Lensyl Urbano – Page 183 – Montessori Muddle

Sovereign immunity, universal jurisdiction and human rights

Some argue that despite all the ongoing wars and conflicts in the world today, the trajectory of history is toward expanding human rights. And the people working to bring dictators and human rights violators to account, are at the forefront of this argument.

Baltasar_Garzon — Baltasar Garzon (from Wikipedia).

One of my small groups chose to do a project on Baltasar Garzón as a defender of human rights. Their presentation brought up the fascinating concept of “sovereign immunity”, the idea that the legal government of a country cannot commit a crime, and they cannot be sued or charged in court for anything they do. The idea comes from the historical belief that, by definition, the king (or queen) can do no wrong.

Garzón, a judge in Spain, has also been pushing the limits of the concept of “universal jurisdiction”, by trying to bring to trial leaders from other countries who have been accused of violating human rights by torturing their citizens and committing genocide. People he’s investigating include former dictators from Argentina and, most famously, Chile. What makes it more pertinent right now is that he’s also investigating members of the recent Bush Administration (former attorney general, Alberto Gonzales; lawyer John Yoo, the infamous author of the memos approving torture, and four others).

Garzón is an idealist, which appeals kids who see the world most often in black and white:

It has always amazed me that politicians keep writing international conventions. But then when the time comes to apply one of those laws that have been ratified, they say “the problem is, economic stability, or political stability, could be threatened by the application of this rule.” So what’s the point? Do we ratify the laws in order to apply them or not? – Baltasar Garzón in interview reported in Speak Truth to Power.

Because of the presentation on Garzón yesterday, my ears perked up this morning when I heard the words “sovereign immunity” on the radio. Nina Totenberg reported on a current Supreme Court case where victims of the military dictatorship in Somalia who are living in the US are suing the former prime minister of the Barre dictatorship who is also now living in the US. It is a fascinating case, with broad implications for the prosecution of human rights violators around the world.

NPR article by Nina Totenberg:

Amnesty’s letter writing videos

I showed my class two YouTube videos from Amnesty International that promote their letter writing campaigns. The videos use spare black and white imagery and signatures, written in the air, are used by victims of human rights abuses to escape their persecutors. The video above did provoke a few giggles, because, I suspect, the character animation has a bit of humor to it despite the seriousness of the issues being portrayed. The video below is more powerful. It more frankly addresses the fact that human rights violations are taking place and some of its subjects are children (e.g. child soldiers).

Not all of the students understood at first that the signatures were meant to be their own, and the purpose of the video was to encourage the viewer to write, but they cleared that up after a short discussion. I hope the videos have some long term effect, because pretty promptly after the brief discussion they tried to convince me that I should show the YouTube video of the “Evolution of Dance“.

Writers’ rules for writing

The Guardian newspaper interviewed authors for their rules for writing fiction. The lists are quite interesting, and we try to instill many of the rules in our language curriculum:

Read it aloud to yourself because that’s the only way to be sure the rhythms of the sentences are OK (prose rhythms are too complex and subtle to be thought out – they can be got right only by ear). – Diana Athill

Keep a diary. The biggest regret of my writing life is that I have never kept a journal or a diary. – Geoff Dyer

Do it every day. Make a habit of putting your observations into words and gradually this will become instinct. This is the most important rule of all … – Geoff Dyer

Cut (perhaps that should be CUT): only by having no inessential words can every essential word be made to count. – Diana Athill

Some are a little odd:

Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils. Margaret Atwood

And many make you think:

Finish the day’s writing when you still want to continue. – Helen Dunmore

Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire. – Geoff Dyer

Only bad writers think that their work is really good. – Anne Enright

I still have not gotten through the whole list, but Graeme Wood summarizes, “the rules sound haughty and dismissive, which is about what you should expect when you ask skilled craftsmen to reduce their craft to a few simple rules.” Yet to me, looking at a few of them at a time makes for a nice space for reflection on my own writing. It’s also the sort of semi-random trivia that my students seem to like. I know they’ll take issue with some of these rules, but that in itself would be make it useful.

