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Lesson 4

We will summarize our understanding of ethos, logos, and pathos and how it applies to Friday Night Lights. We will return to reading Friday Night Lights and analyze Bissinger’s use of rhetoric, specifically ethos, logos, and pathos, to express his perspective on how the football players of Permian learned about values. We will compare the claims made by Ripley with the ideas expressed by Bissinger.

Lesson Goals

  • Can I gather and organize relevant and sufficient evidence to demonstrate an understanding of Bissinger’s claims about values in Friday Night Lights?

  • Can I identify the claims, reasoning, and evidence used to develop arguments and explanations in Friday Night Lights?

  • Can I identify and evaluate the effects of literary devices and rhetoric in Friday Night Lights?

Texts

Core

  • Unit Reader
    • “Baseball for Life,” Sara Corbett, The New York Times Company, 2006
    • “The Case against High-School Sports,” Amanda Ripley, The Atlantic Media Co., 2013
  • Tradebook
    • Friday Night Lights, H.G. Bissinger, Da Capo Press, 1990

Materials

Tools

Question Sets

Editable Google Docs

Activity 1: Write

We will use the Organizing Evidence Tool to write a short response to a prompt about Ripley’s claims in “The Case Against High School Sports.” we will take the information our group wrote down regarding her use of ethos, logos, and pathos and form a response about her use of rhetoric in her writing.

Review the Organizing Evidence Tool you completed in groups in the previous lesson. Consider how Ripley uses rhetoric (ethos, logos, and pathos) to support her claims in "The Case against High-School Sports." Using the information from this document, respond to the following question:

  1. How did Ripley use rhetoric to support her central claim in "The Case against High-School Sports?" Was it effective?

Provide specific examples from the text.

Activity 2: Read – Write – Discuss

We will begin reading chapter 14 of Friday Night Lights as a group, identifying Bissinger’s central claim of the chapter. We will write down this central idea on a new copy of the Organizing Evidence Tool in preparation of an analysis of Bissinger’s use of rhetoric in chapter 14.

Step 1

Read and annotate the first three pages of Chapter 14, ending at the break on page 292: "The source of these notes wasn’t discovered either."

Identify Bissinger’s central claim and write it down on a new copy of the Organizing Evidence Tool.

Step 2

Answer and discuss the following text-dependent questions from the Section 4 Question Set:

  1. Why does Coach Gaines act so angry during the game against Amarillo Tascosa? Considering what happened in previous chapters, what is Coach Gaines illustrating as the most valuable part of athletics? Cite evidence from the text to support your answer.

  2. Reread this quote from the open letter to the football team: "The primary goal of many of you appears to be seeing how intoxicated you can become, while others of you try to see how many rules you can flaunt and get by with." Compare this with the actions of the citizens Bissinger describes in Chapter 11. Cite evidence from both chapters to support your answer.

  3. On page 291, why does McDougal assume intoxicant is a coach’s word? How do you know?

  4. Consider the open letter to the players. What does the letter illustrate is most important to the community? What is inferred as not as important? Cite evidence from the text to support your answer.

Activity 3: Read – Write

As we read parts 1 and 2 of chapter 14, we will identify supporting claims to Bissinger’s central claim and supporting evidence to these additional claims. We will write down these on our Organizing Evidence Tools.

Continue reading and annotating Chapter 14, identifying supporting claims made by Bissinger that support his central claim for the chapter.

Write down these supporting claims and evidence on your Organizing Evidence Tool.

Activity 4: Read – Discuss – Write

After we have read chapter 14 and identified Bissinger’s supporting claims and his supporting evidence on our Organizing Evidence Tools, we will begin analyzing his use of rhetoric. We will complete our Organizing Evidence Tools by explaining how Bissinger uses rhetoric in each of his supporting claims.

With your groups, review the supporting claims and evidence your group identified from Chapter 14 and wrote down on your Organizing Evidence Tool.

Analyze these details and the evidence and determine if Bissinger used rhetorical devices, especially ethos, logos, or pathos, in supporting his claims.

Write down your analysis in the Analyze the Evidence section on the Organizing Evidence Tool.

Activity 5: Read – Discuss

We will analyze a specific sentence from chapter 14 of Friday Night Lights to determine how Bissinger uses ethos, pathos, and logos to support his perspective in his writing.

As a whole class, read aloud the final paragraph of the first section of Chapter 14, starting on page 299.

Notice how this paragraph is a single lengthy sentence. Analyze this sentence and discuss how the author uses ethos, pathos, or logos. Which type of rhetoric does he use? How do you know? Identify the words and phrases the author uses to develop his perspective.

Activity 6: Read

In preparation for the next lesson, we will do a first read of the article “Baseball For Life” for homework.

Read and annotate the article "Baseball for Life" for homework, considering the following question:

  1. What is the author’s perspective about youth sports in the text?

Write down new or interesting words in your Vocabulary Journal.

Write down sentences that stand out to you as interesting or that represent a strong example of a particular concept you have learned in your Mentor Sentence Journal.