To receive free and awesome lesson plans in your email all year long, click here! If you’d like to pay with a PO, request a quote here!
In 2015, Kobe Bryant wrote a poem (i.e. a love letter to basketball) announcing his retirement, entitled, “Dear Basketball.” In 2017, the poem was adapted as a short film that ultimately won an Oscar — and, in 2020, following Bryant’s tragic death, the piece reads more like a eulogy.
“Dear Basketball” provides a timely opportunity for us to teach argument with a highly relevant, engaging, and powerful text. The lesson bundle includes a guided rhetorical analysis, an exercise for considering visual rhetoric, an opportunity to synthesize Bryant’s letter with another player’s “love letter to basketball,” and more. Scroll down for more details about the content of this bundle.
To instantly access this lesson (and ALL of our pop culture lesson bundles) join TeachArgument now!
Lesson Description
Wonder what this lesson bundle includes? Here’s what you can expect!
- A guided rhetorical analysis (spanning eight pages) that places excerpted text from Kobe Bryant’s “Dear Basketball” side-by-side with guiding questions for close reading and rhetorical analysis.
- An exercise that prompts students to revisit the argument with multiple different audiences in mind.
- A visual analysis that scaffolds students’ process of unpacking and analyzing still-frames from the Oscar winning animated adaptation of “Dear Basketball.”
- A comparative rhetorical analysis task that asks students to compare, contrast, and synthesize the strategies and rhetorical situation of Bryant’s “Dear Basketball” with another similar text.
To instantly access this lesson (and ALL of our pop culture lesson bundles) join TeachArgument now!
Lesson Features
| Grade | 7 - 12 |
| Focus | Close reading, Rhetorical analysis, Comparative analysis |
