Abitur Hessen Englisch 2021 · GK

Christina Thompson: On being an outsider (2019)

Before I had any children of my own, I spent a decade and a half living in places where I was an outsider. While I never lost the feeling of estrangement that comes from missing basic cultural cues, for me this was a period of great liberation. I loved the freedom that being a stranger gave me. I loved the fact that people were unable to “place” me and that I was also largely free of preconceptions about them.

This experience was only amplified when I met and married my husband. I had grown up in Boston in a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant family. He was a Maori 1 from New Zealand, and when we married we both became members of communities we knew little about. This, too, had its challenges, but we both experienced it primarily as an opportunity to learn – and be – something new.

When we began having children – three boys in seven years – I was excited by the idea that our kids were going to have a complex identity. It would begin simply with the way they looked. My husband is dark, I am fair, our children are a range of in-between. They all have dark eyes, dark hair, neither curly nor straight, and skin that is light in winter and goes brown quickly in the sun. Ethnically speaking, they are quite difficult to place; over the years they have been mistaken for Latino, Iranian, Turkish, Pakistani, half-Korean, half-Japanese.

I loved the idea that our children were ethnically ambiguous. I saw this as their passport to freedom and viewed our boys as citizens of the world. I wasn’t sure how long it would take them to understand it, but I was confident that the rich complexity of their ancestry would become apparent to them in time. It never crossed my mind that it could be anything other than a bonus.

It helped that early in our married life we lived for a time in Honolulu. Hawaii is an unusual place, demographically speaking. The population is European, Japanese, Hawaiian, Filipino – there is no ethnic majority, and nearly a quarter of the people who live there identify as “hapa,” meaning that they belong to two or more different groups. Hawaii was a comfortable place for us as a family. Our friends were Indonesian, half-Chinese, Pakeha 2 New Zealander; it seemed as though everyone we knew was either some kind of mixture or came from someplace else.

Our three sons are now grown, and it recently occurred to me to ask about their experience of being hapa. Some of what they told me came as a surprise.

One of my sons described his childhood in terms of being “culturally unmoored 3.” “We were like expats,” he said, which, in fact, we were for much of his early life.

But it was a feeling that stuck, even after we moved back to live with my family in Boston. He always felt that we were different from the people around us, an experience he likened to being “not quite a native speaker.”

He conceded that being different was in some ways an asset, in that people were interested in him, but also that “it makes the game harder.” When you’re different, he said, you stand out, regardless of whether you want to or not. “Not everyone is suited to it,” he observed.

This was certainly the case for another of my sons. “From the first day of school,” he told me, “I felt different from my classmates.” He described this as a “slightly bad feeling” and said he’d been bullied, something he’d never told me before. For him, difference was not an advantage, it was a burden, and his looks, which are somewhat exotic, were “a card you could play but don’t really want to.” He, too, acknowledged that this exoticism could be an asset, but it was not one he had ever wanted and the price he’d had to pay for it was steep 4.

My third son had an entirely different take. By the time he was in middle school, he told me, he had recognized that being unusual gave him a social advantage. “I knew it was something that was cool,” he said. He told me that he got a kick out of the fact that people couldn’t pronounce his surname (something that caused his brother endless misery) and observed that the social cred 5 effect had only increased with age.

Despite having grown up in the same family and sharing almost everything in their lives, my sons had very different accounts of what growing up hapa had been like.

(765 Wörter)

Christina Thompson: On being an outsider, 29.03.2019, in: The New York Times, 29.03.2019, URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/well/family/on-being-an-outsider.html (abgerufen am 01.06.2020).

Hinweis

Christina Thompson is an author and editor of Harvard Review (literary magazine). She was born in Switzerland and is a dual citizen of the United States and Australia.

Annotations

1 Maori – indigenous people from New Zealand

2 Pakeha – (in New Zealand) a person who is not of Maori ancestry, especially a white person

3 unmoored – nicht verankert

4 steep – drastic

5 cred – abbreviation of “credibility”

South Africa's struggling economy

Aufgabe

You are a member of a joint South African and German team preparing the visit of German politicians and economists to South Africa.

To inform the South African members in your team about the media coverage in Germany, write an email outlining the information that is given about South Africa's economy in the article. (Material) [100 BE]

Material

Wolfgang Drechsler: Schwächelnde Wirtschaft am Kap: Merkel besucht das Land der Blackouts (2020)

1 Kapstadt. Pünktlich um 20 Uhr erlöschen an der Kapstädter Atlantikküste in vielen Restaurants und

Wohnhäusern die Lichter. Wo kurz zuvor noch das Leben pulsierte, ist es plötzlich zappenduster. Die

Küche im Steakhaus nebenan muss den Betrieb einstellen, weil der Rauchabzug ohne Strom nicht

funktioniert und das Notstromaggregat wegen seines Lärms für die umliegenden Wohnungen nicht

5 angeschaltet werden darf. Sechs Tage in Folge passiert dies nun schon. Stromabschaltungen sind in

Südafrika zum Alltag geworden. […]

Die Wirtschaft in Afrikas einzigem Industriestaat ist schwer angeschlagen. Und die fortgesetzten

Stromabschaltungen könnten den Niedergang beschleunigen. Wieder einmal droht dem Land eine

Rezession. Selbst wenn diese noch vermieden werden könnte, ist die Wachstumsrate am Kap mit

10 derzeit kaum 0,5 Prozent für ein Schwellenland extrem niedrig. Weltbank und Internationaler

Währungsfonds erwarten für das Gesamtjahr weniger als ein Prozent Wachstum.

Dabei bräuchte das Land zum Abbau seiner Armut und einer Arbeitslosenquote von rund 30 Prozent

mindestens das Fünffache. „Südafrika ist in ein tiefes Loch gefallen und wird, um wieder

herauszukommen, seine vielen Krisen viel offener als bisher angehen müssen“, sagt Ann Bernstein

15 vom Centre for Development and Enterprise in Johannesburg.

Die ständigen Blackouts sind für die Menschen am Kap vor allem deshalb so demoralisierend, weil ein

Ende der Engpässe nicht in Sicht ist. Mindestens 18 Monate müsse das Land wegen der nun forcierten

Instandhaltungsarbeiten mit noch häufigeren Stromabschaltungen rechnen, sagte gerade erst der zu

Jahresbeginn neu ins Amt gekommene Eskom 1 -Chef Andre de Ruyter.

20 Dies könnte neben vielen Kleinunternehmen vor allem dem Goldbergbau den Todesstoß versetzen.

Allein in diesem Sektor sind nach Aussagen der Bergbaukammer mehr als ein Drittel aller

Arbeitsplätze gefährdet, wenn der Strom noch öfter ausfalle oder teurer werde. Nicht umsonst stellte

Bergbauminister Gwede Mantashe am Montag zur Eröffnung einer Minenkonferenz in Kapstadt

überraschend den Aufbau eines alternativen Stromerzeugers in den Raum, allerdings ohne

25 Einzelheiten zu nennen. […]

Die Kanzlerin will in Südafrika und […] in Angola Reformansätze in den Ländern „stützen“. Auch

will sie die Wirtschaftsbeziehungen mit Südafrika neu ankurbeln, die in den vergangenen Jahren unter

einer ausgesprochen wirtschaftsfeindlichen Politik des regierenden Afrikanischen Nationalkongresses

(ANC) gelitten haben.

30 Der darauf folgende Quasi-Investitionsboykott weiter Teile der Geschäftswelt ist auch diplomatischen

Kreisen nicht verborgen geblieben.

