My 9th Graders Know How to Recognize Appeals to Emotion

Kathleen W. Dotts teaches ninth grade honors English at Huntsville High School. Her letter to the editor (below) appeared on the Huntsville Times website October 15th in response to an October 6 opinion column by Kenneth Freeman, an organizer for the group Alliance for Citizens Rights, in which he described supporters of the higher learning standards now being implemented in Alabama public schools as “liars or victims.”

With Kathleen’s permission, we’re sharing her comments here. We urge other teachers who support Alabama’s College- and Career-Ready Standards to join Kathleen in explaining to the public why higher standards are important for Alabama’s children and our state’s future prosperity. Please feel free to leave a comment.

Higher Standards in the Classroom:
How 9th Graders Analyze Persuasive Language

by Kathleen W. Dotts

I am a teacher at Huntsville High School and one of Ken Freeman’s “Liars or Victims.” (Freeman. Guest Opinion. “Common Core is a Big Lie; Its Supporters are Liars or Victims.” Huntsville Times 6 Oct. 2013, G1.)

Before condemning the concept of standards or calling me a “liar or victim,” follow me as I demonstrate how I utilize them in my classes.

The standards in this lesson are as follows:

Alabama Course of Study: Content Standard: Used From 2007-2009

• Identify persuasive strategies in oral and visual presentations
Examples: transference, bandwagon, snob appeal, expert testimony. Identifying types of propaganda

Alabama Course of Study: English Language Arts adopted 2010

• Determine an author’s point of view or purpose in a text and analyze how an author uses rhetoric to advance that point of view or purpose

Reading Informational Text Standard 9.8 (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers 2010 – Common Core State Standards Initiative)

• Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, assessing whether the reasoning is valid and the evidence is relevant and sufficient; identify false statements and fallacious reasoning.

Note that ninth grade English teachers are enjoined by standards both old and new to teach students the techniques used in persuasive arguments.

How we teach this standard

First, ninth grade Honors English looks at Atticus Finch’s closing argument in Tom Robinson’s trial for rape in the novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The lesson first has the students reread Atticus’ closing argument. We then identify the elements of his argument: the claim, the evidence, the warrant, or commentary, the counterclaim, and the rebuttal.

As a class, we use colored highlighters to identify the claim in blue to assert the position; the evidence in green to identify the facts and details that support the claim; the warrant or commentary in yellow to clarify the chain of reasoning that connects the claim to the evidence; the counterclaim, the assertions others may believe, in blue; and the rebuttal, logical facts that disprove the counterclaim, in green.

Again as a class we identify the rhetorical devices used in Atticus’ argument by underlining them.

Then as a class we determine what appeals Atticus makes: appeals to logos, reason and logic; appeals to ethos, moral authority; and appeals to pathos, emotion. We then analyze why Atticus primarily uses appeals to logos, thereby proving Tom Robinson could not have beaten Mayella Ewell for he has no working right hand; why Atticus uses appeals to ethos, particularly allusions to Thomas Jefferson and the Bible as authorities; and why he uses little appeal to pathos – emotion.

The class understands finally that Atticus cannot make appeals to pathos, emotion, because the case against Tom Robinson, a black man, is already wrought with emotion, the emotion of racism, “Maycomb’s usual disease” (Lee. “To Kill A Mockingbird,” 117). Atticus must deliberately and consciously divorce all appeals to pathos in his argument in order to preserve life. He fails.

The disease of fear, intolerance and distrust wins.

We also analyze the argument set forward in Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and the friar’s argument against Romeo’s suicide in Act II scene III of “Romeo and Juliet.”

Mr. Freeman appeals entirely to emotion

If one uses the Alabama state standards, both past and present, to analyze Mr. Freeman’s argument in The Huntsville Times on October 6, 2013, against the Common Core, one would discover that his primary appeal is to pathos (emotion).

The first seven paragraphs of Mr. Freeman’s article use the rhetorical device of an extended metaphor built on pathos. He has been frightened by a threat – “something running straight at me” (Freeman). Mr. Freeman deftly encourages his readers to feel his fear: the heightened pulse, the sweat, and the pounding heart.

Three paragraphs later he identifies the threat as a newborn fawn. So far he has used a pure appeal to pathos. He then swiftly moves to admonishing the doe: “You better do a better job of keeping up with that baby . . . or something will be having him for breakfast” (Freeman).

The appeal to pathos of a mother’s duty to and love for her child is wrapped in a threat of destruction. He then moves, smoothly, to a generalization dealing with animal predators, to the human predators who use deception rather than “teeth and claws” (Freeman), another lovely appeal to pathos.

Without losing a beat, he moves to specific human predators – unidentified people who poison for “power and profit” (Freeman) – note the effective use of alliteration and the continued use of emotion. The article moves on without a single use of logos (logic or reason) or ethos (moral authority, historical, Biblical or even literary). It ends with a direct appeal to parents proclaiming that to love your children you must fear and distrust the Common Core – he has circled back to the beginning of his essay when he was in fear; the heightened pulse, the sweat and the heart pounding have neatly been transferred to every parent with a school age child.

My students can recognize the use of pathos to encourage a miasma of fear. This is deception. As standards of teaching insist, argument must balance the appeals of logos, ethos, and pathos. Let not Alabama once again dissolve into the “usual disease” of fear, intolerance and distrust (Lee).

Let Alabama divorce pathos, emotion, from the logical reasons for the Common Core Standards. Let me also remind you that the terrifying threat that engendered Mr. Freeman’s fear which he hopes to recreate in every parent of a school age child is just a fawn.