1. Mark Twain The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

2. The Assignment The first assignment in your Tom Sawyer portfolio will be to create a profile page for Mark Twain. You must include the following: Photo with a quote General Info: Gender, Age, Place where he resides Mark Twain Blurbs: About Me & Who I would like to meet Mark’s Interests: General, Books, Mark’s Details: Relationship Status, Hometown, Children, Education

3. Who is Mark Twain The rest of the info will help you create your profile. You may also use other sources to gather more information. Turn to page 245 of your book to learn more about Mark Twain. Turn to 210 and see what you can learn about Mark Twain by reading “The Boys Ambition.”

4. Race and Twain When studying Twain and reading his literature the issue of race is one that must be addressed. A question that always surrounds Twain is, “Is he racist?” The following clips have insight to the controversy that surrounds Twain.

5. Mark Twain “I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.”

6. The Legend of Mark Twain Copyright © 1994 by Russell Smith "A number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary 'Pike-County' dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guess-work; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several patterns of speech.” An examination of Twain's Civil War record also sheds some light on his Southern feelings about defending slavery and toward what he called the white "tainted aristocracy."

7. Teaching Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finnby Shelley Fisher Fishkin “We continue to live, as a nation, in the shadow of racism while being simultaneously committed, on paper, to principles of equality. As Ralph Ellison observed in our interview, it is this irony at the core of the American experience that Mark Twain forces us to confront head-on.” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/teachers/huck/essay.html