Live site: justinsteinmetz.github.io/AE
A hub page for a supplementary KMK Themenfeld unit (Abitur 2027–29), Deutsche Schule Prag, English Department, Grades 11–12: six phases, six analytical "Moves," ten encounter lessons, four standalone instruments plus a five-part capstone strand, and a corpus of primary texts spanning American and European material.
exceptionable · adj. · open to objection · from the same root as exception
America may be the most successful national story ever told. This unit asks what it costs to maintain it — and where the same story is running closer to home. It also asks where the framework for seeing that breaks down.
A single static HTML page (AE-index-updated.html) — no build step, no dependencies beyond Google Fonts. It is the most structurally layered of the DSP hub pages: rather than a flat grid of instruments, it documents an entire unit's architecture — phases, a recurring analytical vocabulary ("Moves"), encounter-first lessons, interactive tools, and a reading corpus.
Stated immediately after the masthead, before any framework is introduced: the unit's moves describe structural tendencies, not a conspiracy — patterns reproduced by ordinary decisions, not evidence of coordination. The closing Phase 6 essay is required to identify at least one place where the framework fails. This caveat is treated as load-bearing, not decorative — it recurs throughout the page.
| Phase | Name | Question |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Myth Machine | What does America claim to be? Why did people believe it? |
| 2 | The Founding Contradiction | What did the claim cost? Who paid? |
| 3 | Westward, Into Someone Else's Home | What was taken? What framework can see what was lost? |
| 4 | The American Dream, Priced Out | Who built the Dream? Who was excluded from it? |
| 5 | The Mirror Turns | Where do these moves run in Europe? What are they protecting? |
| 6 | Exceptionablism | What does the framework illuminate? Where does it fail? |
Each phase card carries the same closing prompt: what does the framework miss here?
A recurring vocabulary applied across all historical material, then turned back on Europe per "the Rule" (every Move identified in American history must be turned toward Europe — these moves do not belong to America alone):
- The Origin Story — the gap between ideal and reality is load-bearing, not a bug.
- The Necessary Exclusion — the myth requires someone outside it.
- The Erasure — each contradiction treated as isolated; the pattern is never named.
- The Backlash — dissent becomes disloyalty; the critique is delegitimised rather than engaged.
- The Co-optation (5A/5B) — the wound becomes the product, or something genuinely changes; both can be true at once.
- The Mirror — the same moves, run closer to home (Brexit, Windrush, laïcité, Orbán's Hungary), asking not who plays it worst but what it takes to stop playing.
Conversation lessons built around a single object each, run before the framework is named — the teacher does not synthesise and the lesson does not culminate in a correct answer. Objects include Havel via Carney's 2026 Davos address, the There There prologue, Lincoln's Second Inaugural read cold, a 1938 HOLC redlining map, Richard Pryor's Live on the Sunset Strip, Havel's The Power of the Powerless, and the Berlin Wall — used deliberately as a case where the framework fails (Lesson 10: "The Wrong Framework").
| Instrument | Phases | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Document Sorter | 2–3 | Eighteen unlabeled primary sources; sort, name, then reveal. |
| Co-optation or Transformation? | 4–5 | Five historical cases weighed against each other. |
| Testimony Sorter | 2–4 | Fourteen anonymous passages — who is speaking, what do they want? |
| God and Mammon | 2–5 · capstone strand | Five instruments and a coda spanning the 1807 Slave Bible to Project 2025; the coda asks whether any of it worked. |
The corpus does not end at critique. Five non-compatible responses to "now what," each itself held open to scrutiny: Baldwin's daring from love rather than hope; Questlove's healing as its own goal; Du Mez on the contingency of structures that were built and can be dismantled; Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's "our presence is our weapon"; and Audre Lorde on precise anger as the beginning of knowledge.
Organised into five columns on the page: Primary Voices (Baldwin, King, Coates, Simpson, Dunbar-Ortiz, Anzaldúa, Lorde, Du Mez, and others), Affirmative Anchors (Lincoln, Lazarus, King, Obama), Musicians & Artists, Historical Documents (HOLC maps, the Columbus log, the Dawes Act), a Contemporary Frame (Kagan, Serwer, V-Dem, 2026 addresses — explicitly flagged as still-unfolding material that may look different by the time it's read), Resistant Interlocutors (Havel, Rockwell), and Encounter Objects.
- The claim before the critique — four affirmative texts (Lincoln, Lazarus, King, Obama) are encountered first, so the gap between promise and reality registers as tragedy rather than a neutral structural observation.
- The framework is not allowed to explain everything — a stated design constraint, not an afterthought: every phase, several encounter lessons, and the closing essay task all require naming a limit.
- Currency as a feature, not a flaw — the contemporary frame documents events still unfolding when the unit was written, and the page says so directly.
AE-index-updated.html — single-file hub page (HTML + embedded CSS, no JS dependencies)
Visual style: dark editorial aesthetic with gold accent rule, serif display type for the masthead pun and quotations, monospace labels for phase/move metadata.
Hosted via GitHub Pages directly from this repo. To update, edit AE-index-updated.html and push to the default branch — no build step required.
Part of a broader set of interactive HTML classroom instruments developed for DSP Prague's English curriculum, alongside strands such as The Individual & Society (IDHUB) and Britain · Identity · Power · Memory · Narrative (British Hub).