Die Botschafter fünf westlicher Staaten, darunter Deutschland, hatten vor anderthalb Jahren die

Gründe für das trübe Investitionsklima in einem Schreiben an die Regierung aufgelistet:

Regulierungswut 2, lange Visaverfahren 3, Sorgen wegen einer neuen Enteignungsklausel 4, aber auch

35 der unzureichende Investitionsschutz. Südafrika hat vor sechs Jahren seine

Investitionsschutzabkommen 5 mit vielen westlichen Staaten einseitig aufgekündigt – und diese nie

durch gleichwertige Verträge ersetzt.

Statt die Vorschläge der Diplomaten zur Verbesserung des Investitionsklimas ernsthaft zu prüfen,

wurden sie von weiten Kreisen im ANC sofort als inakzeptable „Einmischung“ abgetan und als ein

40 „Vorwand zur Rekolonisierung des Landes“ verworfen. Seitdem verläuft die Initiative im Sand. Rund

600 deutsche Unternehmen sind in Südafrika tätig. Deutschland ist nach China der zweitgrößte

Handelspartner des Landes.

1 Eskom – South African electricity company/supplier

2 Regulierungswut – mania for regulations

3 Visaverfahren – visa procedures

4 Enteignungsklausel – expropriation clause

5 Investitionsschutzabkommen – investment protection agreement

Wolfgang Drechsler: Schwächelnde Wirtschaft am Kap: Merkel besucht das Land der Blackouts, in: Handelsblatt, 05.02.2020.

Christina Thompson: On being an outsider (2019)

Before I had any children of my own, I spent a decade and a half living in places where I was an outsider. While I never lost the feeling of estrangement that comes from missing basic cultural cues, for me this was a period of great liberation. I loved the freedom that being a stranger gave me. I loved the fact that people were unable to “place” me and that I was also largely free of preconceptions about them.

This experience was only amplified when I met and married my husband. I had grown up in Boston in a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant family. He was a Maori 1 from New Zealand, and when we married we both became members of communities we knew little about. This, too, had its challenges, but we both experienced it primarily as an opportunity to learn – and be – something new.

When we began having children – three boys in seven years – I was excited by the idea that our kids were going to have a complex identity. It would begin simply with the way they looked. My husband is dark, I am fair, our children are a range of in-between. They all have dark eyes, dark hair, neither curly nor straight, and skin that is light in winter and goes brown quickly in the sun. Ethnically speaking, they are quite difficult to place; over the years they have been mistaken for Latino, Iranian, Turkish, Pakistani, half-Korean, half-Japanese.

I loved the idea that our children were ethnically ambiguous. I saw this as their passport to freedom and viewed our boys as citizens of the world. I wasn’t sure how long it would take them to understand it, but I was confident that the rich complexity of their ancestry would become apparent to them in time. It never crossed my mind that it could be anything other than a bonus.

It helped that early in our married life we lived for a time in Honolulu. Hawaii is an unusual place, demographically speaking. The population is European, Japanese, Hawaiian, Filipino – there is no ethnic majority, and nearly a quarter of the people who live there identify as “hapa,” meaning that they belong to two or more different groups. Hawaii was a comfortable place for us as a family. Our friends were Indonesian, half-Chinese, Pakeha 2 New Zealander; it seemed as though everyone we knew was either some kind of mixture or came from someplace else.

Our three sons are now grown, and it recently occurred to me to ask about their experience of being hapa. Some of what they told me came as a surprise.

One of my sons described his childhood in terms of being “culturally unmoored 3.” “We were like expats,” he said, which, in fact, we were for much of his early life.

But it was a feeling that stuck, even after we moved back to live with my family in Boston. He always felt that we were different from the people around us, an experience he likened to being “not quite a native speaker.”

He conceded that being different was in some ways an asset, in that people were interested in him, but also that “it makes the game harder.” When you’re different, he said, you stand out, regardless of whether you want to or not. “Not everyone is suited to it,” he observed.

This was certainly the case for another of my sons. “From the first day of school,” he told me, “I felt different from my classmates.” He described this as a “slightly bad feeling” and said he’d been bullied, something he’d never told me before. For him, difference was not an advantage, it was a burden, and his looks, which are somewhat exotic, were “a card you could play but don’t really want to.” He, too, acknowledged that this exoticism could be an asset, but it was not one he had ever wanted and the price he’d had to pay for it was steep 4.

My third son had an entirely different take. By the time he was in middle school, he told me, he had recognized that being unusual gave him a social advantage. “I knew it was something that was cool,” he said. He told me that he got a kick out of the fact that people couldn’t pronounce his surname (something that caused his brother endless misery) and observed that the social cred 5 effect had only increased with age.

Despite having grown up in the same family and sharing almost everything in their lives, my sons had very different accounts of what growing up hapa had been like.

(765 Wörter)

Christina Thompson: On being an outsider, 29.03.2019, in: The New York Times, 29.03.2019, URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/well/family/on-being-an-outsider.html (abgerufen am 01.06.2020).

Hinweis

Christina Thompson is an author and editor of Harvard Review (literary magazine). She was born in Switzerland and is a dual citizen of the United States and Australia.

Annotations

1 Maori – indigenous people from New Zealand

2 Pakeha – (in New Zealand) a person who is not of Maori ancestry, especially a white person

3 unmoored – nicht verankert

4 steep – drastic

5 cred – abbreviation of “credibility”

Aufgaben

1

Outline the attitude the author and her boys have toward being ethnically different. (Material)

[30 BE]

Christina Thompson: On being an outsider (2019)

Before I had any children of my own, I spent a decade and a half living in places where I was an outsider. While I never lost the feeling of estrangement that comes from missing basic cultural cues, for me this was a period of great liberation. I loved the freedom that being a stranger gave me. I loved the fact that people were unable to “place” me and that I was also largely free of preconceptions about them.

This experience was only amplified when I met and married my husband. I had grown up in Boston in a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant family. He was a Maori 1 from New Zealand, and when we married we both became members of communities we knew little about. This, too, had its challenges, but we both experienced it primarily as an opportunity to learn – and be – something new.

When we began having children – three boys in seven years – I was excited by the idea that our kids were going to have a complex identity. It would begin simply with the way they looked. My husband is dark, I am fair, our children are a range of in-between. They all have dark eyes, dark hair, neither curly nor straight, and skin that is light in winter and goes brown quickly in the sun. Ethnically speaking, they are quite difficult to place; over the years they have been mistaken for Latino, Iranian, Turkish, Pakistani, half-Korean, half-Japanese.

I loved the idea that our children were ethnically ambiguous. I saw this as their passport to freedom and viewed our boys as citizens of the world. I wasn’t sure how long it would take them to understand it, but I was confident that the rich complexity of their ancestry would become apparent to them in time. It never crossed my mind that it could be anything other than a bonus.

It helped that early in our married life we lived for a time in Honolulu. Hawaii is an unusual place, demographically speaking. The population is European, Japanese, Hawaiian, Filipino – there is no ethnic majority, and nearly a quarter of the people who live there identify as “hapa,” meaning that they belong to two or more different groups. Hawaii was a comfortable place for us as a family. Our friends were Indonesian, half-Chinese, Pakeha 2 New Zealander; it seemed as though everyone we knew was either some kind of mixture or came from someplace else.

Our three sons are now grown, and it recently occurred to me to ask about their experience of being hapa. Some of what they told me came as a surprise.

One of my sons described his childhood in terms of being “culturally unmoored 3.” “We were like expats,” he said, which, in fact, we were for much of his early life.

But it was a feeling that stuck, even after we moved back to live with my family in Boston. He always felt that we were different from the people around us, an experience he likened to being “not quite a native speaker.”

He conceded that being different was in some ways an asset, in that people were interested in him, but also that “it makes the game harder.” When you’re different, he said, you stand out, regardless of whether you want to or not. “Not everyone is suited to it,” he observed.

