectively which enables learners and teachers to think and acquire knowledge, to express our identity, feelings and ideas, to interact with others and to manage their world. Explore is probably one of the verbs most commonly employed to try and explain what we think writers are doing when they write. I have learnt in Michael Chabon’s essay that Good writing requires casting a cold eye on the other and on the self and then telling the truth about those observations. Reflecting on experiences encourages insight and complex learning.
Why I chose the essay: It was not easy to choose the essay during this period where xenophobia is smelling everywhere in our African country, I wanted to take a caption of a television story about xenophobia where statues were destroyed, but view it in another way of choosing the book that will make it easier for my learners to go through and refer to their past experiences and what can take us back to our South African history having the fear of. lacking the resources. Michael Chabon, whose story reflects the past and present which is history and politics, grammar and literature/comprehension, and to read on what prompted him to be a writer at the end, marriage and divorce whereby his parents divorced when Chabon was 11, mother's marijuana use, which are personal circumstances that and individual may pass through and still be an icon.
Chabon brings the velocity, verve, and emotional richness intrinsic to the best of short stories to his exceptionally canny and stirring essays. As a caring teacher, I had to start my day with learners by promoting a reflective classroom ensuring that learners are fully engaged in the process of making meaning, help each learner by monitoring their progress, again organize instruction so that students are the producers, not just the consumers, of knowledge. To best guide learners in the habits of reflection, I pursued an approach of playing a role as that of "facilitator of meaning making. Group techniques and putting technology at the center of teaching English, has been my choice of strategy that will engage learners to perform various roles so that they may be able to use language effectively and helping to develop maturity in them. As a teacher I struggled to get my assignment material and had to spend time on searching resources online while the system was functional and working. Events took place within a given amount of time.
………………………………………..END……………………………………………………

Bibliography:
Internet:
http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/ https://sites.google.com/a/ohlsd.org/bschwartz/biography http://americanenglish.state.gov/files/ae/resource_files/04-42-2-c.pdf http://www.edutopia.org/blog/comprehensive-assessment-action-5-keys-andrew-miller http://usinfo. state.gov/products/pubs/writers/ www.bartleby.com/61 • Merriam-Webster On-line–The Language Centre: www.m-w.com/ www.danbadan.com/368679-english-90-student-learning-outcomes https://uwaterloo.ca/centre-for-teaching-excellence/teaching-resources/teaching-tips/assessing-student-work/grading-and-feedback/learner-centred-assessment https://startalk.umd.edu/2011/presentations/ACTFL/LearnerCenteredLearningWangYehJensen.pdf Books and online study guide:

Rima Vesely, 1998 Fulbright Scholar. Multilingual Environments for Survival: The Impact of English on Xhosa-Speaking Students in Cape Town.

Michael Chabon, 2004. Teaching Forum. Original. Published in Architectural Digest
Michael Chabon by Salem Press, Inc. Maps and Legends. Online study guide Uterary masterpieces, volume 2
SDENG3J Study guide and Tutorial letter101/0/2015
Dr B Makina, Dr D Lephalala, 2007 English Teacher Education. Tutorial letter 501. Editor LJ Rafapa. UNISA pages 50-51, 72-144

U.S. Department of State's Bureau of International Information Programs

WRITERS ON AMERICA
Introduction

Elmaz Abinader Just off Main Street

Julia Alvarez I, Too, Sing Amrica

Sven Birkerts The Compulsory Power of American Dreams

Robert Olen Butler A Postcard from America

Michael Chabon Maps and Legends

Billy Collins What's American About American Poetry?

Robert Creeley America's American

David Herbert Donald On Being an American Historian

Richard Ford How Does Being an American Inform What I Write?

