Breaking Up: Rhetorically Speaking...

The exhilaration of a new relationship and the world-ending-feeling after a breakup summarize the range of emotions that occur in the daily life of a high school student. The longing for acceptance by self and others is everything as high schoolers gain a better understanding of themselves as a friend, partner, student, and job-worker. What better way to get students interested in Rhetorical Analysis than to compare it to element’s of their everyday life.

To begin, students in English III at Byron Nelson High School deconstructed one of the nation’s oldest break up letters, the Declaration of Independence. They analyzed its literary text structure which included the Preamble (introduction to the conflict which is also the claim), the Declaration (rights and beliefs), a list of grievances (specific complaints), and a counterargument (perspective from the “other side”). Next, student’s scrutinized the popular Country song from Old Dominion called “Break Up with Him” to study the tricky use of sound counterargument.

As a culminating, summative activity, students then wrote their own break up letter using the rhetorical structures and devices they’ve been studying throughout the unit. The lesson objective states “Using “The Declaration of Independence” as a model, you must “declare your independence” from something that is a problem for you: something that makes your life difficult, unhappy, or stressful. This can be a relationship with a person, a problematic object, a bad habit, or even a situation you find yourself in often. You may be as creative as you like!" Once the subject of the essay was chosen, students then had to incorporate the rhetorical appeals of Ethos, Pathos, and Logos and include at least one rhetorical device of choice; furthermore, the location of these literary devices were easily located by color-coding the corresponding statements within their essay.

Breaking Up with Anxiety

Breaking Up With Sugar

Because of its cross-curricular emphasis through incorporating Historical text in conjunction with the relevant, meaningful, and personal context of the assignment, this lesson met multiple objectives outside of the English III, 15A TEK. This meets International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE)’s standard of a Creative Communicator (6D) in which “Students publish or present content that customizes the message and medium for their intended audiences.” in addition to being a Knowledge Constructor (3D) in which “Students build knowledge by actively exploring real-world issues and problems, developing ideas and theories and pursuing answers and solutions.”

Additional examples include Breaking Up with Cats and Breaking Up with Loneliness.

Kid Created News

Teachers know the importance of communication from the classroom to the community. Our teacher challenged the class to come up with ideas of new ways to send out monthly newsletters to our parents. Getting students involved and to take charge of this classroom task was quite a challenge. Mrs. Degnan, 4th grade teacher, Nance Elementary had the students look at several options and once she picked her editors it became clear to use the subscription service called Smore.com.

The top editors were chosen by Mrs. Degnan and the class. Redd, McKenzi, and Lexi where honored with this position. All three students were chosen because of their leadership and their ability to get the job done. The team begun to hire other students for the different jobs: photographers and writers. Publications feature articles about each of our content area subjects, as well as the exciting happenings going on in 4th grade and around the building. Articles included, diagrams, fun facts, pictures and/or videos. We used the classroom iPads at first for our choice of device, but sometimes quality was an issue. We eventually hired a student who was a professional photographer/videographer who participated in the photography club at school. This made our pictures and videos much higher quality! We also borrowed laptops from 5th grade because they were more adept at meeting our needs and were easier to navigate than the ipads.

Over time we wanted to include student made video tutorials explaining how they did the problems in math (division, multiplication, etc.). We also added many science videos too. We had another great idea...interviews! It became our mission to feature all students in our classes. It was easy to feature kids that stand out, but we found that some of our reluctant or shy students have loved having the opportunity to be highlighted. Some of the students in our class were really good at interviewing people so we hired them. These students chose special people to interview and even formed their own questions. We interviewed people like Mrs. Chaney, the principal, PTA members, and teachers and they became part of our interactive newsletter. This exchange of information became a teaching/learning tool as well. Students that missed concepts or did not understand a concept would ask for videos to made for better understanding. Students led these informal tutoring sessions and parents were delighted to understand how their child was learning in school.

To engage our readers, we added an interesting piece called “Fun Facts”. Throughout the given school day students would walk around ask weird things like “How many teeth does a rhino have?” so we researched them and posted them on our newsletter. Our students here at Nance are extremely good writers so we have a section to showcase student work like essays and poems. A LOT OF POEMS! Again, student work became the highlight of our newsletter. We wanted to give all students a voice in our newsletter.

Our teacher nominated us to present our newsletters at TechnoExpo 2016. We had a blast preparing our presentation and as luck would have it, one of our editors came down with Pneumonia. McKenzi and Lexi brainstormed ways that Redd could still participate even though he had become very ill. We called our campus IT Coach and she suggested why not use the web conferencing tool called Zoom? With her help we ZOOMED Redd in and they presentation went as scheduled – the girls were at NHS and Redd was at home. We felt empowered and our presentation was great!


Our newsletter has sparked the interest of hundreds of followers around the world. We have been delighted in the response. Check us out! We really are fabulous!

We hope to inspire students all across the world to use technology to present and share their work to others.

This article was written by Redd, Lexi, and McKenzi in collaboration with Mrs. Egle

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Life's a Journey, Blog It

For the first twenty minutes of class on Thursdays and Fridays, Mrs. Thompson's 7th grade language arts students at Chisholm Trail Middle School begin their day by journaling. Their journals are kept online in a blog created by them, for them. Although most students write about personal experiences, they have the choice to choose their topic. "They may blog about anything, from what is going on in their life, what's on their mind to world news and hot topics."

The requirements are that their journal entries are complete, thorough, show bits and pieces of who they are, use great voice, and of course, use correct spelling and grammar. "Some journal entries take a serious tone while others are more lighthearted and whimsical. These journal entries are something they can look back at later and serve as a source of pride. This outlet also gives the students a global audience and provides a platform to make connections outside of the classroom."

Click HERE to view Jenna's Blog