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Materials and Lessons for Teaching Of Mice and Men

Created by Megan Pankiewicz, on behalf of The English Teachers Friend

Overview of Materials
Okies Search for a Lost Frontier: An article from The New York Times Magazine from 1939. Trampling Out the Vintage: An article by the same reporter who wrote Okies. Notes on drawings included in packet:
Banjo, front view, mechanical drawing drawn by Jos. H. Handon. Drawing caption: American 5 string banjo. Drawing No. 14. Original in Music Library, University of California, Berkeley. Forms part of a group of field materials documenting the WPA California Folk Music Project in Northern California, collected by Sidney Robertson Cowell from 1938 to 1940. Dumbelek, bottom, side, top, and perspective views, mechanical drawing drawn by Jos. H. Handon. Drawing caption: Dumbeg [dumbelek]. Includes enlarged section showing construction and mechanism details, with dimensions noted in inches. Original in Music Library, University of California, Berkeley. Forms part of a group of field materials documenting Jack Bakalian performing Armenian music on the dumbelek on an unspecified day, collected by Sidney Robertson Cowell in Fresno, California.

Dear President Obama: An opinion piece published on Forbes magazines website that deals with current events and the notion of being ones brothers keeper, an idea found in Of Mice and Men as well. Seven Facts About Americas Mental Health Care System: A recent article from The Washington Post.

Web Resources
Dorothea Langes Migrant Mother photographs As Execution Looms, Texas Debates Steinbeck and Whats Mentally Impaired NPR story from August 2012 Audio reports from NPR that deal with mental health: You Can't See It, But You'll Be A Different Person In 10 Years Why Exercise May Do Teenage Mind Good

Audio report from NPR that deal with migrant workers: Exploring 'Hidden' Jobs, From Coal Miner To Cowboy

Op/Ed 2/08/2012 @ 5:27PM

Dear President Obama: I'm Only My Brother's Keeper If My Brother Is My Sheep


By Jerry Bowyer, Contributor to Forbes magazine online There are lots of things that people think are in the Bible, but really are not. For example, God helps those who help themselves is not there, nor is Cleanliness is next to Godliness. There are some things, however, which are in the Bible, but so terribly mangled as to distort their meaning almost completely; for example, Money is the root of all evil is a misquote of the much more sensible, The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. Sometimes quotes are mangled so badly as to be twisted into a complete opposite of their intentions. The We Are the World music video shows Bob Dylan singing that: As God has shown us, by turning stone to bread and so we all must lend a helping hand Of course, God did not turn stones to bread, at least not in the Bible. The New Testament portrays God as pointedly refusing to turn stones into bread when tempted by Satan to do so. President Obamas frequent references to us being our brothers keeper are an example of the last kind of Bible misquote. Most recently he said it like this: But part of that belief comes from my faith in the idea that I am my brothers keeper and I am my sisters keeper; that as a country, we rise and fall together. Im not an island. Although it has become one of his stump themes, the Presidents use of this particular misquote in last weeks National Prayer Breakfast has brought his exegetical skills under greater scrutiny. Its about time. First, lets get the story right: Adam and Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit and been expelled from the Garden of Eden. They conceive and bear two sons, Cain and Abel. Cain is a farmer of some sort, and Abel is a shepherd (remember this part, it will be important later). Cain and Abel offer the fruits of their labor, grain and sheep respectively, to God as some sort of religious observance. God is pleased with Abels offering, but not with Cains. Despite warnings, Cain fails to master his evil nature and murders his brother Abel, after which God asks him: Where [is] Abel thy brother?And Cain replied: I know not: [Am] I my brothers keeper? Thats it, and it is a pretty slender reed (Biblical allusion intended and undistorted) on which to rest the general moral principle that we are our brothers keepers, let alone on which to build a

social theory which compels a steeply progressive federal income tax. After all, Cain is historys first homicide and, worse still, its first fratricide. His brothers blood is still being swallowed by the earth (also intended) while lying to his Creator. Perhaps his is not the moral compass (not in the Bible) by which we should guide the ship of state. And quoting the father of murderers hardly seems like a good way to illustrate your vision for a compassionate society. But this is only half the corrective: weve shown what being your brothers keeper doesnt mean, but that still leaves us to determine what it does mean, and why its found in that part of the Bible. The context suggests pretty strongly that there is a strong element of literary irony here. The story tells us very little about Abel, really only his occupation and how it relates to his liturgical offerings. He was a shepherd. In the book, The Beginning of Wisdom, Leon Kass observes that in effect Cain sarcastically asks whether he is the shepherds keeper. The point is pretty clear in English if we stop and reflect for a moment, but its even clearer in the original Hebrew in which Cain asks whether he is the shmr of his brother.Shomor. The shepherd is missing and Cain is saying that the shepherd is not one of his sheep. In other words, Cain is being a smart ass. But Cain, in his choice of wording, is also revealing a lot about his interior life and his philosophy of human nature. He thinks of men as being shepherds of other men, who of necessity must therefore be sheep. The old Roman saying that Homo homini lupus est (man is a wolf to man) is prefigured in the sense that if the first group of men is a wolf to the second group of men, then the second group of men must be sheep to the first. How do we know that Cain thought of Abel as his sheep? Well, first of all, because he slaughtered him. Up until then in the story, animals were the only things that had been slaughtered. Men are closely related to animals, especially mammals, in the Torah: Both are created on the sixth day, and both are created from the earth (unlike other living creatures like birds and fish which are created without reference to preexisting material). The very fact that animals like sheep are offered to God is based on their analogous relationship to man. They could not substitute for man in a religious ritual if they were not somehow fitting representatives. The human-animal analogue is so strong in the Torah that it becomes the basis of the creation of Eve. Adam names the animals and notices their gender bifurcation and sees that he is incomplete. Again, the analogy only works based on some element of commonality. Cain takes the analogy a step too far. If animals are like men, then he can slaughter men like animals, which he does. It doesnt really matter whether you believe the story is true; texts have to be taken on their own terms if they are to be used to buttress our arguments. If the President wants to use a story from the Torah to support his progressive political agenda, then he must first understand what the Torah means. So must we.

