Overview

Lesson Procedure

65-75 minutes of class time across 5 phases.

1. Warm-Up10 minutes
2. Direct Instruction20 minutes
3. Guided Practice15 minutes
4. Independent Practice15-20 minutes
5. Closure5-10 minutes

1. Warm-Up10 minutes

   Start with one sentence stripped of its book.

   Warm-Up Prompt

   "A friend sends you one sentence from a 300-page book written in 1890: 'The tenement has come to stay.' What do you think the author wants? Now learn one fact about the whole book: its author spent years pushing for better housing for the poor. Does the sentence mean the same thing now? Write two sentences."

   Collect readings. Many students first hear surrender or approval; knowing the whole, the sentence becomes a premise for reform ("the tenement ... must itself be the solution," as the author says later). Tell students that RH.11-12.1 asks for exactly this double move: evidence from specific details, connected to an understanding of the text as a whole.

2. Direct Instruction20 minutes

   Part 1: The detail-to-whole move. Present Diagram 1. Every analysis takes four steps: quote the detail, state the insight it gives, place it in the text's larger argument, structure or purpose, and say what it adds to an understanding of the whole. Then read back from the whole to the detail. Remind students that the same move applies to a secondary source: its details serve its thesis. Show Diagram 2 so students see where each passage sits in the 300-page book.

   Part 2: Model with Riis. Riis, a Danish immigrant, was a police reporter in New York when he wrote the book. Read the Introduction paragraph aloud, then the opening of chapter I, and model the worked examples. Point out that both passages quote official reports (a legislative committee, a sanitary inquiry, the report to the Legislature of 1857); students should always ask whose words a quotation really is.

   What are you going to do about it? is the question of to-day. It was asked once of our city in taunting defiance by a band of political cutthroats, the legitimate outgrowth of life on the tenement-house level. Law and order found the answer then and prevailed. With our enormously swelling population held in this galling bondage, will that answer always be given? It will depend on how fully the situation that prompted the challenge is grasped. Forty per cent. of the distress among the poor, said a recent official report, is due to drunkenness. But the first legislative committee ever appointed to probe this sore went deeper down and uncovered its roots. The "conclusion forced itself upon it that certain conditions and associations of human life and habitation are the prolific parents of corresponding habits and morals," and it recommended "the prevention of drunkenness by providing for every man a clean and comfortable home." Years after, a sanitary inquiry brought to light the fact that "more than one-half of the tenements with two-thirds of their population were held by owners who made the keeping of them a business, generally a speculation. The owner was seeking a certain percentage on his outlay, and that percentage very rarely fell below fifteen per cent., and frequently exceeded thirty.... The complaint was universal among the tenants that they were entirely uncared for, and that the only answer to their requests to have the place put in order by repairs and necessary improvements was that they must pay their rent or leave. The agent's instructions were simple but emphatic: 'Collect the rent in advance, or, failing, eject the occupants.'" Upon such a stock grew this upas-tree. Small wonder the fruit is bitter. The remedy that shall be an effective answer to the coming appeal for justice must proceed from the public conscience. Neither legislation nor charity can cover the ground. The greed of capital that wrought the evil must itself undo it, as far as it can now be undone. Homes must be built for the working masses by those who employ their labor; but tenements must cease to be "good property" in the old, heartless sense. "Philanthropy and five per cent." is the penance exacted.

   1The first tenement New York knew bore the mark of Cain from its birth, though a generation passed before the writing was deciphered. It was the "rear house," infamous ever after in our city's history. There had been tenant-houses before, but they were not built for the purpose. Nothing would probably have shocked their original owners more than the idea of their harboring a promiscuous crowd; for they were the decorous homes of the old Knickerbockers, the proud aristocracy of Manhattan in the early days.

