Narrative: I Went From Prison to Professor
The essay “I Went from Prison to Professor” by Stanley Andrisse is a narrative essay that also incorporates research and argumentation. The original essay can be found at CommonLit.
This essay discusses higher education for people who are incarcerated, or previously were incarcerated like the author. The essay contains incorporation of research, as well as providing insight based on the author’s personal experience from a life of crime and navigating a system that made it difficult, but not impossible, to become a college professor.
The following instructional activities, assignments, and documents are included for this reading.
GOAL 1: Understanding Academic Writing Assignments
- Analyzing and Answering Questions with Multiple Parts: A PowerPoint and activity to help the students annotate and analyze the directions for assignments (will need to be adapted to the directions/assignments for this particular module.)
- How to Analyze a Writing Prompt and create a Strong Thesis Statement activity (will need to be adapted to the directions/assignments for this particular module.)
- Understanding the Relationship between the Assignment and the Rubric (will need to be adapted to the directions/assignments for this particular module.)
GOAL 2: Read and understand college-level texts
- Vocabulary Preview: A list of challenging words and phrases from the text is identified so that students can build knowledge of vocabulary before reading the article.
- Reading Process Activity: This activity guides students through the reading process – previewing the article, actively reading and annotating the text, and reflecting on the meaning of the text and the reading process. Emphasis is placed on using the title, headings, introduction, and conclusion to predict ideas in the text.
- Summary and Response Activity: This activity provides a set of guided questions to develop a summary and reading response to the article. An example is provided to help with developing a response, as well as providing suggestions to start the writing process.
GOAL 3: Develop Sophisticated Grammatical Structures
- Passive Voice activities: Noticing passive voice; Choosing between active and passive voice; Error correction of sentences in passive voice
- Adjective (Relative) Clause activities: Editing with adjective clauses, Reducing adjective clauses
- Adverb Clause activities: Recognizing and using adverb clauses
- Noun Clause activities: Using reported speech and noun clauses
GOAL 4: Develop Fluency with Academic Vocabulary
- Vocabulary Preview: A list of challenging words and phrases from the text is identified so that students can build knowledge of vocabulary before reading the article.
- Recognizing Two Different Writing Styles: Instructive material that shows how the essay uses different sentence structures to combine personal and persuasive writing.
- Rewriting a narrative passage with improved vocabulary and more advanced grammatical structures
- Personal paragraph writing assignment with a planner and a suggested list of vocabulary and grammatical structures
- Finding and paraphrasing main ideas in the article. A list of past participles frequently used in academic writing is provided.
GOAL 5: Strategies for Using Evidence in Academic Writing
- Support activity: Using Noun Clauses for Reported Speech guides students through how to use noun clauses to talk about what was said by an author and how to choose an accurate noun clause marker word.
- Identifying Thesis Statements, Claims, and their Supporting Evidence: A document that guides the student through the essay to explain the relationship between claims and evidence.
- Using Sources Responsibly: A document that provides an example from the original text where students will evaluate the four attempts of incorporating sources has been done so correctly.
