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2. AP FRQ Argument. At the close of her 2017 essay “How Black Books Lit My Way
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along the Appalachian Trail,” Rahawa Haile states “[t]hat visibility is vulnerability but that
it also paves the way toward action for those who see themselves in you.” Write an essay
that argues your position on the role of visibility and vulnerability in bringing about change.
3. Creative Writing. In paragraph 3, Haile lists and ascribes a weight to items she carried on
Identity
the trail — both tangible and intangible. If you were to hike the Appalachian Trail, what
might your list look like? Use Haile’s paragraph as a model to compose your own list of real
and metaphorical things to bring with you. How would each thing help you reach the goal of
your hike?
Copyright (c) 2023 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Uncorrected proofs have been used for this sample chapter.

Country Pride: What I Learned
TRM ELL Essential Guide Handout
An ELL Essential Guide for this reading Growing Up in Rural America
Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Strictly for use with its products. Not for redistribution.
can be found in the Teacher’s Resource Sarah Smarsh
Materials.
Sarah Smarsh (b. 1980) is a nationally recognized journalist who often
writes and speaks on issues related to economic inequality. Born and
TRM Vocabulary Handout raised in rural Kansas, where she currently lives, Smarsh earned a BA Manny Carabel/Getty Images
Vocabulary in Context exercises based on from Kansas State University and an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia
challenging words from this reading can be University. She is the author of two books: Heartland: A Memoir of
found in the Teacher’s Resource Materials. Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (2018)
and She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her
Songs (2020).
BUILDING CONTEXT KEY CONTEXT The following essay, adapted from Heartland, was published by the
Guardian two months before the 2018 U.S. midterm elections.
You might use the Key Context note to help
ou might use the Key Context note to help
Y
students explore the historical situation
when the article was first published. They hat it means to be “country” has changed represent the rural, working-class experience,
might do some quick research into the key W in the few decades of my lifetime, I think, often by people who have things my family
issues of the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, from an experience to a brand cultivated by con- never could have afforded.
and note that the Guardian is a British servative forces. I’d never heard of Carhartt, for instance, the
newspaper. This background could lead Once, when I was about 30, I saw a boy from popular workwear brand sometimes worn as a
into considering the rhetorical situation a small town wearing a T-shirt that read pro-God, class-conscious fashion statement, until I was
using the rhetorical triangle, SOAPSTone, pro-guns, pro-life. I was shocked. In my experi- well into adulthood. My choring coveralls were
SPACECAT, or another method. ence, there was no evangelism about my 20 years old with a big corduroy collar and holes
TRM Instructional Strategies family’s Catholic faith in the 1980s and little in the lining, and I slopped the hogs while wear-
overt cross-pollination between our church and ing old tennis shoes as often as I did in boots.
SOAPSTone/SPACES/SPACECAT. For our politics. There was, that I can recall, no Grandpa’s trucks were small Toyotas bought
advice on effectively conveying SOAP- resentment toward people in cities with more used, not big Fords or Chevrolets jacked up a foot
STone, SPACES, or SPACECAT, see the formal education and money. I’m suspicious above big tires to look tough. Those trucks tend
Teacher’s Resource Materials. when I see these tropes trotted out proudly to to look too clean for a machine that’s done any

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DIFFERENTIATION
Scaffolding
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AP Teaching Tip. Smarsh often relies on the
techniques of definition and of comparison/
contrast as she develops her essay. Both of
those are Unit 4 skills in the CED (see REO-
1.K and REO-1.L). You might preview or
review some common features of each mode,
and then ask students to pay attention to
them as they read Smarsh’s essay (she
begins, for instance, by questioning the
definition of “country,” and then she spends
several paragraphs contrasting the popular
image with her experience of the reality).

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