In year 2 of the course, after you have finished the Higher-Level Essay and the Individual Oral, you will most likely no longer teach non-literary bodies of work.

Why? 

Well, Paper 1 is soon approaching and you will want to broaden your approach.  With that in mind, over the next several months, InThinking will be publishing a variety of lessons with resources geared toward non-literary textual analysis.  This will allow you to focus explicitly on how language creates meaning.  Obviously, you already do this! 

What this page offers, however, is a tightly focused lesson or set of lessons built around a concept.  The page we are publishing this week – found here – is titled “The Language of Nutrition.”  The lesson revolves around a set of claims made by Tom Brady (in his 2017 book TB12) about what to eat and what not to eat. 

Most interesting to us as Language and Literature as well as Theory of Knowledge teachers are those claims.  What language does Brady use to make his claims?  How does he support his arguments?  What constitutes an expert?  Can we trust him?  These questions and more frame these resources.

Again, these resources fit best in year 2 of the program, after you have completed the Individual Oral and Higher Level Essay and the focus here is on textual bias in particular.  More specifically, you will be asking students to identify and explore the implications of the textual bias that exists in the writing about diet, nutrition, and exercise.

Best,

Tim and David