This was certainly the case for another of my sons. “From the first day of school,” he told me, “I felt different from my classmates.” He described this as a “slightly bad feeling” and said he’d been bullied, something he’d never told me before. For him, difference was not an advantage, it was a burden, and his looks, which are somewhat exotic, were “a card you could play but don’t really want to.” He, too, acknowledged that this exoticism could be an asset, but it was not one he had ever wanted and the price he’d had to pay for it was steep 4.

My third son had an entirely different take. By the time he was in middle school, he told me, he had recognized that being unusual gave him a social advantage. “I knew it was something that was cool,” he said. He told me that he got a kick out of the fact that people couldn’t pronounce his surname (something that caused his brother endless misery) and observed that the social cred 5 effect had only increased with age.

Despite having grown up in the same family and sharing almost everything in their lives, my sons had very different accounts of what growing up hapa had been like.

(765 Wörter)

Christina Thompson: On being an outsider, 29.03.2019, in: The New York Times, 29.03.2019, URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/well/family/on-being-an-outsider.html (abgerufen am 01.06.2020).

Hinweis

Christina Thompson is an author and editor of Harvard Review (literary magazine). She was born in Switzerland and is a dual citizen of the United States and Australia.

Annotations

1 Maori – indigenous people from New Zealand

2 Pakeha – (in New Zealand) a person who is not of Maori ancestry, especially a white person

3 unmoored – nicht verankert

4 steep – drastic

5 cred – abbreviation of “credibility”

Aufgaben

2

Relate the text to other experiences of being different also including the film version of “To Kill a Mockingbird”.

[45 BE]

Christina Thompson: On being an outsider (2019)

Before I had any children of my own, I spent a decade and a half living in places where I was an outsider. While I never lost the feeling of estrangement that comes from missing basic cultural cues, for me this was a period of great liberation. I loved the freedom that being a stranger gave me. I loved the fact that people were unable to “place” me and that I was also largely free of preconceptions about them.

This experience was only amplified when I met and married my husband. I had grown up in Boston in a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant family. He was a Maori 1 from New Zealand, and when we married we both became members of communities we knew little about. This, too, had its challenges, but we both experienced it primarily as an opportunity to learn – and be – something new.

When we began having children – three boys in seven years – I was excited by the idea that our kids were going to have a complex identity. It would begin simply with the way they looked. My husband is dark, I am fair, our children are a range of in-between. They all have dark eyes, dark hair, neither curly nor straight, and skin that is light in winter and goes brown quickly in the sun. Ethnically speaking, they are quite difficult to place; over the years they have been mistaken for Latino, Iranian, Turkish, Pakistani, half-Korean, half-Japanese.

I loved the idea that our children were ethnically ambiguous. I saw this as their passport to freedom and viewed our boys as citizens of the world. I wasn’t sure how long it would take them to understand it, but I was confident that the rich complexity of their ancestry would become apparent to them in time. It never crossed my mind that it could be anything other than a bonus.

It helped that early in our married life we lived for a time in Honolulu. Hawaii is an unusual place, demographically speaking. The population is European, Japanese, Hawaiian, Filipino – there is no ethnic majority, and nearly a quarter of the people who live there identify as “hapa,” meaning that they belong to two or more different groups. Hawaii was a comfortable place for us as a family. Our friends were Indonesian, half-Chinese, Pakeha 2 New Zealander; it seemed as though everyone we knew was either some kind of mixture or came from someplace else.

Our three sons are now grown, and it recently occurred to me to ask about their experience of being hapa. Some of what they told me came as a surprise.

One of my sons described his childhood in terms of being “culturally unmoored 3.” “We were like expats,” he said, which, in fact, we were for much of his early life.

But it was a feeling that stuck, even after we moved back to live with my family in Boston. He always felt that we were different from the people around us, an experience he likened to being “not quite a native speaker.”

He conceded that being different was in some ways an asset, in that people were interested in him, but also that “it makes the game harder.” When you’re different, he said, you stand out, regardless of whether you want to or not. “Not everyone is suited to it,” he observed.

This was certainly the case for another of my sons. “From the first day of school,” he told me, “I felt different from my classmates.” He described this as a “slightly bad feeling” and said he’d been bullied, something he’d never told me before. For him, difference was not an advantage, it was a burden, and his looks, which are somewhat exotic, were “a card you could play but don’t really want to.” He, too, acknowledged that this exoticism could be an asset, but it was not one he had ever wanted and the price he’d had to pay for it was steep 4.

My third son had an entirely different take. By the time he was in middle school, he told me, he had recognized that being unusual gave him a social advantage. “I knew it was something that was cool,” he said. He told me that he got a kick out of the fact that people couldn’t pronounce his surname (something that caused his brother endless misery) and observed that the social cred 5 effect had only increased with age.

Despite having grown up in the same family and sharing almost everything in their lives, my sons had very different accounts of what growing up hapa had been like.

(765 Wörter)

Christina Thompson: On being an outsider, 29.03.2019, in: The New York Times, 29.03.2019, URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/well/family/on-being-an-outsider.html (abgerufen am 01.06.2020).

Hinweis

Christina Thompson is an author and editor of Harvard Review (literary magazine). She was born in Switzerland and is a dual citizen of the United States and Australia.

Annotations

1 Maori – indigenous people from New Zealand

2 Pakeha – (in New Zealand) a person who is not of Maori ancestry, especially a white person

3 unmoored – nicht verankert

4 steep – drastic

5 cred – abbreviation of “credibility”

Aufgaben

3.1

“He, too, acknowledged that this exoticism could be an asset, but it was not one he had ever wanted and the price he’d had to pay for it was steep.” (Material)

Taking the quotation as a starting point, comment on whether exoticism is rather an asset or a price you have to pay.

[25 BE]

Christina Thompson: On being an outsider (2019)

Before I had any children of my own, I spent a decade and a half living in places where I was an outsider. While I never lost the feeling of estrangement that comes from missing basic cultural cues, for me this was a period of great liberation. I loved the freedom that being a stranger gave me. I loved the fact that people were unable to “place” me and that I was also largely free of preconceptions about them.

This experience was only amplified when I met and married my husband. I had grown up in Boston in a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant family. He was a Maori 1 from New Zealand, and when we married we both became members of communities we knew little about. This, too, had its challenges, but we both experienced it primarily as an opportunity to learn – and be – something new.

When we began having children – three boys in seven years – I was excited by the idea that our kids were going to have a complex identity. It would begin simply with the way they looked. My husband is dark, I am fair, our children are a range of in-between. They all have dark eyes, dark hair, neither curly nor straight, and skin that is light in winter and goes brown quickly in the sun. Ethnically speaking, they are quite difficult to place; over the years they have been mistaken for Latino, Iranian, Turkish, Pakistani, half-Korean, half-Japanese.

I loved the idea that our children were ethnically ambiguous. I saw this as their passport to freedom and viewed our boys as citizens of the world. I wasn’t sure how long it would take them to understand it, but I was confident that the rich complexity of their ancestry would become apparent to them in time. It never crossed my mind that it could be anything other than a bonus.

It helped that early in our married life we lived for a time in Honolulu. Hawaii is an unusual place, demographically speaking. The population is European, Japanese, Hawaiian, Filipino – there is no ethnic majority, and nearly a quarter of the people who live there identify as “hapa,” meaning that they belong to two or more different groups. Hawaii was a comfortable place for us as a family. Our friends were Indonesian, half-Chinese, Pakeha 2 New Zealander; it seemed as though everyone we knew was either some kind of mixture or came from someplace else.

Our three sons are now grown, and it recently occurred to me to ask about their experience of being hapa. Some of what they told me came as a surprise.

One of my sons described his childhood in terms of being “culturally unmoored 3.” “We were like expats,” he said, which, in fact, we were for much of his early life.