   2It was the stir and bustle of trade, together with the tremendous immigration that followed upon the war of 1812 that dislodged them. In thirty-five years the city of less than a hundred thousand came to harbor half a million souls, for whom homes had to be found. Within the memory of men not yet in their prime, Washington had moved from his house on Cherry Hill as too far out of town to be easily reached. Now the old residents followed his example; but they moved in a different direction and for a different reason. Their comfortable dwellings in the once fashionable streets along the East River front fell into the hands of real-estate agents and boarding-house keepers; and here, says the report to the Legislature of 1857, when the evils engendered had excited just alarm, "in its beginning, the tenant-house became a real blessing to that class of industrious poor whose small earnings limited their expenses, and whose employment in workshops, stores, or about the warehouses and thoroughfares, render a near residence of much importance." Not for long, however. As business increased, and the city grew with rapid strides, the necessities of the poor became the opportunity of their wealthier neighbors, and the stamp was set upon the old houses, suddenly become valuable, which the best thought and effort of a later age has vainly struggled to efface. Their "large rooms were partitioned into several smaller ones, without regard to light or ventilation, the rate of rent being lower in proportion to space or height from the street; and they soon became filled from cellar to garret with a class of tenantry living from hand to mouth, loose in morals, improvident in habits, degraded, and squalid as beggary itself." It was thus the dark bedroom, prolific of untold depravities, came into the world. It was destined to survive the old houses. In their new rôle, says the old report, eloquent in its indignant denunciation of "evils more destructive than wars," "they were not intended to last. Rents were fixed high enough to cover damage and abuse from this class, from whom nothing was expected, and the most was made of them while they lasted. Neatness, order, cleanliness, were never dreamed of in connection with the tenant-house system, as it spread its localities from year to year; while reckless slovenliness, discontent, privation, and ignorance were left to work out their invariable results, until the entire premises reached the level of tenant-house dilapidation, containing, but sheltering not, the miserable hordes that crowded beneath smouldering, water-rotted roofs or burrowed among the rats of clammy cellars." Yet so illogical is human greed that, at a later day, when called to account, "the proprietors frequently urged the filthy habits of the tenants as an excuse for the condition of their property, utterly losing sight of the fact that it was the tolerance of those habits which was the real evil, and that for this they themselves were alone responsible."

   • Detail to structure: the book's question

     T2: "What are you going to do about it? is the question of to-day."

     Result: Insight: Riis takes a taunt once thrown at the city and turns it into a question for the reader. Whole: the book is built to answer it; its last chapter is titled "How the Case Stands" and lists "three effective ways of dealing with the tenements" (T3).

   • Detail to argument: whose fault

     T1, paragraph 2: "the necessities of the poor became the opportunity of their wealthier neighbors."

     Result: Insight: the balanced phrase makes the poor's need and the rich's profit one event. Whole: this is the book's charge that the tenement was made by people, which the same chapter sharpens when it reports the owners' excuse (Worked Example 4).

   • Detail to later chapters: the dark bedroom

     T1, paragraph 2: rooms were "partitioned into several smaller ones, without regard to light or ventilation ... It was thus the dark bedroom, prolific of untold depravities, came into the world."

     Result: Insight: a landlord's partition, a design choice, created the dark bedroom. Whole: the history chapter gives the origin of the conditions the later tours show, so each dark room the reader meets afterward is evidence of this history (Diagram 1).

   • Reading a quotation inside a quotation

     T1, paragraph 2: "the proprietors frequently urged the filthy habits of the tenants as an excuse for the condition of their property ... and that for this they themselves were alone responsible."

     Result: Insight: the words "filthy habits" are the landlords' excuse, which the report and Riis reject. Whole: the book argues that conditions shape habits, so a student who cites "filthy habits" as Riis's view has reversed the whole argument.

   • Detail to remedy

     T2: "'Philanthropy and five per cent.' is the penance exacted."

     Result: Insight: reform must be both generous and profitable; "penance" makes it a duty owed for a wrong. Whole: the Introduction announces a remedy that the last chapter argues in detail, where Riis promises that "it will pay to do it" (T3, paragraph 8).

3. Guided Practice15 minutes

   Pairs read the opening of the last chapter, where Riis sums up his case. They draw an arrow from at least three of the eight "bald facts" back to a specific detail in T1 or T2 that supports it, and write one sentence per arrow.

