Title – Ben Franklin’s Autobiography

By – Tina Marie Tedeschi

Subject – Social Studies, Language Arts

Grade Level – high school

After reading Ben Franklin’s Autobiography and discussing his list of virtues to achieve perfection, I had my class develop its own list of virtues for the 21st century. In groups, the students had to make a list of 10 virtues. Each virtue had to have a title and a description/definition. After the group had developed its list, the members needed to decide which 3 of the virtues are most important. They wrote these 3 virtues and the definitions on the board. Once all the groups added their virtues, I had the students play The List (the show on VH1). Each group was able to “nix” any virtue it wanted, but the students from that group had to supply an explanation. After each group had the opportunity to do that, we finally had a class list of virtues. The students then made a log and needed to mark down each time a virtue was not obeyed. These logs needed to be kept for a full week. At the end of the week, they needed to turn in their logs along with a written discussion of their experiences and anything they learned.

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