Teacher Resources:
Sample Assignments Written by Teachers

Want to get a sense of how other teachers have made use of the readings in The New Humanities Reader? Want to get a better idea what assignments teachers actually hand out in class look like? The links below will take you both to extended assignments and briefer assignments that teachers of The New Humanities Reader have used successfully.

And, if you have an assignment that's worked well for you and you'd like to share it with other teachers using The New Humanities Reader, please send your assignment on to us: we'd be happy to have the opportunity to consider publishing your work here. Just send your assignment or assignments as an attachment to us at NHR Sample Assignments.

Ahmed, Leila. "On Becoming an Arab." A Border Passage: Cairo to America—A Woman's Journey.

Armstrong, Karen. "Homo religiosus." The Case for God.

Boyarin, Jonathan. "Waiting for a Jew: Marginal Redemption at the Eighth Street Shul." Thinking in Jewish.

Carr, Nicholas. "'Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The Atlantic.

Faludi, Susan. "The Naked Citadel." The New Yorker.

Fraser, Caroline. "Rewilding North America." Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution.

Gilbert, Daniel. "Immune to Reality." Stumbling on Happiness.

Gladwell, Malcolm. "The Power of Context: Bernie Goetz and the Rise and Fall of New York City Crime," The Tipping Point.

Johnson, Steven. "The Myth of the Ant Queen." Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software.

Kenneally, Christine. "You Have Gestures." The First Word.

Krakauer, Jon. "The Alaska Interior" and "The Stampede Trail." Selections from Into the Wild.

Loffreda, Beth. "Selections from Losing Matt Shepherd: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder."

Nafisi, Azar. Excerpt from Reading Lolita in Tehran.

O'Brien, Tim. "How to Tell a True War Story." The Things They Carried.

Pallasmaa, Juhani. Excerpts from The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses.

Sacks, Oliver. "The Mind's Eye." The New Yorker.

Siebert, Charles. "An Elephant Crackup?" The New York Times Magazine.

Singer, Peter and Jim Mason. "Meat and Milk Factories." The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter.

Specter, Michael. "A Life of Its Own" New Yorker.

Stout, Martha. "When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday." The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness.

Tannen, Deborah. "The Roots of Debate in Education and the Hope of Dialogue." The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue.

Tenner, Edward. "Another Look Back, and a Look Ahead." Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences.

Thurman, Robert. "Wisdom." Infinite Life.

Twenge, Jean. "An Army of One: Me." Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable than Ever Before.

Wedel, Janine R. "Confidence Men and Their Flex Lives." Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government and the Free Market.

Back to top