For this reason, I like Jeffrey Tayler’s advice (which is not on the list):

[R]emember: None of us gets out of here alive. So don’t fear risks. Rebel. Be bold, try hard, and embrace adversity; let both success and failure provide you with unique material for your writing, let them give you a life different enough to be worth writing about.

Evolution and/of dance

My students know my weaknesses too well. I had a well crafted argument today that I should let them watch Judson Laipply‘s YouTube video, “Evolution of Dance“. The gist of the argument was that they never really understood evolution until they saw the video (we covered evolution last year); the way the dance moves evolved, with small changes from one to the other is an excellent analogy for the gradual evolution of organisms. The best example was how The Robot changed into Breakdancing. I let them watch it of course, it was a good argument and the video is pretty harmless. And if it actually helped them learn about evolution ….

“Imagine” “War”

One of the small group assignments last week was to pick two anti-war songs and present their meaning and context. They had a choice of music ranging in time from Frederick Weatherly’s “Danny Boy” to Green Day’s “Holiday”, but they chose two Vietnam Era songs, “Imagine” and “War”.

These turned out to be inspired choices. Not the least because both had music videos that closely reflected the songs’ different approaches to conveying the same message. Lennon’s “Imagine” is peaceful, aspirational, but somewhat subversive, while Edwin Star’s “War” is militant with its rejection of conflict.

The lyrics also provided an excellent contrast in the poetic use of language to convey meaning. After showing the two music videos, the students took the songs apart, stanza by stanza, and you can read the stridency in the punctuation and use of capitals in the lyrics of “War”:

WAR! good God y’all huh
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing…say it say it SAY IT!
WAR!…uh huh yeah huh!
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing…listen to me

We had a great discussion. I found this to be an excellent assignment that merged the poetry we’ve been studying in Language Arts with the history and peace education of Social World.

John Lennon – Imagine
Uploaded by hushhush112. – See the latest featured music videos.

The Clinton Library

I have one student who intends to be president. He already has the date picked out. So the Clinton Library in Little Rock was a great stop on our immersion. It took a little coaxing to get him all the way through while some of the others, who were not as enthusiastic, waited patiently. I’m fairly sure he would have been happy to spent the entire day there.

The library is located on the Arkansas River. In fact, while it’s mostly built on the bluff overlooking the river, one side of juts out over the embankment, out over the flood plain. I suspect that if the river were to flood (which is perhaps unlikely with all the locks on the river), the supports for that wing of the building would be under water.

Inside the museum are displays about Bill Clinton’s eight years as president, a small theater with a video about Clinton’s life and some other odds and ends of the Clinton presidency (the limo, the replica oval office). The highlight was the replica of the cabinet room. Everyone enjoyed sitting at the table. After the initial rush for seats, it was discovered that they were all labeled for the different members of the cabinet, which was interesting enough as the all took at least a second to consider what their role might be if they were actually in the government.

There was also an exhibit with a number of Madeleine Albright’s pins, which she used to send messages to her diplomatic counterparts while she was the UN ambassador and as Secretary of State. You might not think that would particularly interesting to adolescents, but there were some spectacularly beautiful, jeweled insects that attracted the attention of some students, and an interesting RPG pin (from Pakistan) that attracted the attention of others.

Since we’d been doing museums and tours all day, everyone was tired by the time we’d finished the museum. It would be another hour before we got back to Lake Catherine so instead of just jumping into the van I offered them the chance to run around on the steep, grassy embankment, down into the floodplain. Instead they (mostly) opted to roll down. Fun was had by all.

The museum was a decent stop, worthy of an hour or two, but, with our current study of civil rights, and the age of our students, it could not match Central High.

Citing websites

My students are very good at putting the list references on their presentations, however, websites usually turn up as simply a link to the site. I’m now working on rectifying this. Because there are a lot of different types of online resources Yale Library has a few different ways to cite them. What I like the most, however, is that they give very clear examples of how to use them in the MLA, APA and Chicago styles. My preference is for the APA but to make sure and include the URL (like the citation at the bottom of this post).