   1What, then, are the bald facts with which we have to deal in New York?

   2I. That we have a tremendous, ever swelling crowd of wage-earners which it is our business to house decently.

   3II. That it is not housed decently.

   4III. That it must be so housed here for the present, and for a long time to come, all schemes of suburban relief being as yet utopian, impracticable.

   5IV. That it pays high enough rents to entitle it to be so housed, as a right.

   6V. That nothing but our own slothfulness is in the way of so housing it, since "the condition of the tenants is in advance of the condition of the houses which they occupy" (Report of Tenement-house Commission).

   7VI. That the security of the one no less than of the other half demands, on sanitary, moral, and economic grounds, that it be decently housed.

   8VII. That it will pay to do it. As an investment, I mean, and in hard cash. This I shall immediately proceed to prove.

   9VIII. That the tenement has come to stay, and must itself be the solution of the problem with which it confronts us.

   10This is the fact from which we cannot get away, however we may deplore it. Doubtless the best would be to get rid of it altogether; but as we cannot, all argument on that score may at this time be dismissed as idle. The practical question is what to do with the tenement. I watched a Mott Street landlord, the owner of a row of barracks that have made no end of trouble for the health authorities for twenty years, solve that question for himself the other day. His way was to give the wretched pile a coat of paint, and put a gorgeous tin cornice on with the year 1890 in letters a yard long. From where I stood watching the operation, I looked down upon the same dirty crowds camping on the roof, foremost among them an Italian mother with two stark-naked children who had apparently never made the acquaintance of a wash-tub. That was a landlord's way, and will not get us out of the mire.

   11The "flat" is another way that does not solve the problem. Rather, it extends it. The flat is not a model, though it is a modern, tenement. It gets rid of some of the nuisances of the low tenement, and of the worst of them, the overcrowding--if it gets rid of them at all--at a cost that takes it at once out of the catalogue of "homes for the poor," while imposing some of the evils from which they suffer upon those who ought to escape from them.

   12There are three effective ways of dealing with the tenements in New York:

   13I. By law.

   14II. By remodelling and making the most out of the old houses.

   15III. By building new, model tenements.

   16Private enterprise--conscience, to put it in the category of duties, where it belongs--must do the lion's share under these last two heads.

   Debrief with two questions. Which fact on the list has no support in the passages you have read? (Fact VII, "it will pay to do it," is only promised here: "This I shall immediately proceed to prove.") What does the Mott Street landlord's "coat of paint" and "gorgeous tin cornice" do in the whole argument? It is a concrete example of a false remedy, set just before Riis lists the three real ones.

   For Activity 2 (Repair the Paragraph). The paragraph below was written for this page as a weak secondary analysis. It quotes real words from T1 and T2 but misreads the whole.

   Jacob Riis did not believe that the poor were victims of their surroundings. In How the Other Half Lives, he blames tenement families for their own condition. He calls them "loose in morals, improvident in habits, degraded, and squalid as beggary itself," and he points to "the filthy habits of the tenants." He also reports that "Forty per cent. of the distress among the poor" is "due to drunkenness." Riis's real purpose was to warn wealthy readers that the poor could not be helped.

4. Independent Practice15-20 minutes

   Students read the book's closing paragraphs and a secondary source written for this page, then answer the quiz on their own. Keep T1-T3 available: several questions ask how a detail in the ending connects to the rest of the book. The poet Riis mentions at the end is James Russell Lowell.