____________________________________________________________________________________ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jerrybowyer/2012/02/08/dear-president-obama-im-only-my-brotherskeeper-if-my-brother-is-my-sheep/

Seven facts about Americas mental health-care system


By Sarah Kliff , Updated: December 17, 2012 (Click here for hyperlink.)
In the wake of the Newtown school massacre, many have called for a stronger mental health safety net as one way to reduce violent shootings. Shooters in previous massacres had unmet mental health needs. By widening access to services, the thinking goes, professionals could intervene before a tragedy occurs. The mental health-care system in the United States is a multibillion-dollar industry that is still not big enough to serve all those who need it. Costs are a big barrier to treatments but so are attitudes about mental health. New laws might change access to mental health, although significant barriers still remain. Heres a look at what we invest in the mental health-care system, what that buys us and where gaps in coverage remain. 1. The United States spends $113 billion on mental health treatment. That works out to about 5.6 percent of the national health-care spending, according to a 2011 paper in the journal Health Affairs. This puts us in the same range as other developed nations including Australia and Italy, according to the World Health Organization. Egypt leads the group of countries they surveyed, spending 9 percent of its health budget on mental health treatment.

2. Mental health dollars mostly go toward prescription drugs and outpatient treatment. Thats what you can see in this graph from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which shows the breakdown of mental health spending in 1986 and 2005. It shows a big shift away from inpatient treatments.

The shift away from inpatient spending traces back to the 1960s, when states began moving away from institutionalization for the mentally ill. Jeneen Interlandi offered some context in a recent New York Times Magazine story, starting with the Community Mental Health Centers Act of 1963. That law pushed for more treatment in community settings rather than in state-run, psychiatric institutions. By treating the rest in the least-restrictive settings possible, the thinking went, we would protect the civil liberties of the mentally ill and hasten their recoveries. Surely community life was better for mental health than a cold, unfeeling institution. But in the decades since, the sickest patients have begun turning up in jails and homeless shelters with a frequency that mirrors that of the late 1800s. Were protecting civil liberties at the expense of health and safety, says Doris A. Fuller, the executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit group that lobbies for broader involuntary commitment standards. Deinstitutionalization has gone way too far. 3. Access to mental health care is worse than other types of medical services. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated in 2010 that the country had 156,300 mental health counselors. Access to mental health professionals is worse than for other types of doctors: 89.3 million Americans live in federally-designated Mental Health Professional Shortage Areas, compared to 55.3 million Americans living in similarly-designated primary-care shortage areas and 44.6 million in dental health shortage areas.

4. Mental health care is pricey, with 45 percent of the untreated citing cost as a barrier. A quarter of the 15.7 million Americans who received mental health care listed themselves as the main payer for the services, according to one survey that looked at those services from 2005 to 2009. The majority of those who did seek outpatient treatment had out-of-pocket costs between $100 and $5,000. These findings suggest that even though the majority of adults have some form of health insurance coverage, there are significant limitations on coverage for mental health services, federal researchers wrote in a July 2011 brief. Separate research from the same agency found 45 percent of those not receiving mental health care listing cost as a barrier. Its worth noting though that Americans actually pick up a larger percent of the tab for their physical health-care costs than for mental health-care services. You can see that in this graph, via the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Americans paid 13 percent of the costs for health-care services generally in 2005, compared to 11 percent of behavioral health spending, which includes both mental health and substance abuse treatment. 5. Attitudes about mental health services are another big barrier to care. A 2007 study in the journal Psychiatric Services looked at 303 mental health patients who had, in the past year, thought about going to the doctor but decided against it. The researchers asked them why.

The most frequent response, from 66 percent of the patients, had to do with attitude: They thought the problem would get better on its own. Seventy-one percent agreed with the statement I wanted to solve the problem on my own. Cost was a barrier too: 47 percent cited financial obstacles as a reason not to seek treatment. Still, attitudinal barriers about the value of mental health care seemed to be the biggest obstacle. 6. States cut $1.8 billion from their mental health budgets during the recession. That figure comes from the National Alliance on Mental Illness, which notes that states tend to play a larger role in providing mental health services than they do with physical health. The biggest budget cuts came in the following 10 states:

The biggest budget cuts were made to long-term, inpatient care facilities. Vermont, a particularly striking example, closed its only state-run psychiatric hospital in the wake of Hurricane Irene. That means that much of the treatment of the mentally ill shifts toward other places in the healthcare system. The NAMI report looks at Rhode Island, which has seen a a 65 percent increase in the number of children living with mental illness boarding in public emergency rooms after a series of budget cuts. 7. Recent federal legislation requires more expansive insurance coverage for mental health services. The Mental Health Parity and Addiction Act of 2008 applies to large, employersponsored insurance plans. It bars insurers from putting up financial barriers to mental health care that are greater than those created for physical treatments. While there was some concern that the new requirements would lead employers to drop mental health coverage altogether, a poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found only 2 percent did so. The Affordable Care Act creates more mental health mandates, by requiring all insurers who sell on the exchanges to include such treatments in their benefit packages.

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