American Studies: 10/13

Yesterday's journal, if you missed it:
1. When do you have money to spend? How do you earn the money you spend?
2. Do you prefer to spend your money right away?
3. What kinds of things would you save for?
4. Do you buy things only when you need them?
5. How do you differentiate between what you "want" and what you "need?"
6. Do you shop when you have to, or do you shop for other reasons?
7. Do you have time to yourself? How do you spend it?
8. How do you get to the places you want to go? How would you get there if you could?
You don't have to copy the questions, but by your answers it should be clear what the question was.
Monday: Parent/adult interview due; complete Thursday's "Walden" journal (below), keeping in mind whether Walden is relevant today.
Write a minimum 3/4 page response to this quote in your journal…tape or glue this quote in above your response.
“The nation itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads?” Henry David Thoreau, Walden
For Tuesday: Read "Resistance to Civil Government" (often known as "Civil Disobedience") in your textbook, pages 249 to 254
Thoreau wrote this piece after he spent a night in jail as a result of refusing to pay his poll tax to protest the Mexican-American war.
You need to take critical reading notes on the piece.
What's next:
Monday: Affluenza
Tuesday: Discuss Affluenza and Civil Disobedience
Wednesday: Civil Disobedience
Thursday: Romanticism/Transcendentalism Fishbowl
Friday: Test on Vocab. List 2
Monday 10/24: Start The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn