Language Arts – Page 4 – Montessori Muddle

What a Sonnet Might Look Like

The one rotated piece represents the volta of the sonnet, the moment at which the poem pivots from exploring a dilemma to developing a resolution. Volta translates from Italian to turn in English so the physical translation of that structural device is quite literally done.

— Bert Geyer (2011).

sonnet-01 — Bert Geyer's visual representation of the form of a sonnet. (Photo by Bert Geyer).

Last year, my middle school class spent a fair amount of time looking at sonnets: pulling them apart; comparing similarities and differences; discovering their poetic form; and then each creating their own.

Bert Geyer took this type of analysis to the next step. He created a visual translation of a Petrarchan sonet using color and shape to represent the patterns of the sonnet.

sonnet-02 — An excerpt. Image by Bert Geyer.

The artist’s description of the piece is quite fascinating.

The varying stains at the ends of the lines indicate rhyme scheme. I chose to use the Petrarchan format–abbaabbacdcdee. Overall, every feature of the piece takes precedent from the composite structure of a sonnet (not any specific sonnet). But the piece isn’t an exact analog. My aim through this piece is to observe the nuances and complexities of translating from one medium to another. How certain features may be reproduced in another medium, albeit differently. And how translation to a new medium has limitations and new opportunities.

— Bert Geyer (2011).

I particularly appreciate that the statement so clearly demonstrates the care and effort that went into the details of the piece. The illustration that the creation of art requires just as much thought and energy as in any other field.

This should make an excellent, spark-the-imagination, addition to any discussion of sonnets. Indeed, it can also serve as a template for how to analyze different types of poetry to look for their forms. And the meaning of all the different parts should just jump out to Montessori (and any other) students who’ve used geometric symbols to diagram sentences.

Resorting to Poetry

We’re off to the Heifer International farm near Little Rock for a week. I have not been there before, but I suspect I’ll be disconnected, loosing contact with the part of my brain that has all the details.

I could program during some of my downtime, but all the reference documentation is online. I could do some reading about pedagogy – I’ve been meaning to get to the book about homework – but I suspect it would be extremely frustrating to not be able to look up the references and follow thoughts with some online research. And I can’t really blog.

I’m not even sure I’ll have phone service.

So instead I’ve brought a book of poetry. It’s the same one I used to take on long trips before I was so fully committed to the internet. I’ve read it through a number of times, but there’s always something new to discover.

And it should provide the time I need to finish memorizing a few favorites. At one point I could recall the first three parts of the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, but I think I’m back down to one now.

At any rate, there might be some slow blogging for the next week. I’ve scheduled a few posts but not enough to cover the time I’m gone, so this might be the first significant break for a couple years. We’ll see how it goes.

The Difference Between Plagiarism and Repurposing

There’s not much of a difference between what’s being called repurposing as opposed to plagiarism, at least as far as I can tell. Andrew Sullivan excerpts from an essay to highlight Kenneth Goldsmith’s “Uncreative Writing” class where:

… students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing. Not surprisingly, they thrive. Suddenly what they’ve surreptitiously become expert at is brought out into the open and explored in a safe environment, reframed in terms of responsibility instead of recklessness. …

After a semester of my forcibly suppressing a student’s “creativity” by making her plagiarize and transcribe, she will tell me how disappointed she was because, in fact, what we had accomplished was not uncreative at all; by not being “creative,” she had produced the most creative body of work in her life. By taking an opposite approach to creativity—the most trite, overused, and ill-defined concept in a writer’s training—she had emerged renewed and rejuvenated, on fire and in love again with writing.

The essence of Goldsmith’s article, however, is that creativity, these days is more built upon the work of others than ever before. No longer does the picture of a lonely, isolated artist, creating truly original work, seem to fit. Creativity these days is much more often found (and rewarded) in people who are rearranging, reimagining, and repurposing the work of others. It’s the “unoriginal genius”.

Harry Potter and the Making of the Peace

Here’s a wonderfully serious piece in the magazine Foreign Policy on what the wizarding world should do to recover and reconcile now that Voldemort has finally been vanquished.

… if history teaches us anything (consider the bitter legacy still lingering from the 17th-century Goblin Wars or the recent experience of American Muggles in Iraq and Afghanistan), it is that the defeat of Voldemort by Harry Potter may have been the easy part. Indeed, one might even say it was child’s play. The hard work of postwar stabilization still lies ahead.