Linda Hogan For Life's Sake

Mark Jacobs Both Sides of the Border

Charles Johnson An American Milk Bottle

Bharati Mukherjee On Being an American Writer

Naomi Shihab Nye This Crutch That I Love

Robert Pinsky A Provincial Sense of Time

Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon
________________________________________

The prolific literary output of novelist and short-story writer Michael Chabon recently culminated with the publication of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Random House, 2000), an ambitious novel charting the adventures of two cousins who arrive in New York in the 1930s and get into the comic book business. Kavalier & Clay won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Chabon is currently pressing ahead on a number of other major projects and publications. His published work includes The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, a novel, (1988) and Wonder Boys, a novel, (1995) as well as two collections of short stories, A Model World and Other Stories, (1990) and Werewolves In Their Youth (1999). His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Playboy, and in a number of anthologies, among them Prize Stories 1999: The O'Henry Awards. Much of his writing can also be found on his ingenious Web site, www.michaelchabon.com. A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, Chabon subsequently enrolled in the master of fine arts writing program at the University of California, Irvine. Chabon submitted the manuscript of a novel as his MFA thesis, and it was soon published in 1988, as The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, when Chabon was in his 20s. The New Yorker called Mysteries "a nearly perfect example of the promising first novel," and other reviewers compared Chabon to such worthies as F. Scott Fitzgerald and J.D. Salinger. His next novel, Wonder Boys, was a bestseller, and became a movie starring Michael Douglas. Chabon's essay "Maps and Legends," in this volume, stems from the circumstance of being born in 1964 in Columbia, Maryland, one of the very few planned towns in the United States. His luxuriant imagination, Chabon has avowed, stems in part from his high level of exposure to comic books in childhood, which were brought to him by his father. His father's father, in turn, was a printer who printed many comic books and brought them to his son. Echoing many critics, Saul Austerlitz writes on the "Central Booking" Web site, "Michael Chabon is one of the most enjoyable, in addition to being one of the most acclaimed, writers to emerge in American fiction in the past decade. He also avoids many of the games of his postmodern peers, preferring instead the simple, old-fashioned virtue of a story well-told. His books leave readers with the recollection of powerful, well-shaped characters and a gift for sharply pointed dialogue." Chabon lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Ayelet Waldman, and their children.