But it was a feeling that stuck, even after we moved back to live with my family in Boston. He always felt that we were different from the people around us, an experience he likened to being “not quite a native speaker.”

He conceded that being different was in some ways an asset, in that people were interested in him, but also that “it makes the game harder.” When you’re different, he said, you stand out, regardless of whether you want to or not. “Not everyone is suited to it,” he observed.

This was certainly the case for another of my sons. “From the first day of school,” he told me, “I felt different from my classmates.” He described this as a “slightly bad feeling” and said he’d been bullied, something he’d never told me before. For him, difference was not an advantage, it was a burden, and his looks, which are somewhat exotic, were “a card you could play but don’t really want to.” He, too, acknowledged that this exoticism could be an asset, but it was not one he had ever wanted and the price he’d had to pay for it was steep 4.

My third son had an entirely different take. By the time he was in middle school, he told me, he had recognized that being unusual gave him a social advantage. “I knew it was something that was cool,” he said. He told me that he got a kick out of the fact that people couldn’t pronounce his surname (something that caused his brother endless misery) and observed that the social cred 5 effect had only increased with age.

Despite having grown up in the same family and sharing almost everything in their lives, my sons had very different accounts of what growing up hapa had been like.

(765 Wörter)

Christina Thompson: On being an outsider, 29.03.2019, in: The New York Times, 29.03.2019, URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/well/family/on-being-an-outsider.html (abgerufen am 01.06.2020).

Hinweis

Christina Thompson is an author and editor of Harvard Review (literary magazine). She was born in Switzerland and is a dual citizen of the United States and Australia.

Annotations

1 Maori – indigenous people from New Zealand

2 Pakeha – (in New Zealand) a person who is not of Maori ancestry, especially a white person

3 unmoored – nicht verankert

4 steep – drastic

5 cred – abbreviation of “credibility”

Aufgaben

3.2

“If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.”

Theresa May, former prime minister of the UK, 2016

Taking the situation in the text (Material) as a starting point, discuss Theresa May’s statement.

[25 BE]

Material

Martin Luther King, Jr.: Why we can’t wait (1964)

The following text is taken from the introduction of a 1964 book by African American civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr. It deals with the nonviolent protests of 1963 during the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement.

It is the beginning of the year of our Lord 1963.

I see a young Negro 1 boy. He is sitting on a stoop in front of a vermin-infested apartment house in

Harlem. The stench of garbage is in the halls. The drunks, the jobless, the junkies are shadow figures

of his everyday world. The boy goes to a school attended mostly by Negro students with a scattering

5 of Puerto Ricans. His father is one of the jobless. His mother is a sleep-in domestic, working for a

family on Long Island.

I see a young Negro girl. She is sitting on the stoop of a rickety wooden one-family house in

Birmingham 2. Some visitors would call it a shack. It needs paint badly and the patched-up roof

appears in danger of caving in. Half a dozen small children, in various stages of undress, are

10 scampering about the house. The girl is forced to play the role of their mother. She can no longer

attend the all-Negro school in her neighborhood [...]. The girl’s father is a porter in a downtown

department store. He will always be a porter, for there are no promotions for the Negro in this store,

where every counter serves him except the one that sells hot dogs and orange juice.

This boy and this girl, separated by stretching miles, are wondering: Why does misery constantly

15 haunt the Negro? In some distant past, had their forebears done some tragic injury to the nation, and

was the curse of punishment upon the black race? Had they shirked in their duty as patriots, betrayed

their country, denied their national birthright? Had they refused to defend their land against a foreign

foe?

Not all of history is recorded in the books supplied to school children in Harlem or Birmingham. Yet

20 this boy and girl know something of the part of history which has been censored by the white writers

and purchasers of board-of-education books 3. [...] The boy’s Sunday-school teacher has told him that

one of the team who designed the capital of their nation, Washington, D.C., was a Negro, Benjamin

Banneker. Once the girl had heard a speaker, invited to her school during Negro History Week. This

speaker told how, for two hundred years, without wages, black people, brought to this land in slave

25 ships and in chains, had drained the swamps, built the homes, made cotton king and helped, on whip-

lashed backs, to lift this nation from colonial obscurity to commanding influence in domestic

commerce and world trade.

Wherever there was hard work, dirty work, dangerous work – in the mines, on the docks, in the

blistering foundries – Negroes had done more than their share.

30 The pale history books of Harlem and Birmingham told how the nation had fought a war over slavery.

Abraham Lincoln had signed a document that would come to be known as the Emancipation

Proclamation 4. The war had been won but not a just peace. Equality had never arrived. Equality was a

hundred years late.

The boy and the girl knew more than history. They knew something about current events. [...] They

35 knew that Negroes living in the capital of their own nation were confined to ghettos and could not

always get a job for which they were qualified. They knew that white supremacists 5 had defied the

Supreme Court and that southern governors had attempted to interpose themselves between the people

and the highest law of the land. They knew that, for years, their own lawyers had won great victories

in the courts which were not being translated into reality.

40 They were seeing on television, hearing from the radio, reading in the newspapers that this was the

one-hundredth birthday of their freedom.

But freedom had a dull ring, a mocking emptiness when, in their time – in the short life span of this

boy and girl – buses had stopped rolling in Montgomery; sit-inners 6 were jailed and beaten; freedom

riders 7 were brutalized and mobbed; dogs’ fangs were bared in Birmingham; and in Brooklyn, New

45 York, there were certain kinds of construction jobs for whites only.

It was the summer of 1963. Was emancipation a fact? Was freedom a force?

The boy in Harlem stood up. The girl in Birmingham arose. Separated by stretching miles, both of

them squared their shoulders and lifted their eyes toward heaven. Across the miles they joined hands,

and took a firm, forward step. It was a step that rocked the richest, most powerful nation to its

50 foundations.

This is the story of that boy and that girl. This is the story of Why We Can’t Wait.

(763 Wörter)

Martin Luther King, Jr.: Why we can’t wait, New York 1964, S. ix–xi.

1 Negro – old-fashioned term for African American, nowadays generally considered politically incorrect

2 Birmingham – here: Birmingham, Alabama

3 board-of-education books – books provided by an education authority

4 Emancipation Proclamation – declaration changing the legal status of more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans from slave to free after 1862

5 white supremacist – a person who believes that the white race is inherently superior to other races and should therefore be in control over others

6 sit-inners – people occupying an area as a form of protest

7 freedom riders – civil rights activists who violated segregation rules of public transport as a form of protest

Aufgabe 1 (30 BE)

Outline the information on the life of African Americans in the 1960s as presented in the text. (Material)

Material

Martin Luther King, Jr.: Why we can’t wait (1964)

The following text is taken from the introduction of a 1964 book by African American civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr. It deals with the nonviolent protests of 1963 during the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement.

It is the beginning of the year of our Lord 1963.

I see a young Negro 1 boy. He is sitting on a stoop in front of a vermin-infested apartment house in

Harlem. The stench of garbage is in the halls. The drunks, the jobless, the junkies are shadow figures

of his everyday world. The boy goes to a school attended mostly by Negro students with a scattering

5 of Puerto Ricans. His father is one of the jobless. His mother is a sleep-in domestic, working for a

family on Long Island.

I see a young Negro girl. She is sitting on the stoop of a rickety wooden one-family house in

Birmingham 2. Some visitors would call it a shack. It needs paint badly and the patched-up roof

appears in danger of caving in. Half a dozen small children, in various stages of undress, are

10 scampering about the house. The girl is forced to play the role of their mother. She can no longer

attend the all-Negro school in her neighborhood [...]. The girl’s father is a porter in a downtown

department store. He will always be a porter, for there are no promotions for the Negro in this store,

where every counter serves him except the one that sells hot dogs and orange juice.

