About This Lesson
This 30 page Teacher's guide overviews Zoon Garden, lists all available resources, and outlines how to teach the novel, including background information, individual assignments, group assignments, and class discussion for each chapter. Topics taught include:
- America’s foundational principles (Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness).
- The Bill of Rights, specifically discussing the First, Second, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments.
- Pressing modern day issues: Free Speech, gun legislation, police brutality and corruption, etc.
- The philosophies of the Left and the Right.
- Rightist Nazi Germany and Leftist Soviet Russia and how to avoid either extreme.
- The tenets of Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism.
- Propaganda and its influence on the masses.
- Media bias and how to detect it.
- Social Media and its impacts on society.
- Cultural diversity and how it strengthens society.
- The danger of prejudice and stereotypes.
- How to live alongside people of opposite belief.
- Tribalism and Polarization.
Zoon Garden is a 21st century American political satire. It is the preeminent novel for discussing the America's division and has be lauded as a "novel every citizen should read."