In 1969, when I was six years old, my parents took out a Veterans Administration loan and bought a three-bedroom house in an imaginary city called Columbia. As a paediatrician for the Public Health Service, my Brooklyn-born father was a veteran, of all things, of the United States Coast Guard (which had stationed him, no doubt wisely, in the coast-free state of Arizona). Ours was the first V.A. housing loan to be granted in Columbia, Maryland, and the event made the front page of the local paper.
Columbia is now the second-largest city in the state, I am told, but at the time we moved there, it was home to no more than a few thousand people -- "pioneers," they called themselves. They were colonists of a dream, immigrants to a new land that as yet existed mostly on paper. More than four-fifths of Columbia's projected houses, office buildings, parks, pools, bike paths, elementary schools, and shopping centres had yet to be built; and the millennium of racial and economic harmony that Columbia promised to birth in its theoretical streets and cul-de-sacs was as far from parturition as ever. In the end, for all its promise and ambition, Columbia may have changed nothing but one little kid. Yet I believe that my parents' decision to move us into the midst of that unfinished, ongoing act of architectural and social imagination altered the course of my life and made me into the writer that I am.
In the mid-1960s, a wealthy, stubborn, and pragmatic dreamer named James Rouse had, by stealth and acuity, acquired an enormous chunk of Maryland tobacco country lying along either side of the old Columbia Pike, between Baltimore and Washington. Rouse, often referred to as the inventor of the shopping mall (though there are competing claims to this distinction), was a man with grand ideas about the pernicious nature of the suburb, and the enduring importance of cities in human life. The City was a discredited idea in those days, burnt and poisoned and abandoned to rot, but James Rouse felt strongly that it could be reimagined, rebuilt, renewed.
He assembled a team of bright men -- one of countless such teams of bright men in narrow neckties and short haircuts whose terrible optimism made the '60s such an admirable and disappointing time. These men, rolling up their sleeves, called themselves the Working Group. Like their patron, they were filled with sound and visionary ideas about zoning, green space, accessibility, and the public life of cities, as well as with enlightened notions of race, class, education, architecture, capitalism, and transit. Fate, fortune, and the headstrong inspiration of a theorist with very deep pockets had given them the opportunity to experiment on an enormous scale, and they seized it. Within a relatively short time, they had come up with the Plan.
My earliest memories of Columbia are of the Plan. It was not merely the founding document and chief selling point of the Columbia Experiment. It was also the new town's most treasured possession, the tangible evidence of the goodness of Mr. Rouse's inspiration. The Plan, in both particulars and spirit, was on display for all to see, in a little building (one of Frank Gehry's first built works) called the Exhibit Centre, down at the shore of the manmade lake that lay at the heart of both plan and town. This lake -- it was called, with the studied, historicist whimsy that contributed so much authentic utopian atmosphere to the town, Lake Kittamaqundi -- was tidy and still, rippled by the shining wakes of ducks. Beside it stood a modest high-rise, white and modernistic in good late-'60s Star Trek style, called the American City Building. Between this, Columbia's lone "skyscraper," and the Exhibit Centre, stretched a landscaped open plaza, lined with benches and shrubbery, immaculate, and ornamented by a curious piece of sculpture called the People Tree, a tall dandelion of metal, whose gilded tufts were the stylized figures of human beings. Sculpture, benches, plaza, lake, and tower: On a sunny afternoon in 1970 these things had an ideal aspect; they retained the unsullied, infinite perspective of the architect's drawings from which they had so recently sprung.
My parents, my younger brother, and I were shown those drawings, and many more, inside the Exhibit Centre. There were projections and charts and explanatory diagrams. The famous Covenant -- the common agreement of all Columbia's citizens and developers to abide by certain rather strict aesthetic guidelines in constructing and altering their homes -- was explained. And there was a slide show, conducted in one of those long-vanished 1970s rooms, furnished only with carpeted cubes and painted the colours of a bag of candy corn. The slide show featured smiling children at play, families strolling along wooded paths, couples working their way in paddleboats across Kittamaqundi or its artificial sister, Wilde Lake. It was a bright, primary-coloured world, but the children in it were assiduously black and white. Because that was an integral part of the Columbia idea: that here, in these fields where slaves had once picked tobacco, the noble and extravagant promises that had just been made to black people in the flush of the Civil Rights movement would, at last, be redeemed. That was, I intuited, part of the meaning of the symbol that was reproduced everywhere around us in the Exhibit Centre: that we were all branches of the same family; that we shared common roots and aspirations.
Sitting atop a cube, watching the slide show, I was very much taken with the idea -- the Idea -- of Columbia, but it was as we were leaving the Exhibit Centre that my fate was sealed: as we walked out, I was handed a map -- a large, fold-out map, detailed and colourful, of the Working Group's dream.
The power of maps to fire the imagination is well known. And, as Joseph Conrad's Marlow observed, there is no map as seductive as the one, like the flag-coloured schoolroom map of Africa that doomed him to his forlorn quest, marked by doubts and conjectures, by the romantic blank of unexplored territory. The map of Columbia I took home from that first visit was like that. The Plan dictated that the Town be divided into sub-units to be called Villages, each Village in turn divided into Neighbourhoods. These Villages had all been laid out and named, and were present on and defined by the map. Many of the Neighbourhoods, too, had been drawn in, along with streets and the network of bicycle paths that knit the town together. But there were large areas of the map that, apart from the Village name, were entirely empty, conjectural -- non-existent, in fact.