This boy and this girl, separated by stretching miles, are wondering: Why does misery constantly

15 haunt the Negro? In some distant past, had their forebears done some tragic injury to the nation, and

was the curse of punishment upon the black race? Had they shirked in their duty as patriots, betrayed

their country, denied their national birthright? Had they refused to defend their land against a foreign

foe?

Not all of history is recorded in the books supplied to school children in Harlem or Birmingham. Yet

20 this boy and girl know something of the part of history which has been censored by the white writers

and purchasers of board-of-education books 3. [...] The boy’s Sunday-school teacher has told him that

one of the team who designed the capital of their nation, Washington, D.C., was a Negro, Benjamin

Banneker. Once the girl had heard a speaker, invited to her school during Negro History Week. This

speaker told how, for two hundred years, without wages, black people, brought to this land in slave

25 ships and in chains, had drained the swamps, built the homes, made cotton king and helped, on whip-

lashed backs, to lift this nation from colonial obscurity to commanding influence in domestic

commerce and world trade.

Wherever there was hard work, dirty work, dangerous work – in the mines, on the docks, in the

blistering foundries – Negroes had done more than their share.

30 The pale history books of Harlem and Birmingham told how the nation had fought a war over slavery.

Abraham Lincoln had signed a document that would come to be known as the Emancipation

Proclamation 4. The war had been won but not a just peace. Equality had never arrived. Equality was a

hundred years late.

The boy and the girl knew more than history. They knew something about current events. [...] They

35 knew that Negroes living in the capital of their own nation were confined to ghettos and could not

always get a job for which they were qualified. They knew that white supremacists 5 had defied the

Supreme Court and that southern governors had attempted to interpose themselves between the people

and the highest law of the land. They knew that, for years, their own lawyers had won great victories

in the courts which were not being translated into reality.

40 They were seeing on television, hearing from the radio, reading in the newspapers that this was the

one-hundredth birthday of their freedom.

But freedom had a dull ring, a mocking emptiness when, in their time – in the short life span of this

boy and girl – buses had stopped rolling in Montgomery; sit-inners 6 were jailed and beaten; freedom

riders 7 were brutalized and mobbed; dogs’ fangs were bared in Birmingham; and in Brooklyn, New

45 York, there were certain kinds of construction jobs for whites only.

It was the summer of 1963. Was emancipation a fact? Was freedom a force?

The boy in Harlem stood up. The girl in Birmingham arose. Separated by stretching miles, both of

them squared their shoulders and lifted their eyes toward heaven. Across the miles they joined hands,

and took a firm, forward step. It was a step that rocked the richest, most powerful nation to its

50 foundations.

This is the story of that boy and that girl. This is the story of Why We Can’t Wait.

(763 Wörter)

Martin Luther King, Jr.: Why we can’t wait, New York 1964, S. ix–xi.

1 Negro – old-fashioned term for African American, nowadays generally considered politically incorrect

2 Birmingham – here: Birmingham, Alabama

3 board-of-education books – books provided by an education authority

4 Emancipation Proclamation – declaration changing the legal status of more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans from slave to free after 1862

5 white supremacist – a person who believes that the white race is inherently superior to other races and should therefore be in control over others

6 sit-inners – people occupying an area as a form of protest

7 freedom riders – civil rights activists who violated segregation rules of public transport as a form of protest

Aufgabe 2 (40 BE)

Analyze the structure and language used to convey Martin Luther King's message.

Material

Martin Luther King, Jr.: Why we can’t wait (1964)

The following text is taken from the introduction of a 1964 book by African American civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr. It deals with the nonviolent protests of 1963 during the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement.

It is the beginning of the year of our Lord 1963.

I see a young Negro 1 boy. He is sitting on a stoop in front of a vermin-infested apartment house in

Harlem. The stench of garbage is in the halls. The drunks, the jobless, the junkies are shadow figures

of his everyday world. The boy goes to a school attended mostly by Negro students with a scattering

5 of Puerto Ricans. His father is one of the jobless. His mother is a sleep-in domestic, working for a

family on Long Island.

I see a young Negro girl. She is sitting on the stoop of a rickety wooden one-family house in

Birmingham 2. Some visitors would call it a shack. It needs paint badly and the patched-up roof

appears in danger of caving in. Half a dozen small children, in various stages of undress, are

10 scampering about the house. The girl is forced to play the role of their mother. She can no longer

attend the all-Negro school in her neighborhood [...]. The girl’s father is a porter in a downtown

department store. He will always be a porter, for there are no promotions for the Negro in this store,

where every counter serves him except the one that sells hot dogs and orange juice.

This boy and this girl, separated by stretching miles, are wondering: Why does misery constantly

15 haunt the Negro? In some distant past, had their forebears done some tragic injury to the nation, and

was the curse of punishment upon the black race? Had they shirked in their duty as patriots, betrayed

their country, denied their national birthright? Had they refused to defend their land against a foreign

foe?

Not all of history is recorded in the books supplied to school children in Harlem or Birmingham. Yet

20 this boy and girl know something of the part of history which has been censored by the white writers

and purchasers of board-of-education books 3. [...] The boy’s Sunday-school teacher has told him that

one of the team who designed the capital of their nation, Washington, D.C., was a Negro, Benjamin

Banneker. Once the girl had heard a speaker, invited to her school during Negro History Week. This

speaker told how, for two hundred years, without wages, black people, brought to this land in slave

25 ships and in chains, had drained the swamps, built the homes, made cotton king and helped, on whip-

lashed backs, to lift this nation from colonial obscurity to commanding influence in domestic

commerce and world trade.

Wherever there was hard work, dirty work, dangerous work – in the mines, on the docks, in the

blistering foundries – Negroes had done more than their share.

30 The pale history books of Harlem and Birmingham told how the nation had fought a war over slavery.

Abraham Lincoln had signed a document that would come to be known as the Emancipation

Proclamation 4. The war had been won but not a just peace. Equality had never arrived. Equality was a

hundred years late.

The boy and the girl knew more than history. They knew something about current events. [...] They

35 knew that Negroes living in the capital of their own nation were confined to ghettos and could not

always get a job for which they were qualified. They knew that white supremacists 5 had defied the

Supreme Court and that southern governors had attempted to interpose themselves between the people

and the highest law of the land. They knew that, for years, their own lawyers had won great victories

in the courts which were not being translated into reality.

40 They were seeing on television, hearing from the radio, reading in the newspapers that this was the

one-hundredth birthday of their freedom.

But freedom had a dull ring, a mocking emptiness when, in their time – in the short life span of this

boy and girl – buses had stopped rolling in Montgomery; sit-inners 6 were jailed and beaten; freedom

riders 7 were brutalized and mobbed; dogs’ fangs were bared in Birmingham; and in Brooklyn, New

45 York, there were certain kinds of construction jobs for whites only.

It was the summer of 1963. Was emancipation a fact? Was freedom a force?

The boy in Harlem stood up. The girl in Birmingham arose. Separated by stretching miles, both of

them squared their shoulders and lifted their eyes toward heaven. Across the miles they joined hands,

and took a firm, forward step. It was a step that rocked the richest, most powerful nation to its

50 foundations.

This is the story of that boy and that girl. This is the story of Why We Can’t Wait.

(763 Wörter)

Martin Luther King, Jr.: Why we can’t wait, New York 1964, S. ix–xi.

1 Negro – old-fashioned term for African American, nowadays generally considered politically incorrect

2 Birmingham – here: Birmingham, Alabama

3 board-of-education books – books provided by an education authority

4 Emancipation Proclamation – declaration changing the legal status of more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans from slave to free after 1862

5 white supremacist – a person who believes that the white race is inherently superior to other races and should therefore be in control over others

6 sit-inners – people occupying an area as a form of protest

7 freedom riders – civil rights activists who violated segregation rules of public transport as a form of protest

Aufgabe 3.1 (30 BE)

“Across the miles they joined hands, and took a firm, forward step. It was a step that rocked the richest, most powerful nation to its foundations.” (Material)

Assess what situations call for mass protest. Consider both the situation described in the text as well as more recent examples.

