Hints
Both of these pre-reading
exercises focus on concrete facets of postwar conditions --
homes, clothing, injuries. Of the two, you may have
chosen Exercise B as the more informative and
challenging. For Grade 8 learning level, however, that
is precisely its difficulty. Unless a World History
course is taught in the same year as this German course, or
unless students can be assigned additional research, WW II
will probably have little resonance with students at this
age. Even for adult students of the 1990s, WW II and,
indeed, even the Cold War are relatively remote
events. True, newscasts and magazine have exposed
students to problems of countries at war, but those images
have involved warfare restricted largely to individual
nations. Lacking a sense of what global conflicts
imply, these students will need a considerable amount of
information to make meaningful generalizations.
To render Exercise B a task
effectively representing the comparisons standards,
then, informational charts, stories, or pictures would be
essential. In other words, students would need to
undertake a pre-reading that involves reading of
supplementary material. They might see a diagram that
illustrates percentages of towns destroyed and people killed
or they might be shown some pictures of devastated Hamburg
or Berlin. The caveat here is that such analysis would
involve high level cognitive comparison of multiple
features, many of them new or unfamiliar to American
students.
Exercise A avoids such cognitive
and background problems by focusing more narrowly on the
effects of war, a connections rather than a
comparison goal. If you rejected this
pre-reading task in favor of the comparison asked for in
Exercise B, you may have been concerned that an exercise
asking for the effects of war placed a higher cognitive
demand on students at Grade 8 level, because it appears to
involve cause and effect logic. Those demands are,
however, more apparent than real.
The task in Exercise A does not
actually ask for more than very low level analysis.
Students need only generate lists rather than truly
reflecting about cause and effect. In other words,
when told "Stellt Euch vor, es hat in Eurem Land ein Krieg
gegeben. Welche Probleme würde es geben?" they
need only think about one type of situation--the aftermath
of war, which they might even know from video games set in
imaginary countries. They are not being asked, for
example, to compare differences among different occupation
forces and their impact or analyze German military policies
and their consequences for the immediate postwar
situation. Moreover, unlike Exercise B, neither the
scope nor the particulars of the German postwar situation
are asked for in Exercise A.