Hamlet's Soliloquy (From Shakespeare's Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Act III, Scene I)
"Roger Ebert: The Essential Man" [Excerpts]
"Human Life Calculator" (online resource)
"What Is The Value Of A Human Life?" (Kenneth Feinberg)
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says (Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Address)
Module Description and Background: “The Value of Life" provides students with extended practice analyzing and synthesizing a diverse set of texts on a shared question: How should human life be valued? The summative assessment offers students two choices for responding to the central question in the reading selections: a reflective project on the value of life. The assignment sequence in this module asks students to read a number of texts, written in very different contexts and genres, that provide various points of view on the ways in which we as a society value human life. The goal of this module is to inquire into different ways writers have probed and represented the value of human life. The key objective for the students is to make connections among the various texts, notice the rhetorical conventions used by specific genres to explore similar questions, and then use similar rhetorical devices while creating and sharing a project about their own perceptions of how life should be valued.