Material

Martin Luther King, Jr.: Why we can’t wait (1964)

The following text is taken from the introduction of a 1964 book by African American civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr. It deals with the nonviolent protests of 1963 during the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement.

It is the beginning of the year of our Lord 1963.

I see a young Negro 1 boy. He is sitting on a stoop in front of a vermin-infested apartment house in

Harlem. The stench of garbage is in the halls. The drunks, the jobless, the junkies are shadow figures

of his everyday world. The boy goes to a school attended mostly by Negro students with a scattering

5 of Puerto Ricans. His father is one of the jobless. His mother is a sleep-in domestic, working for a

family on Long Island.

I see a young Negro girl. She is sitting on the stoop of a rickety wooden one-family house in

Birmingham 2. Some visitors would call it a shack. It needs paint badly and the patched-up roof

appears in danger of caving in. Half a dozen small children, in various stages of undress, are

10 scampering about the house. The girl is forced to play the role of their mother. She can no longer

attend the all-Negro school in her neighborhood [...]. The girl’s father is a porter in a downtown

department store. He will always be a porter, for there are no promotions for the Negro in this store,

where every counter serves him except the one that sells hot dogs and orange juice.

This boy and this girl, separated by stretching miles, are wondering: Why does misery constantly

15 haunt the Negro? In some distant past, had their forebears done some tragic injury to the nation, and

was the curse of punishment upon the black race? Had they shirked in their duty as patriots, betrayed

their country, denied their national birthright? Had they refused to defend their land against a foreign

foe?

Not all of history is recorded in the books supplied to school children in Harlem or Birmingham. Yet

20 this boy and girl know something of the part of history which has been censored by the white writers

and purchasers of board-of-education books 3. [...] The boy’s Sunday-school teacher has told him that

one of the team who designed the capital of their nation, Washington, D.C., was a Negro, Benjamin

Banneker. Once the girl had heard a speaker, invited to her school during Negro History Week. This

speaker told how, for two hundred years, without wages, black people, brought to this land in slave

25 ships and in chains, had drained the swamps, built the homes, made cotton king and helped, on whip-

lashed backs, to lift this nation from colonial obscurity to commanding influence in domestic

commerce and world trade.

Wherever there was hard work, dirty work, dangerous work – in the mines, on the docks, in the

blistering foundries – Negroes had done more than their share.

30 The pale history books of Harlem and Birmingham told how the nation had fought a war over slavery.

Abraham Lincoln had signed a document that would come to be known as the Emancipation

Proclamation 4. The war had been won but not a just peace. Equality had never arrived. Equality was a

hundred years late.

The boy and the girl knew more than history. They knew something about current events. [...] They

35 knew that Negroes living in the capital of their own nation were confined to ghettos and could not

always get a job for which they were qualified. They knew that white supremacists 5 had defied the

Supreme Court and that southern governors had attempted to interpose themselves between the people

and the highest law of the land. They knew that, for years, their own lawyers had won great victories

in the courts which were not being translated into reality.

40 They were seeing on television, hearing from the radio, reading in the newspapers that this was the

one-hundredth birthday of their freedom.

But freedom had a dull ring, a mocking emptiness when, in their time – in the short life span of this

boy and girl – buses had stopped rolling in Montgomery; sit-inners 6 were jailed and beaten; freedom

riders 7 were brutalized and mobbed; dogs’ fangs were bared in Birmingham; and in Brooklyn, New

45 York, there were certain kinds of construction jobs for whites only.

It was the summer of 1963. Was emancipation a fact? Was freedom a force?

The boy in Harlem stood up. The girl in Birmingham arose. Separated by stretching miles, both of

them squared their shoulders and lifted their eyes toward heaven. Across the miles they joined hands,

and took a firm, forward step. It was a step that rocked the richest, most powerful nation to its

50 foundations.

This is the story of that boy and that girl. This is the story of Why We Can’t Wait.

(763 Wörter)

Martin Luther King, Jr.: Why we can’t wait, New York 1964, S. ix–xi.

1 Negro – old-fashioned term for African American, nowadays generally considered politically incorrect

2 Birmingham – here: Birmingham, Alabama

3 board-of-education books – books provided by an education authority

4 Emancipation Proclamation – declaration changing the legal status of more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans from slave to free after 1862

5 white supremacist – a person who believes that the white race is inherently superior to other races and should therefore be in control over others

6 sit-inners – people occupying an area as a form of protest

7 freedom riders – civil rights activists who violated segregation rules of public transport as a form of protest

Aufgabe 3.2 (30 BE)

For the website of the European Youth Forum, a platform of non-governmental youth organisations, write a blog entry in which you evaluate the effectiveness of ways of fighting different forms of discrimination in western societies.

Material 1

Leon Aldridge: The lost art of front porch sitting (blog, 2017)

A friend called Saturday afternoon. I answered the phone, then went to the front porch and sat down, got comfortable and enjoyed the conversation.

The front porch on my house is big. It spans the full 45-foot width of the house and is all under the roof line. That means it is protected from weather and harsh sunlight, and also means it is more than half the square footage of the first house I owned many years ago.

Potted plants and a variety of furniture adorns the big old porch. The focal point is a wicker love seat 1 and two chairs originally purchased for watching sunsets from the back porch where we lived on Lake Murvaul in East Texas. One of the obligatory reproduction park benches and a couple of old rocking chairs provide additional places to sit a spell 2.

It’s a really great front porch, and I really enjoyed sitting there Saturday afternoon… which makes me really wonder why I don’t sit out there more often than I do.

Front porch sitting is a wonderful pass time, a relaxing ending to any day, and can be excellent therapy. My grandparents were avid front porch sitters. If they ever missed a day, it was a sure bet someone was deathly ill, the weather was awful, or some similar catastrophic circumstance.

The small white frame house at 323 Cypress Street in Pittsburg, Texas, where my father was raised, had a small wooden-floor front porch – small compared to mine today in Center, Texas. Two old rockers fit the porch perfectly and were year-round permanent fixtures. As long as company didn’t exceed two additional people, another one or two chairs recruited from the living room could be squeezed in. It was a little crowded, but also sort of cozy for friends or family. And, that included just about everybody invited to sit on the porch, because if they were not friends or family before the visit, they surely would be before the evening was over.

The routine seldom varied. With supper over and the kitchen cleaned, everyone migrated to the porch. Things got underway by simply relaxing and visiting about anything that came up, but conversations typically were a recap of the day’s highlights. Maybe a discussion about one of my grandfather’s trees. They were his hobby before he retired and his passion after his paycheck days were over. Huge pecan trees lined the front of the house, trees he planted when they moved in the house in 1930. The back yard was shaded all day with just about any variety of fruit tree imaginable.

The mail was another frequent topic. Mail was a big deal then. The postman’s daily delivery was a highly anticipated event. Things like the newspaper, a Fort Worth Star-Telegram every day, or a Pittsburg Gazette once a week. Perhaps a letter or postcard from a family member like “Aunt Ruby” in Fort Worth, my grandmother’s sister. They were all read and talked about on the porch. Most family news traveled via the mail as long distance phone calls were reserved for birth and death events. It was just too expensive for chit chat. […]

We knew it was time to go in when my grandmother softly started singing a hymn. While my grandfather’s favorite was “Blessed Assurance,” whatever the song for the evening was, songbooks weren’t needed. They both knew the words to every verse.

