Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

What is the American Dream? How does one achieve it or measure its success or failure? In what ways does it apply to immigration? Is it a realistic goal, or a myth?

Teaching Suggestion: Encourage students to consider how race, capitalism, and democracy factor into the definition.

• “What Is the American Dream? Examples and How to Measure It” by Adam Barone discusses the origin and power of the American Dream.
• “The Original Meanings of the ‘American Dream’ and ‘America First’ Were Starkly Different from How We Use Them Today” by Anna Diamond examines the phrase’s etymology.

Short Activity

“I, Too” by Langston Hughes considers the accessibility of the American Dream. Read the poem and brainstorm in your notes a list of words and phrases that come to mind in connection to the speaker’s tone, mood, and ideas.

Teaching Suggestion: Ask students to think of a group or organization they would have liked to belong to but have been excluded from. Then, have them model Hughes’s poem with their own topics.