Like in an earlier lesson on using feminist articles to practice for extended response prompts on state tests, this lesson is based on the assumption that students will benefit more from lessons if they use texts with actual tangible relevance. In this case, the article/worksheet combo asks students to read Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff's editorial "Stopping the Traffickers" and determine whether a claim is true or false, according to the article.
Kristoff tells the story of his attempts to free several young sex slave prostitutes in Cambodia, a topic that will pull any disengaged student from daydreams and directly into the discussion. Tactfully written, but with enough candor to be shocking, "Stopping the Traffickers" forces students to confront the continued existence of practices that many of them assume have been obliterated for decades, if not longer.
Though the alterations to the original article are slight, the worksheet version is massaged for diction so that students won't have too much to deal with beyond the topic and the skills being focused on.
Since the lesson is based on finding textual support to either uphold or disprove a claim, it's ideal for talking about main idea and supporting details, but it has the benefit of also allowing students to talk about the content of the article while practicing these skills. Too often, focusing on formal elements of a text takes students too far away from what the text is "about," leading to disengagement. In this case, the worksheet asks readers to argue with claims about causes, solutions, and relationship between the abstract world of sex slavery and living in the comparably secure world of most students. However, rather than just arguing about the topic in general, the activity keeps pushing students back to the text.
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