Just like my grandparent’s front porch 3, the mood on my front porch last Saturday afternoon was perfect for relaxing and chatting with a friend, albeit via the modern contrivance of cell phones. In fact, sitting on the porch was so enjoyable that when the chat was over, I lingered a while longer before leaving. A couple of neighbors walked by. We exchanged a “howdy” 4 wave, and I smiled thinking they must have suspected something was terribly amiss since I never sit on the front porch.

Oh, and those two rocking chairs that were front porch fixtures at my grandparent’s house 5 for decades? Although they are in need of repairs, I still have them. Maybe I’ll get them fixed now, add them to my front porch collection and spend more time porch sitting.

Not only is it relaxing and therapeutic, it reminds me of summer evenings at my grandparent’s house 5 many years ago. Plus, it’s also kind of fun making the neighbors wonder what I’m up to.

(733 Wörter)

Leon Aldridge: The lost art of front porch sitting 16.09.2017, URL: https://leonaldridge.com/2017/09/16/the-lost-art-of-front-porch-sitting (abgerufen am 08.04.2020).

1 wicker love seat – ein Korbsessel

2 to sit a spell – to sit down, relax, and socialize for a while

3 grandparent’s front porch – grammatically correct: grandparents’ front porch

4 howdy – an informal greeting, used in the American South

5 grandparent’s house – grammatically correct: grandparents’ house

Material 2

Atticus and Scout, after her first day at school where she had a fight with Walter Cunningham. Atticus explains to her the importance of seeing things from someone else’s point of view.

Material 3

Judge Taylor asks Atticus to defend Tom Robinson.

Material 4

Scout finally meets Boo Radley after he has rescued her and her brother from an attack and brought them home.

Material 5

Scout brings Boo Radley home.

Aufgaben

1

Outline the significance the author attaches to "porch-sitting". (Material 1)

(25 BE)

Material 1

Leon Aldridge: The lost art of front porch sitting (blog, 2017)

A friend called Saturday afternoon. I answered the phone, then went to the front porch and sat down, got comfortable and enjoyed the conversation.

The front porch on my house is big. It spans the full 45-foot width of the house and is all under the roof line. That means it is protected from weather and harsh sunlight, and also means it is more than half the square footage of the first house I owned many years ago.

Potted plants and a variety of furniture adorns the big old porch. The focal point is a wicker love seat 1 and two chairs originally purchased for watching sunsets from the back porch where we lived on Lake Murvaul in East Texas. One of the obligatory reproduction park benches and a couple of old rocking chairs provide additional places to sit a spell 2.

It’s a really great front porch, and I really enjoyed sitting there Saturday afternoon… which makes me really wonder why I don’t sit out there more often than I do.

Front porch sitting is a wonderful pass time, a relaxing ending to any day, and can be excellent therapy. My grandparents were avid front porch sitters. If they ever missed a day, it was a sure bet someone was deathly ill, the weather was awful, or some similar catastrophic circumstance.

The small white frame house at 323 Cypress Street in Pittsburg, Texas, where my father was raised, had a small wooden-floor front porch – small compared to mine today in Center, Texas. Two old rockers fit the porch perfectly and were year-round permanent fixtures. As long as company didn’t exceed two additional people, another one or two chairs recruited from the living room could be squeezed in. It was a little crowded, but also sort of cozy for friends or family. And, that included just about everybody invited to sit on the porch, because if they were not friends or family before the visit, they surely would be before the evening was over.

The routine seldom varied. With supper over and the kitchen cleaned, everyone migrated to the porch. Things got underway by simply relaxing and visiting about anything that came up, but conversations typically were a recap of the day’s highlights. Maybe a discussion about one of my grandfather’s trees. They were his hobby before he retired and his passion after his paycheck days were over. Huge pecan trees lined the front of the house, trees he planted when they moved in the house in 1930. The back yard was shaded all day with just about any variety of fruit tree imaginable.

The mail was another frequent topic. Mail was a big deal then. The postman’s daily delivery was a highly anticipated event. Things like the newspaper, a Fort Worth Star-Telegram every day, or a Pittsburg Gazette once a week. Perhaps a letter or postcard from a family member like “Aunt Ruby” in Fort Worth, my grandmother’s sister. They were all read and talked about on the porch. Most family news traveled via the mail as long distance phone calls were reserved for birth and death events. It was just too expensive for chit chat. […]

We knew it was time to go in when my grandmother softly started singing a hymn. While my grandfather’s favorite was “Blessed Assurance,” whatever the song for the evening was, songbooks weren’t needed. They both knew the words to every verse.

Just like my grandparent’s front porch 3, the mood on my front porch last Saturday afternoon was perfect for relaxing and chatting with a friend, albeit via the modern contrivance of cell phones. In fact, sitting on the porch was so enjoyable that when the chat was over, I lingered a while longer before leaving. A couple of neighbors walked by. We exchanged a “howdy” 4 wave, and I smiled thinking they must have suspected something was terribly amiss since I never sit on the front porch.

Oh, and those two rocking chairs that were front porch fixtures at my grandparent’s house 5 for decades? Although they are in need of repairs, I still have them. Maybe I’ll get them fixed now, add them to my front porch collection and spend more time porch sitting.

Not only is it relaxing and therapeutic, it reminds me of summer evenings at my grandparent’s house 5 many years ago. Plus, it’s also kind of fun making the neighbors wonder what I’m up to.

(733 Wörter)

Leon Aldridge: The lost art of front porch sitting 16.09.2017, URL: https://leonaldridge.com/2017/09/16/the-lost-art-of-front-porch-sitting (abgerufen am 08.04.2020).

1 wicker love seat – ein Korbsessel

2 to sit a spell – to sit down, relax, and socialize for a while

3 grandparent’s front porch – grammatically correct: grandparents’ front porch

4 howdy – an informal greeting, used in the American South

5 grandparent’s house – grammatically correct: grandparents’ house

Material 2

Atticus and Scout, after her first day at school where she had a fight with Walter Cunningham. Atticus explains to her the importance of seeing things from someone else’s point of view.

Material 3

Judge Taylor asks Atticus to defend Tom Robinson.

Material 4

Scout finally meets Boo Radley after he has rescued her and her brother from an attack and brought them home.

Material 5

Scout brings Boo Radley home.

2 Relate this view on the porch to the function of the porch in the film “To Kill a Mockingbird”, taking the film stills as a starting point. (Material 2–4) [40 BE]

Material 1

Leon Aldridge: The lost art of front porch sitting (blog, 2017)

A friend called Saturday afternoon. I answered the phone, then went to the front porch and sat down, got comfortable and enjoyed the conversation.

The front porch on my house is big. It spans the full 45-foot width of the house and is all under the roof line. That means it is protected from weather and harsh sunlight, and also means it is more than half the square footage of the first house I owned many years ago.

Potted plants and a variety of furniture adorns the big old porch. The focal point is a wicker love seat 1 and two chairs originally purchased for watching sunsets from the back porch where we lived on Lake Murvaul in East Texas. One of the obligatory reproduction park benches and a couple of old rocking chairs provide additional places to sit a spell 2.

It’s a really great front porch, and I really enjoyed sitting there Saturday afternoon… which makes me really wonder why I don’t sit out there more often than I do.

Front porch sitting is a wonderful pass time, a relaxing ending to any day, and can be excellent therapy. My grandparents were avid front porch sitters. If they ever missed a day, it was a sure bet someone was deathly ill, the weather was awful, or some similar catastrophic circumstance.

The small white frame house at 323 Cypress Street in Pittsburg, Texas, where my father was raised, had a small wooden-floor front porch – small compared to mine today in Center, Texas. Two old rockers fit the porch perfectly and were year-round permanent fixtures. As long as company didn’t exceed two additional people, another one or two chairs recruited from the living room could be squeezed in. It was a little crowded, but also sort of cozy for friends or family. And, that included just about everybody invited to sit on the porch, because if they were not friends or family before the visit, they surely would be before the evening was over.