   1And so this task, too, has come to an end. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. I have aimed to tell the truth as I saw it. If this book shall have borne ever so feeble a hand in garnering a harvest of justice, it has served its purpose. While I was writing these lines I went down to the sea, where thousands from the city were enjoying their summer rest. The ocean slumbered under a cloudless sky. Gentle waves washed lazily over the white sand, where children fled before them with screams of laughter. Standing there and watching their play, I was told that during the fierce storms of winter it happened that this sea, now so calm, rose in rage and beat down, broke over the bluff, sweeping all before it. No barrier built by human hands had power to stay it then. The sea of a mighty population, held in galling fetters, heaves uneasily in the tenements. Once already our city, to which have come the duties and responsibilities of metropolitan greatness before it was able to fairly measure its task, has felt the swell of its resistless flood. If it rise once more, no human power may avail to check it. The gap between the classes in which it surges, unseen, unsuspected by the thoughtless, is widening day by day. No tardy enactment of law, no political expedient, can close it. Against all other dangers our system of government may offer defence and shelter; against this not. I know of but one bridge that will carry us over safe, a bridge founded upon justice and built of human hearts. I believe that the danger of such conditions as are fast growing up around us is greater for the very freedom which they mock. The words of the poet, with whose lines I prefaced this book, are truer to-day, have far deeper meaning to us, than when they were penned forty years ago:

   2"--Think ye that building shall endure
   Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor?"

   1Jacob Riis came to New York from Denmark in 1870 and knew poverty firsthand before he found steady work as a police reporter for the New York Tribune. By the late 1880s he was photographing tenement rooms at night with magnesium flash powder, a new technique that let a camera record spaces too dark to photograph before. How the Other Half Lives, published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1890, joined those pictures to two very different kinds of writing.

   2The first is the walking tour. Riis addresses the reader as a visitor, warns him about the dark stairs and stops him outside a single door. The second is the official count: numbers of tenements, tenants, deaths and arrests taken from public records. Neither instrument alone explains the book's effect. A reader can dismiss one dying child as bad luck, and a table of figures as an abstraction. The book persuades because each tour is presented as one sample of a system that the numbers show to be enormous.

   3That combination had consequences. Theodore Roosevelt, who became president of New York City's police board in 1895, walked the tenement districts with Riis at night, and Riis later wrote that, not long after the book appeared, Roosevelt had left a card saying he had read the book and had come to help. When New York State passed its Tenement House Act in 1901, setting stricter rules for light, air, fire safety and plumbing in new tenements and requiring improvements to older ones, reformers could count on a public that Riis had helped to educate.

   4Reading the book whole also means reading the parts that trouble readers today. Riis blames a "system" of greed and neglect, yet several chapters describe entire immigrant groups in sweeping and insulting generalizations. His tenants rarely speak for themselves; they appear in a few lines of dialect while Riis explains what their lives mean. His remedy leans on the conscience and self-interest of landlords and investors rather than on the tenants themselves. A student who quotes only one of the book's best-known scenes, a dying child in a Cherry Street tenement, misses both the numbers that made the book persuasive in 1890 and the assumptions that limit it.

5. Closure5-10 minutes

   Exit ticket: "Quote one detail from today's passages. In two sentences, explain what it shows and how it connects to the book's argument as a whole." Sort the tickets into "detail only," "detail and insight" and "connected to the whole" to plan the next lesson.

   Homework passage and data. The preface opens the book; the table comes from its appendix, which prints official figures on tenements.

   The belief that every man's experience ought to be worth something to the community from which he drew it, no matter what that experience may be, so long as it was gleaned along the line of some decent, honest work, made me begin this book. With the result before him, the reader can judge for himself now whether or not I was right. Right or wrong, the many and exacting duties of a newspaper man's life would hardly have allowed me to bring it to an end but for frequent friendly lifts given me by willing hands. To the President of the Board of Health, Mr. Charles G. Wilson, and to Chief Inspector Byrnes of the Police Force I am indebted for much kindness. The patient friendship of Dr. Roger S. Tracy, the Registrar of Vital Statistics, has done for me what I never could have done for myself; for I know nothing of tables, statistics and percentages, while there is nothing about them that he does not know. Most of all, I owe in this, as in all things else, to the womanly sympathy and the loving companionship of my dear wife, ever my chief helper, my wisest counsellor, and my gentlest critic.

