Kendrick Lamar, Winnie the Pooh, or Voltaire?

Here’s a sneaky way to get students to analyze snippets of primary text: Who said it: Kendrick Lamar, Winnie the Pooh, or Voltaire?

This activity instantly engages minds and activates conversation. And, it’s trickier than it seems: Kendrick Lamar and Voltaire actually agree quite a bit about the state of the world and the rights of individuals.

I am using this as my seventh graders study the Age of Enlightenment, but you could do this with any historic or contemporary figure.

I have done this before with quotations from Superman and Tolstoy, as a way of introducing Tolstoy’s short story, “The Three Questions.” For that one, I set it up as a google slides presentation and had students “vote with their feet”–If you think it was Superman, move to this side of the room; if you think it was Tolstoy, move to the other.

There are many different ways to create this activity. I have simply done an internet search: “list of quotations by (person)”. More recently, I have used chatgpt, but if you go this route, you have to watch out for errors. I found that asking chatgpt to fact-check itself helped me fix some of these mistakes.

This exercise lends itself to a number of writing exercises. Students can, for example, select a quotation and write a short paragraph explaining what the quotation means and whether or not they agree. It could launch a research paper comparing and contrasting the two (or three) figures and/or the new ideas they introduced to the world. Or, you could take a more creative approach and have students create a talk show featuring the quoted persons or use the quotations to launch a debate.

Essentially, the question is (ALWAYS!): How can a single idea change the world?