Lesson 3: Comprehension Aids

The two activities described above are holistic. Students need to have the reading skills to make meaning of the material, the ability to generalize about information acquired in one place and apply it in another, and the ability to conceptualize. In addition, they need to have the patience to work with details over a period of days or even weeks. For some students, all of this may be too much right now.

In this section, study questions are provided for selected documents. In this way, the unit is broken down into bite-sized components. For each there are two levels of questions:

• Getting the Meaning provides literal questions that direct students to important points in the text.
• Making Inferences are questions that encourage students to generalize, to see patterns and ideas, and to make comparisons to similar events in other contexts.

The questions might be useful to you as guides for discussion or for soliciting written responses, or a combination of the two. Of course, you should feel free to edit the questions to make them appropriate for your group. You may decide not to use all the selections, or to combine questions about some with one of the other activities.

"TVA History"	Background information about the TVA
"In His Mind's Eye"	Reading a political cartoon about Roosevelt's hopes for the TVA
"Roosevelt Press Conference"	Partial text of a press conference wherein Roosevelt explains the benefit of the project
"The Displaced People"	Economic considerations and the effects of the TVA on people who would have to relocate because of it
"Washday at Stooksbury Homestead"	Photograph and notes by a contemporary local, raising the issue of how photographers represented local people, and why
"The Planned Community of Norris, Tennessee"	An article about the intentions of the planners of Norris and what evolved there over time
"Power for All"	An article about rural electrification and the implications of government-owned industries
"Refrigeration"	A foreign journalist reflects on the need for refrigeration in the Tennessee Valley
"What REA Service Means to Our Farm Home"	A personal account of how life improved as a result of electrification
"Power: A Living Newspaper Production of the Federal Theater Project"	Two scenes from the play "Power," which dramatized the issues of electrification for contemporary audiences