   Tenements, from the appendix of How the Other Half Lives (1890), as printed

   Item	Figure
   Number of tenements in New York, December 1, 1888	32,390
   Number built from June 1, 1888, to August 1, 1890	3,733
   Rear tenements in existence, August 1, 1890	2,630
   Total number of tenements, August 1, 1890	37,316
   Estimated population of tenements, August 1, 1890	1,250,000
   Estimated number of children under five years in tenements, 1890	163,712

   Teacher note. Riis and the reports he quotes wrote with the prejudices of their time. T1 quotes an 1857 report that calls tenants "loose in morals, improvident in habits, degraded"; T3 describes an Italian mother with contempt; and other chapters of the book, not printed here, use labels for immigrant groups that are offensive today. The passages are quoted exactly as printed in 1890. Treat these lines as evidence of the writers' point of view, not as facts about the people described, and let T5, paragraph 4, frame the discussion.

Differentiation Strategies

Assessment Guidance

1. Question 1 of 20 · Multiple Choice

   "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap" (T4, paragraph 1). Which idea from earlier in the book does this proverb echo?

   AThat the tenants' drinking is the main cause of their poverty BThat the city's own earlier greed planted the tenement system it now faces CThat rapid transit to the suburbs will soon empty the tenements DThat the old Knickerbocker families were proud of their houses

2. Question 2 of 20 · Multiple Choice

   T4 describes "The sea of a mighty population, held in galling fetters." Which phrase from the Introduction (T2) does this echo most closely?

   A"a band of political cutthroats" B"a clean and comfortable home" C"our enormously swelling population held in this galling bondage" D"the prolific parents of corresponding habits and morals"

3. Question 3 of 20 · Multiple Choice

   T4 says, "Once already our city ... has felt the swell of its resistless flood. If it rise once more, no human power may avail to check it." How does this connect to T2?

   AT2 says the city has never faced any challenge before BBoth passages praise the police for keeping perfect order CT2 says that law alone will always be enough to answer the challenge DBoth look back to a past challenge the city overcame and doubt that it will be overcome next time

4. Question 4 of 20 · Multiple Choice

   In T4, the calm summer sea that "rose in rage" in winter stands for what?

   AThe tenement population, quiet for now but able to rise with a force no barrier could stop BThe summer visitors from the city who crowd the beach CThe weather, which Riis blames for disease in the tenements DThe churches, which Riis hopes will reach the poor

5. Question 5 of 20 · Multiple Choice

   T3 lists "I. By law" as one of three effective ways of dealing with the tenements, but T4 says "No tardy enactment of law, no political expedient, can close" the gap between the classes. Which reading best fits the book as a whole?

   ARiis contradicts himself, so the book has no consistent argument BRiis changed his mind during the chapter and now rejects all laws CLaw is one tool for improving houses, but Riis thinks no law alone can close the gap between classes DT3 says that law is the only effective way to deal with the tenements

6. Question 6 of 20 · Multiple Choice

   Why is ending with the lines "Think ye that building shall endure / Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor?" effective for the book as a whole?

   AIt introduces a new subject that Riis plans for a second volume BIt makes buildings an image of society and returns to the poet quoted at the start CIt proves with numbers that the tenement buildings will fall down DIt shows the reader that Riis wrote poetry as well as prose

7. Question 7 of 20 · Multiple Choice

   "I believe that the danger of such conditions ... is greater for the very freedom which they mock" (T4). What does Riis mean?

   APeople who are free will not bear conditions that mock freedom, so the danger is greater BFreedom itself created the tenements, so it should be limited CThe tenements are dangerous only in countries that lack freedom DFreedom will solve the tenement problem without any other help

8. Question 8 of 20 · Multiple Choice

   T4 says the city took on "the duties and responsibilities of metropolitan greatness before it was able to fairly measure its task." Which detail from T1 best supports this?

   A"The first tenement New York knew bore the mark of Cain from its birth" B"Washington had moved from his house on Cherry Hill" C"the tenant-house became a real blessing to that class of industrious poor" D"In thirty-five years the city of less than a hundred thousand came to harbor half a million souls"

9. Question 9 of 20 · Multiple Choice

   What is T5's central claim about why How the Other Half Lives persuaded its readers?