— Malinowski et al, 2011: Post-Conflict Potter in Foreign Policy.

It’s a bit long, but it’s worth reading at least through the first section on, “Transitional Justice and Reconciliation”.

This section points out that, sure, Voldemort’s henchmen need to be prosecuted before the law (and not just detained without charge), but it will be a lot more difficult to deal with the thousands who supported Voldemort in greater or lesser ways. After all, some of these only did what they did under threat. The article recommends a Truth and Reconciliation Commission like in South Africa.

Among their other recommendations are:

the breaking the monopoly of the Daily Prophet on the news media,
a Comprehensive Curse Ban Treaty,
more transparency at the Ministry of Magic,
a Charter on the Rights of Witches and Wizards,
“that the Wizengamot, the high council of Magical Great Britain, be split into separate legislative and judicial bodies,”
and closing Azkaban immediately.

You’ll notice that a number of these recommendations focus on expanding the rights of the individual and build in more checks and balances into government and the media. These, and the overall emphasis on building mechanisms to prevent future conflict, align well with the ideas of peace education. It might also be an interesting focus for a class discussion/Socratic dialogue.

I’d be curious to hear from any Harry Potter fans who might come across this post and have the time to read the article (even though school’s restarted and the homework’s being piled on).

Serialized Canticle

The science fiction classic,A Canticle for Leibowitz, is available in the public domain as an adapted audio serial from Old Time Radio via the Internet Archive.

Inspired by the author’s participation in the Allied bombing of the monastery at Monte Cassino during World War II, the novel is considered a masterpiece by literary critics. It has been compared favorably with the works of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Walker Percy, and its themes of religion, recurrence, and church versus state have generated a significant body of scholarly research.

— Internet Archive

You can play it here.

Making Text Easier to Read

Christian Boer, who is dyslexic, has come up with a new font designed to make text easier for dyslexics to read. There are a number of changes to the letters themselves, such as making the bottoms heavier, enlarging the openings, and making similar letters look more different. But, Boer’s website also offers advice on how to lay out text: separate paragraphs with space; avoid right justification; use columns instead of having text across the entire page, and so on.

Unfortunately, the Dyslexie font is not yet available in the U.S..

When I was choosing the layout for this blog, I was aiming for something that would be easy and enjoyable for me to read; I tend to be a little picky about my reading and writing environment. Interestingly, many of my own preferences align well with the ones noted above, but there seem to be a number of improvements I can still make to improve readability for everyone. Abigail Marshall has some additional advice on Web Design for Dyslexic Users.

Molly Backes on How to Be a Writer

Molly Backes, an author of young adult fiction, considers the question from a mother about her teenager, “She wants to be a writer. What should we be doing?”

Her first answer was, “You really do have to write a lot. I mean, that’s mostly it. You write a lot.”

But then she thought about it, and that’s where it gets really interesting:

First of all, let her be bored. …

Let her be lonely. Let her believe that no one in the world truly understands her. …

Let her have secrets. …

…

Let her fail. Let her write pages and pages of painful poetry and terrible prose. …

Let her make mistakes.

…

Let her find her own voice, even if she has to try on the voices of a hundred others first to do so. …

Keep her safe but not too safe, comfortable but not too comfortable, happy but not too happy.

Above all else, love and support her. …

— Bakes (2011): How to Be a Writer

At the end she posts a picture of her collection of forty-two writer’s notebooks.

It’s a wonderfully written and well considered post that I’d recommend to anyone trying to teach writing and language, particularly if you take the apprentice writer approach. And, I’ve always been a great believer in the power of boredom.

Backes’ advice more-or-less summarizes my interpretation of the Montessori approach: create a safe environment and give students the opportunity to explore and learn, even if it means a certain amount of struggle and failure.

Jungle play area at the Skudeneshavn Primary School in Karmøy on the west coast of Norway is another great example of creating an environment that offers students the opportunity to explore.

It’s also interesting to note how differently writers and other experts think, yet how much their practices overlap. Mathematician Kevin Houston also recommends writing a lot when he explains how to think like a mathematician, but his objective is to use full, rigorous sentences to clarify hard logic, and less to explore the beauty of the language or discover something profound about shared humanity.