The names of Columbia! That many, if not most of them, were bizarre, unlikely, and even occasionally ridiculous, was a regular subject of discussion among Columbians and outsiders alike. In the Neighbourhood called Phelps Luck, you could find streets with names that were Anglo-whimsical and alliterative (Dry straw Drive, Margrave Mews, Luck penny Lane); elliptical and puzzling, shorn of their suffixes, Zen (Blue Pool, Red Lake, Spiral Cut); or truly odd (Cloud leap Court, Roll Right Court, New grange Garth). It was rumoured that the naming of Columbia's one thousand streets had been done by a single harried employee of the Rouse Company who, barred by some kind of arcane agreement from duplicating any of the street names in use in the surrounding counties of Baltimore and Anne Arundel, had turned in desperation from the exhausted lodes of flowers, trees, and U.S. presidents to the works of American writers and poets. The genius loci of Phelps Luck -- did you guess? -- was Robinson Jeffers.
I spent hours poring over that map, long before my family ever moved into the house that we eventually bought, with that V.A. loan, at 5179 Eliots Oak Road, in the neighbourhood of Longfellow, in the Village of Harper's Choice. To me the remarkable thing about those names was not their oddity but the simple fact that most of them referred to locations that did not exist. They were like magic spells, each one calibrated to call into being one particular stretch of blacktop, sidewalk, and lawn, and no other. In time -- I witnessed it with my own eyes, month by month, year by year -- the street demanded by the formula "Darkbush Terrace" or "Night Roost" would churn up out of the Maryland mud and clay, begin to sprout houses, trees, a tidy blue-and-white identifying sign. It was a powerful demonstration to me of the incantatory power of names and naming.
Eventually I tacked the map, considerably tattered and worn, to the wall of my room, on the second floor of our three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath pseudo-colonial tract house on Eliots Oak Road. In time the original map was joined, there, by a map of Walt Disney World's new Magic Kingdom, and by another of a world of my own devising, a world of horses and tall grass which I called Davoria. I studied the map of Columbia in the morning as I dressed for school (a school without classrooms, in which we were taught, both by racially diverse teachers and by the experience of simply looking around at the other faces in the room, that the battle for integration and civil rights was over, and that the good guys had won). I glanced up at the map at night as I lay in bed, reading The Hobbit or The Book of Three or a novel set in Oz. And sometimes I would give it a once over before I set out with my black and white friends for a foray into the hinterlands, to the borders of our town and our imaginations.
Our Neighbourhood of Longfellow was relatively complete, with fresh-rolled sod lawns and spindly little foal-legged trees, but just beyond its edges my friends and I could ride our bikes clear off the edge of the Known World, into that unexplored blank of bulldozed clay and ribboned stakes where, one day, houses and lives would blossom. We would climb down the lattices of rebar into newly dug basements, dank and clammy and furred with ends of tree roots. We rolled giant spools of telephone cable down earthen mounds, and collected like arrowheads bent nails and spent missile shells of grout. The skeletons of houses, their nervous systems, their subcutaneous layers of insulation, were revealed to us as we watched them growing from the inside out. Later I might come to know the house's eventual occupants, and visit them, and stand in their kitchen thinking, I saw your house being born.
In a sense, the ongoing work of my hometown and the business of my childhood coincided perfectly; for as my family subsequently moved to the even newer, rawer Village of Long Reach, and then proceeded to fall very rapidly apart, Columbia and I both struggled to fill in the empty places, to feel our way outward into the mysterious gaps and undiscovered corners of the world. In the course of my years in Columbia, I encountered things not called for by the members of the Working Group, things that were not on the map. There were strange, uncharted territories of race and sex and nagging human unhappiness. And there was the vast, unsuspected cataclysm of my parents' divorce that redrew so many boundaries, and created, with the proverbial stroke of the pen, vast new areas of confusion and dismay. And then one day I left Columbia, and discovered the bitter truth about race relations, and for a while I was inclined to view the lessons I had been taught with a certain amount of rueful anger. I felt that I had been lied to, that the map I had been handed was a forgery. And after all, I would hear it said from time to time, Columbia had failed in its grand experiment. It had become a garden-variety suburb in the Baltimore-Washington Corridor; there was crime there, and racial unrest.
The judgments of Columbia's critics may or may not be accurate, but it seems to me, looking back at the city of my and James Rouse's dreams from 30 years on, that just because you have stopped believing in something you once were promised does not mean that the promise itself was a lie. Childhood, at its best, is a perpetual adventure, in the truest sense of that overtaxed word: a setting forth into trackless lands that might have come to existence the instant before you first laid eyes on them. How fortunate I was to be handed, at such an early age, a map to steer by, however provisional, a map furthermore ornamented with a complex nomenclature of allusions drawn from the poems, novels and stories of mysterious men named Faulkner, Hemingway, Frost, Hawthorne, and Fitzgerald! Those names, that adventure, are with me still, every time I sit down at the keyboard to sail off, clutching some dubious map or other, into terra incognita.
________________________________________
Originally published in Architectural Digest
2001 Michael Chabon Billy Collins: What's American About American Poetry?