   ARiis's photographs alone, not his writing, made the book famous BReaders trusted Riis because he worked as a police reporter CJoining tours to official figures made each tour stand for a vast system DTheodore Roosevelt's praise made readers take the book seriously

10. Question 10 of 20 · Multiple Choice

    Which detail from T5 supports its claim that the book "had consequences"?

    A"Jacob Riis came to New York from Denmark in 1870" B"published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1890" C"A reader can dismiss one dying child as bad luck" D"When New York State passed its Tenement House Act in 1901"

11. Question 11 of 20 · Multiple Choice

    T5, paragraph 4, says that Riis "blames a 'system' of greed and neglect." Which sentence from T2 best supports this description?

    A"The greed of capital that wrought the evil must itself undo it, as far as it can now be undone." B"Law and order found the answer then and prevailed." C"Forty per cent. of the distress among the poor, said a recent official report, is due to drunkenness." D"It was asked once of our city in taunting defiance by a band of political cutthroats"

12. Question 12 of 20 · Multiple Choice

    T5 ends: "A student who quotes only one of the book's best-known scenes, a dying child in a Cherry Street tenement, misses both the numbers that made the book persuasive in 1890 and the assumptions that limit it." What is the purpose of this sentence in T5 as a whole?

    ATo argue that the dying child should never be quoted in an essay BTo claim that the numbers in the book are false or exaggerated CTo praise the book as a whole without any reservations DTo conclude that analysis must connect a vivid detail to the whole book

13. Question 13 of 20 · Multiple Choice

    T1, paragraph 2, says that in thirty-five years the city "of less than a hundred thousand came to harbor half a million souls." By these figures, how did the population change?

    AIt became more than 5 times as large BIt became exactly 4 times as large CIt became one-fifth as large DIt became 35 times as large

14. Question 14 of 20 · Multiple Choice

    Which pair of quotations best supports the claim "Riis argues that the tenement problem was made by people, not by nature"?

    A"the tremendous immigration that followed upon the war of 1812" (T1) and "The ocean slumbered under a cloudless sky" (T4) B"the necessities of the poor became the opportunity of their wealthier neighbors" (T1) and "nothing but our own slothfulness is in the way of so housing it" (T3) C"all schemes of suburban relief being as yet utopian, impracticable" (T3) and "No barrier built by human hands had power to stay it then" (T4) D"Law and order found the answer then and prevailed" (T2) and "III. By building new, model tenements" (T3)

15. Question 15 of 20 · Short Answer

    Choose one detail from T4 not discussed in questions 1-7. Explain the insight it gives and connect it to a specific passage in T1, T2 or T3. What does the connection add to your understanding of the book as a whole?

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16. Question 16 of 20 · Short Answer

    T5 claims that the book persuades by joining concrete scenes to official figures. Test this with T1: quote one figure and one concrete physical detail from T1, and explain how they work together in the book as a whole.

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17. Question 17 of 20 · Short Answer

    Evaluate T5's claim that Riis's tenants "rarely speak for themselves." Use T2: who speaks in the paragraph, and how are the tenants' views reported?

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18. Question 18 of 20 · Short Answer

    State T5's thesis about the book as a whole in one sentence. Then explain how paragraph 3 of T5 (Roosevelt and the 1901 law) serves that thesis.

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19. Question 19 of 20 · Short Answer

    T2 speaks of "the coming appeal for justice," and T4 hopes for "a harvest of justice" and "a bridge founded upon justice." Trace the word "justice" from the Introduction to the ending. What does the repetition show about the book's purpose as a whole?

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20. Question 20 of 20 · Short Answer

    Write an evidence paragraph (4-6 sentences): Is How the Other Half Lives mainly a book of sympathy or a book of warning? Quote at least one detail each from T1, T2 and T4, and connect them to the book as a whole.

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These standards connect to RH.11-12.1: prerequisites to review first, parallel standards at the same level, and next steps that build on it.

Standard text: Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy. © Copyright 2010. National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. All rights reserved.