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What is Courage? Essay

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What is Courage?

What is courage? Is it the ability to prove yourself in war? Or the strength it takes to decide you will not fight? Is courage being yourself when you’re different from everyone else? Is it doing something that even your own father thinks you can’t do? Is courage synonymous with honor? Is it speaking up, even if doing so puts you in danger? Risking death for the person most precious to you? Or risking death for strangers? Is courage facing your fears, no matter how big or small they might be? Is it forging forward into a new life when you still miss the old one? Is courage all of these things? None of them?

The following text set is designed to help ninth grade students create and examine …show more content…

The first type of courage, that seen in war or revolution, is particularly meaningful right now considering the current situation in Iraq. The media is full of portrayals of courageous soldiers, but the books in this text set ask students to take a closer look not only at soldiers, but also at other voices connected to these conflicts. Three books center around the Vietnam War: The Road Home explores the hellish existences of a nurse and soldier whose true courage may be learning to move on with their lives once they return home, Come in from the Cold looks at the political climate in 1969 as two American teenagers decide to take a stand about their beliefs, and Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam provides a poignant reminder that soldiers are real people by giving readers a glimpse of letters written during the war. This message is further exemplified in the film Saving Private Ryan, which explores courage in everyday soldiers during World War II. Meanwhile, Sky and Before We Were Free give accounts of individual women’s courage—the narrator of Sky works against the Nazis during WWII while the protagonist in Before We Were Free contemplates the bravery of her relatives while she herself is forced to be courageous during a revolt in the Dominican Republic. Finally, there is

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