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.
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.
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.
I recently found the 1954 animated version of Orwell’s Animal Farm online at hulu.com (see below). Things on hulu seem to come and go without warning so watch out. I hope this one stays up since the video quality is quite good.
For the middle-south, “With year’s hottest and driest weather just ahead, it is best to delay the planting of tress and shrubs until autumn, when the odds of successful establishment are more favorable.” – St. Claire, 2010
Another nice resource that provides neat graphs of real data that are easy for students to understand is Pollster.com. The graphs of survey results are constantly updated and, if you want to, you can go into how they were created (survey questions, averages etc.). They’re great for current event discussions and research projects.
In addition to the national polls, like the president’s job approval (see below), the site also has charts for state level races, like for governor, which are handy around election time.
Pollster.com aggregates polls, because, depending on how a question is phrased, each poll will have it’s own bias. However, since not all of the poll data is freely available to the public, the sites of the major polling organizations, like GALLUP, are also quite useful. The polling organizations tend to have a much wider variety of poll results available. Gallup in particular provides some very nice graphs.
Chicago Public Radio has its series of short stories read by actors, Stories on Stage, available online. It’s quite an impressive list of stories and includes some of Camella C.’s favorites:
The series does not seem to extend beyond 2007 but there are quite a number of stories going all the way back to 2001. It’s great to hear these stories well read, and to recognize that the rules for reading prose out loud are very similar to those for poetry.
Maria Montessori developed her method teaching through careful observation of children and how they learn, which is why her method had held up so well over time and aligns so well with modern pedagogy (see Lillard, 2005). Montessori’s worked early childhood through elementary kids, and while she did some serious thinking and writing about secondary education, she did not put those thoughts into action herself.
Over the last 20 years or so Betsy Coe has developed, at School of the Woods, an exceptional middle school (and now high school) program based on Montessori’s ideas and tied to close observation of early adolescents and our growing understanding of their cognitive and neurological development. Unlike Montessori’s boarding school model (e.g. Hershey Montessori), Dr. Coe’s is primarily a day school but with “land-labs” one week out of every six, where student get to go out and live on the land.
There’s a lot to say about Dr. Coe’s program (which will be well explained in her upcoming book) but you can glean some of her influence from this blog, because I trained with her over the last two summers at the Houston Montessori Center.
One of the key tenets that Coe shares with Montessori is that the primary job of the teacher is to observe the students, their interactions and their environment. You apply the scientific process to the classroom. Observe, hypothesize, test and make the necessary changes. As such, a key part of the training program is the research project.
For the research project teachers in training have to apply the process to some aspect of their class and write it up. My own project was on the utility of my classroom wiki, which I’ve said a bit about previously. My peers did quite a wide variety of excellent projects, and I’ve asked them to share their experiences with me for the blog. I’m one of those people who’d collect bits of string because they might be useful in the future (hence the blog), so I’m loathe to let their experiences and efforts just disappear since it is unlikely that much of this work will be published.
I plan to post summaries of the research projects so there is a record of who did what, and I apologize for any mistakes I make in condensing the work. My goal is to create at least one node for discussion so that we might add these small anecdotes to the collective gestalt as we attempt to not replicate the interesting errors of others but make brand-new errors of our own.
Since most of this work is not formal research I’ll use the tag anecdotal research to help keep track of things.
