Teacher Resources:
Sample Assignments Written by Richard and Kurt

Looking for help writing an assignment? The assignments posted here, written by Richard and Kurt, should help get you started!

To learn more about how we've organized organized the sample assignment home pages for each author, click here.

When you go to the sample assignment home page we've created for each author, you will find three different kinds of questions:

Questions for Making Connections within the Reading: these are brief questions we've written to help improve your students' understanding of the readings;

Questions for Writing: these are sample assignments that focus on a single reading;

Questions for Making Connections Between Readings: these are sample assignments that ask the students to make connections between two or more readings.

You will also find links from each author's sample assignment home page to additional examples of assignments for making connections between the readings. These are examples of the kind of extended assignments teachers of The New Humanities Reader have handed out in their classes. If you'd like to have your assignments considered for publication on this site, please send them on as an attachment (preferably in HTML) to Richard Miller (rem@newhum.com).

Abram, David. "The Ecology of Magic." The Spell of the Sensuous.

Abu-Lughod, Lila. "Honor and Shame." Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories.

Angell, Marcia. "Science in the Courtroom: Opinions Without Evidence," Science on Trial: The Clash of Medical Evidence and the Law in the Breast Implant Case.

Armstrong, Karen. "Does God Have a Future?" A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Barber, Benjamin R. "Time, Work, and Leisure in a Civil Society." A Place For Us: How to Make Society Civil and Democracy Strong.

Becker, Jasper. "False Science, False Promises" and "How Many Died?" Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine.

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

Peter Ho Davies, "What You Know," Harper's Magazine.

Dillard, Annie. "The Wreck of Time: Taking Our Century's Measure." Harper's.

Dissanayake, Ellen. "The Core of Art: Making Special." Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why.

Drucker, Peter. "The Age of Social Transformation." The Atlantic Monthly.

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

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

Goodall, Jane. "The Mind of the Chimpanzee" and "Bridging the Gap," Selections from Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe.

Gould, Stephen Jay. "What does the dreaded 'E' word mean anyway? A Reverie for the Opening of the New Hayden Planetarium." Natural History.

Guinier, Lani. "Second Prom and Second Primaries: The Limits of Majority Rule," Boston Review.

Hall, Stephen. "Prescription for Profit," New York Times Magazine.

Henderson, Hazel. "Perfecting Democracy's Tools," Building a Win-Win World: Life Beyond Global Economic Warfare.

Kaldor, Mary. "Beyond Militarism, Arms Races, and Arms Control." Talk delivered at the Nobel Peace Prize Symposium, December, 2001.

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."

Nussbaum, Martha. "Women and Cultural Universals," Sex and Social Justice.

Petroski, Henry. "Being Human" and "Lessons from Play; Lessons from Life," Selections from To Engineer is Human.

Pollan, Michael. "Playing God in the Garden," The New York Times Magazine.

Schlosser, Eric. "Global Realization," Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal.

Scott, James C. "Behind the Official Story." Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts.

Stephens, Mitchell. "Thinking ‘Above the Stream'," The Rise of the Image and the Fall of the Word.

Stille, Alexander. "The Ganges' Next Life." The New Yorker.

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

Frans de Waal, "Selections from The Ape and the Sushi Master: 'Survival of the Kindest' and 'Down with Dualism,'" The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Cultural Primatologist.

Willis, Jan. "Decision Time: A 'Piece' or Peace?", "This, too, is Buddha's Mind," and "My Great Seal Retreat," Selections from Dreaming Me: An African American Woman's Journey."

Wilmut, Ian. "Cloning People," The Second Generation: Dolly and the Age of Biological Control.

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