 As students listened to that first part of the speech, there was a during listening activity where they were to answer three questions. The questions were designed to have students look at the tone and look more specifically at FDR's text of what he was saying. We went into sort of a group discussion about how the speech captured and how FDR used metaphors to capture America's attention and how that was important to getting his New Deal programs through. How does FDR's voice strike you? Casey? Slow and sort of reassuring. Slow, reassuring. It has an upbeat sort of tone to it. Francis? He kind of explained it in an easy way to understand. He's going to explain things in an easy way to understand. For example, Francis, from the speech. Kind of like when you were talking about the building ownership and relating that to the making of governmental policies. Awesome. Why did he give the address? Andrew? To tell Americans that things are being done in Washington and they're trying to make policies and all that to help get them out. He's telling Americans that there is something being done. Sort of building up his argument against the Republicans by saying things are happening and we're working it out even though some people might not see it getting worked on. He's saying to bear with it. It's a big plan. It's a big picture. Before you can set the ship out to sea, you need to build it up. You need to build the structure. You need to make the structure strong before it can go off into the ocean. I was pointing out to students that it was important that none of FDR's New Deal legislation could have been passed without Congress's support and their voting for his legislation. So how now he's using the people of the United States to influence their Congress people tell them to push through FDR's legislation. Following our warm-up activity, we then launched into looking at some of the criticisms of FDR. And each student was assigned a particular critic of the New Deal. They were first asked to read about that critic, read the biography of the critic, and look at, on the back, look at the primary source that was associated with this critic and the New Deal. How would your critic criticize that piece of the speech? So you're thinking where was criticism coming from? You said the Republicans on one side, but also from... Socialists. He seems like a really liberal socialist. Okay. Still imagine what he would argue. So you're section one obviously dealing with the big picture. And so how is Mr. Schaus going to attack the big picture? He lost too much money and he's not enough whiskey. Alright, and FDR is becoming this powerful executive. Yeah, and he doesn't like that. And what is he, what's Schaus in the American Liberty League scared of? Isn't there whiskey? It's becoming too powerful. Yeah, becoming, yeah, exactly. I really wanted students to focus, to imagine themselves as this critic, get inside that person's head, and really look closely at FDR's text. And I didn't want them to see the bigger picture, but rather dissecting FDR's fireside chat into these four segments.