Race in America - The Donald Sterling Case

Today we will take a close look at a recent event - the comments made by Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, a professional basketball team. His comments were quickly labeled as racist, protests were seen across the country, and the NBA fined and banned him from the sport.

What is this story about?  To just say "racism" is only part of the picture.  Today we will read several different stories and attempt to synthesize the information.

Here are a few different news sources for you to explore. Browse through the articles and find two - one information, and one opinion piece.

• http://www.nytimes.com/
• http://www.cnn.com/
• http://espn.go.com/
• http://www.latimes.com/
• http://www.foxnews.com/
• http://www.msnbc.com/
• http://www.usatoday.com/
• http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/

Visions of the Future - Synthesis

We read excerpts from 1984 and Brave New World and explored their different visions of the future.

We paid close attention to the tone, setting, and characterization. Then we discussed the role of technology and what the different excerpts have to say about human nature.

This was part of our work on synthesizing ideas, which also included:

• Reading a packet of poems and identifying common language and ideas
• Viewing and working with a series of images and creating a narrative to unify them