The routine seldom varied. With supper over and the kitchen cleaned, everyone migrated to the porch. Things got underway by simply relaxing and visiting about anything that came up, but conversations typically were a recap of the day’s highlights. Maybe a discussion about one of my grandfather’s trees. They were his hobby before he retired and his passion after his paycheck days were over. Huge pecan trees lined the front of the house, trees he planted when they moved in the house in 1930. The back yard was shaded all day with just about any variety of fruit tree imaginable.

The mail was another frequent topic. Mail was a big deal then. The postman’s daily delivery was a highly anticipated event. Things like the newspaper, a Fort Worth Star-Telegram every day, or a Pittsburg Gazette once a week. Perhaps a letter or postcard from a family member like “Aunt Ruby” in Fort Worth, my grandmother’s sister. They were all read and talked about on the porch. Most family news traveled via the mail as long distance phone calls were reserved for birth and death events. It was just too expensive for chit chat. […]

We knew it was time to go in when my grandmother softly started singing a hymn. While my grandfather’s favorite was “Blessed Assurance,” whatever the song for the evening was, songbooks weren’t needed. They both knew the words to every verse.

Just like my grandparent’s front porch 3, the mood on my front porch last Saturday afternoon was perfect for relaxing and chatting with a friend, albeit via the modern contrivance of cell phones. In fact, sitting on the porch was so enjoyable that when the chat was over, I lingered a while longer before leaving. A couple of neighbors walked by. We exchanged a “howdy” 4 wave, and I smiled thinking they must have suspected something was terribly amiss since I never sit on the front porch.

Oh, and those two rocking chairs that were front porch fixtures at my grandparent’s house 5 for decades? Although they are in need of repairs, I still have them. Maybe I’ll get them fixed now, add them to my front porch collection and spend more time porch sitting.

Not only is it relaxing and therapeutic, it reminds me of summer evenings at my grandparent’s house 5 many years ago. Plus, it’s also kind of fun making the neighbors wonder what I’m up to.

(733 Wörter)

Leon Aldridge: The lost art of front porch sitting 16.09.2017, URL: https://leonaldridge.com/2017/09/16/the-lost-art-of-front-porch-sitting (abgerufen am 08.04.2020).

1 wicker love seat – ein Korbsessel

2 to sit a spell – to sit down, relax, and socialize for a while

3 grandparent’s front porch – grammatically correct: grandparents’ front porch

4 howdy – an informal greeting, used in the American South

5 grandparent’s house – grammatically correct: grandparents’ house

Material 2

Atticus and Scout, after her first day at school where she had a fight with Walter Cunningham. Atticus explains to her the importance of seeing things from someone else’s point of view.

Material 3

Judge Taylor asks Atticus to defend Tom Robinson.

Material 4

Scout finally meets Boo Radley after he has rescued her and her brother from an attack and brought them home.

Material 5

Scout brings Boo Radley home.

Aufgaben

3 Choose one of the following tasks: (35 BE)

3.1

In the closing voice-over of the film, a mature Scout says: “One time Atticus said you never really knew a man until you stood in his shoes and walked around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.” (Material 5)

Evaluate in what way standing on the Radley porch might help Scout to understand Boo, also considering the development of Scout’s perception of him.

Material 1

Leon Aldridge: The lost art of front porch sitting (blog, 2017)

A friend called Saturday afternoon. I answered the phone, then went to the front porch and sat down, got comfortable and enjoyed the conversation.

The front porch on my house is big. It spans the full 45-foot width of the house and is all under the roof line. That means it is protected from weather and harsh sunlight, and also means it is more than half the square footage of the first house I owned many years ago.

Potted plants and a variety of furniture adorns the big old porch. The focal point is a wicker love seat 1 and two chairs originally purchased for watching sunsets from the back porch where we lived on Lake Murvaul in East Texas. One of the obligatory reproduction park benches and a couple of old rocking chairs provide additional places to sit a spell 2.

It’s a really great front porch, and I really enjoyed sitting there Saturday afternoon… which makes me really wonder why I don’t sit out there more often than I do.

Front porch sitting is a wonderful pass time, a relaxing ending to any day, and can be excellent therapy. My grandparents were avid front porch sitters. If they ever missed a day, it was a sure bet someone was deathly ill, the weather was awful, or some similar catastrophic circumstance.

The small white frame house at 323 Cypress Street in Pittsburg, Texas, where my father was raised, had a small wooden-floor front porch – small compared to mine today in Center, Texas. Two old rockers fit the porch perfectly and were year-round permanent fixtures. As long as company didn’t exceed two additional people, another one or two chairs recruited from the living room could be squeezed in. It was a little crowded, but also sort of cozy for friends or family. And, that included just about everybody invited to sit on the porch, because if they were not friends or family before the visit, they surely would be before the evening was over.

The routine seldom varied. With supper over and the kitchen cleaned, everyone migrated to the porch. Things got underway by simply relaxing and visiting about anything that came up, but conversations typically were a recap of the day’s highlights. Maybe a discussion about one of my grandfather’s trees. They were his hobby before he retired and his passion after his paycheck days were over. Huge pecan trees lined the front of the house, trees he planted when they moved in the house in 1930. The back yard was shaded all day with just about any variety of fruit tree imaginable.

The mail was another frequent topic. Mail was a big deal then. The postman’s daily delivery was a highly anticipated event. Things like the newspaper, a Fort Worth Star-Telegram every day, or a Pittsburg Gazette once a week. Perhaps a letter or postcard from a family member like “Aunt Ruby” in Fort Worth, my grandmother’s sister. They were all read and talked about on the porch. Most family news traveled via the mail as long distance phone calls were reserved for birth and death events. It was just too expensive for chit chat. […]

We knew it was time to go in when my grandmother softly started singing a hymn. While my grandfather’s favorite was “Blessed Assurance,” whatever the song for the evening was, songbooks weren’t needed. They both knew the words to every verse.

Just like my grandparent’s front porch 3, the mood on my front porch last Saturday afternoon was perfect for relaxing and chatting with a friend, albeit via the modern contrivance of cell phones. In fact, sitting on the porch was so enjoyable that when the chat was over, I lingered a while longer before leaving. A couple of neighbors walked by. We exchanged a “howdy” 4 wave, and I smiled thinking they must have suspected something was terribly amiss since I never sit on the front porch.

Oh, and those two rocking chairs that were front porch fixtures at my grandparent’s house 5 for decades? Although they are in need of repairs, I still have them. Maybe I’ll get them fixed now, add them to my front porch collection and spend more time porch sitting.

Not only is it relaxing and therapeutic, it reminds me of summer evenings at my grandparent’s house 5 many years ago. Plus, it’s also kind of fun making the neighbors wonder what I’m up to.

(733 Wörter)

Leon Aldridge: The lost art of front porch sitting 16.09.2017, URL: https://leonaldridge.com/2017/09/16/the-lost-art-of-front-porch-sitting (abgerufen am 08.04.2020).

1 wicker love seat – ein Korbsessel

2 to sit a spell – to sit down, relax, and socialize for a while

3 grandparent’s front porch – grammatically correct: grandparents’ front porch

4 howdy – an informal greeting, used in the American South

5 grandparent’s house – grammatically correct: grandparents’ house

Material 2

Atticus and Scout, after her first day at school where she had a fight with Walter Cunningham. Atticus explains to her the importance of seeing things from someone else’s point of view.

Material 3

Judge Taylor asks Atticus to defend Tom Robinson.

Material 4

Scout finally meets Boo Radley after he has rescued her and her brother from an attack and brought them home.

Material 5

Scout brings Boo Radley home.

3.2 Assess whether the picture (Material 4) would have made a good film poster for “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

(35 BE)