Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
– from The Layers by Stanley Kunitz
Month: July 2010
Greek painted statues
Despite the elegance of the plain white marble statues from ancient Greece, they were originally painted. The Boston Globe and the Smithsonian Magazine have great articles on how the reconstruction of the coloring is done and on Vinzenz Brinkmann, the archeologist who did much of this work.
Montessori Science Fiction
One of my favorite books that ties in with the study of the life sciences is Janet Kagan’s Mirable. It’s a series of stories about colonists trying establish themselves on a new world. Because of an accident on the trip over from Earth, the plants and animals they try bring with them (or propagate from their recorded DNA sequences) tend to randomly, and all too frequently, produce offspring that are hybrids of all sorts of phylogenetically unrelated organisms. The hybrids then produce other hybrids until, eventually, they produce another “Earth-authentic” species. This was supposed to be a feature to add redundancy to their gene banks. The impetus for the stories comes from the fact that some of the hybrids are unexpected and quite interesting, like the kangaroo-rex.
Kagan writes a good story, entertaining, light hearted and easily accessible to early adolescents, but I particularly like her model of education on the new world. Since they need as much genetic diversity as possible, even people who don’t want to raise children need to have them. So kids are sent to live at a boarding school that’s really a hotel, which they run. Sounds a lot like Montessori’s Erdkinder.
The kids get training and regular visits from experts in a variety of fields. They get to help of the protagonist with her projects by tracking animals in the field and running genetic sequences through their equivalent of GenBank.
The best science fiction provides interesting models of society. Mirable, I believe, is a model of a society designed around the ideas of Peace Education. The Montessori spirit runs throughout the stories not just in the education system, but in the way characters interact one another, even in times of conflict.
I’m an unabashed advocate for using science fiction in the classroom because it delves into such wide ranging parts of the curriculum, Natural World, Social World, Language and, in this case, Peace Education. Of course the stories have to be chosen well. Mirable is one of perhaps only two books (the other is The Chrysalids by John Wyndham) that I use when we study the life sciences.
Nuclear explosions
The history of the second half of the 20th century is interlaced with the history nuclear weapons. From ending the Second World War in the Pacific to mutually assured destruction to the conflict between India and Pakistan. It’s fascinating how you can interpret that history from video above showing the relative timing of the nuclear explosions. It also interesting to note just how many nukes were exploded and by whom. Wired magazine has a good article about the video, and I’ve posted previously about tying nuclear weapons into both the Natural and Social sciences.
Save the Galvao!
Following the theme of philanthropy, if you use Twitter you can help save the Galvao birds of Brazil. More information about this fascinating project can be found at On The Media.
FreeRice – donate food with your vocabulary skills
The UN World Food Program (WFP) has the site FreeRice.com where for each vocabulary question you answer correctly it donates 10 grains of rice to the WFP. The site is quite ingenious, it uses the money generated by the banner adds at the bottom of the page to buy the rice. It was created by John Breen and donated to the WFP.
The site is going beyond vocabulary into other subjects such as geography (identify country capitals and countries), identifying chemical symbols, art, language and math (pre-algebra).
They also have a nice video of the rice being distributed to refugees from Myanmar sheltering in Bangladesh.
Finding meaning in video games
If we can use music videos as a shorter proxy for introducing literature responses, then what about other types of media. On The Media had an interesting interview with the Tom Bissell, the author of “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter“. Bissell argues that there is art worthy of criticism in video games, but there is not nearly as much as there should be.
I tend to like violent games, the same reason that I’ve worked as a war correspondent, the same reason I wrote a book about a war. I’m interested in violence.
That said, there are some games that have interesting stuff to say about violence and some games that just treat it mindlessly. And, you know both can be fun. But the ones that really affect me are the ones that actually try to address the subject. – Tom Bissell on On The Media.
In particular, he highlights “Far Cry 2”:
There’s a game called Far Cry 2 that takes place in a contemporary African civil war. It’s extremely beautiful.
And yet, it is just the most unrelentingly savage game I think I’ve ever played.
Most games that are violent give you the gun, push you in the direction of the bad guys and say hey, go kill all those guys, they’re bad. You’ll be rewarded. Good job.
Far Cry 2 does something really confounding. Going through the game, quote, “getting better at killing,” the game kind of introduces slowly that you’re actually not helping things, that, in fact, you’re kind of the problem.
Everything you’re doing is just making this conflict worse. So by the end of the game you’re just a wreck. You’re progressing through the game because that’s what the game’s asked you to do, but it’s also throwing all of this stuff back at you that’s actually shaming you a little bit for being participant in this virtual slaughter. And I love that about it. – Tom Bissell on On The Media.
Is he reading too much into violent video games trying to justify his own habits? Perhaps, but he does have a point.
When my students were telling me about Call Of Duty:Modern Warfare 2, one of the first things we talked about was the infamous airport mission. The player is an undercover agent with a terrorist organization and has to participate in shooting civilians in an attack on an airport. Jesse Stern, the scriptwriter for the video game says the mission was intended to be provocative:
People want to know. As terrifying as it is, you want to know. And there’s a part of you that wants to know what it’s like to be there because this is a human experience. These are human beings who perpetrate these acts, so you don’t really want to turn a blind eye to it. You want to take it apart and figure out how that happened and what, if anything, can be done to prevent it. Ultimately, our intention was to put you as close as possible to atrocity. As for the effect it has on you, that’s not for us to determine. Hopefully, it does have an emotional impact and it seems to have riled up a lot of people in interesting ways. Some of them good. Some of them bad.
– Jesse Stern in Gaudiosi, 2009.
There is a difference between vicariously becoming a participant in violence when a novelist lets us see the world through the eyes of a killer, and actually having to pull the virtual trigger yourself, but it seems as much one of degree as anything else. While I’ve seen some initial evidence that violent video games are bad, I’m not familiar at all with the evidence that violent novels are also bad.
Perhaps, however, when we start treating video games, particularly violent ones, in as pedantic a way as literature is sometimes treated, maybe they’ll lose some of their appeal. Or maybe, they’ll just become more educational experiences. Stern again:
When we tested the level, it was interesting. …people would get angry or sad or disgusted and immediately wonder what the Hell was going on here. And then after a few moments of having that experience, they would remember that they were in a video game and they would let go. Every single person in testing opened fire on the crowd, which is human nature. It feels so real but at the same time it’s a video game and the response to it has been fascinating. I never really knew you could elicit such a deep feeling from a video game, but it has.
Extrapolating meaning
The group Bright Eyes has a wonderful video for their song First Day of My Life. It consists of a series of vignettes of people sitting on a couch listening to and responding to the song. It’s fascinating to think about the stories behind the couples and individuals (and one dog) sitting on the couch. The people in the video are obviously not actors, and you get a glimpse of their character as they respond to the same thing you are hearing. It’s interesting to see how their response differs from your own.
In reading literature we try to get students to think beyond the book, while in creative writing we try to build and get to know our own interesting characters. In the video you get perhaps a five second glimpse of the characters so there is much room for questioning and exploring. What brought these people to this place and this time, what history do they have that makes them act the way they do?
In a video and song like this one, you can ask many of the same questions that you ask when you read a story. There may be no story arc with regards to individuals, but there is a broader pattern embedded within the lyrics and the sequencing of the video. I would like to use this to introduce different types of reading responses, such as writing a letter to a character, or assessing the issues raised by the video.
Alternatively, the video could be used as a writing prompt. Choose one set of characters in the video and tell me their story. The format of this video is nice for this type of assignment because you have the parallel experience of hearing the same words and music that the people in the video are responding to.