Category: Language Arts

Seeing Egypt in Ankh-Morpork

Anti-government protesters guard their barricade at the Kasr al-Nil bridge entrance into the square. They erected a complicated defense wall, strung a heavy electrical cable around 10 meters in front of the wall, and scattered lines of debris another 10 meters ahead of that to break up any attacks. (Image and caption from Al Jazeera English)

Following the ongoing convulsions in the Egyptian streets, I’m becoming more and more impressed by the research and thought that Terry Pratchett must have put into his novel Night Watch.

Anti-government protesters anticipating an attack man the barricade at the Kasr al-Nil bridge entrance into the square, where they had arranged complicated defense walls and stockpiled rocks to throw at pro-Mubarak men. (Image and caption from Al Jazeera English).

In typical Pratchett fashion, Night Watch has an amalgamation of influences, from fictional sources like Les Miserables, to historical events, like the Peterloo Massacre of 1819; however, the book follows a character immersed in the events that are remarkably parallel to what’s going on Egypt right now, especially with the Army trying to sit out events and things becoming somewhat medieval.

A man sells koshari to anti-government protesters for three pounds a cup (around 50 cents) inside the barricade at the Kasr al-Nil bridge entrance into Tahrir. (Image and caption from Al Jazeera English).

This is the first time I’ve been able to follow a revolution so closely, and it’s largely thanks to the volumes of raw reports streaming across the twitterverse, blogosphere and media websites. Pratchett gives us the wonderful characters that highlight the inherent conflict in the revolution: the police with their conflicting allegiances; the secret police that have to be dealt with; the idealists whose high hopes are bound to be dashed on the rocky shoals of human nature; and even down to the men selling food to the protesters behind the barricades.

Night Watch

I think I’m going to have to add this book to our reading list for next year.

At the end of Night Watch, the protesters win, and barricades come down when the old dictator is deposed. However, he’s replaced by a new dictator, who turns out to be just as bad as his predecessor. To paraphrase Pratchett, they’re called revolutions because they go round and round.

In the center of the square, anti-government protesters sat around campfires and talked - as they have for the past nine nights of demonstrations. (Image and caption from Al Jazeera English - Feb 4th, 2011)

Islands of peace in a revolution

From the Guardian’s live feed of the uprising in Egypt:

A protester approaches the police to organize a cease-fire for the evening prayer. (Screengrab from Al Jezeera via The Guardian)
Prayer as protest (via The Daily Dish)

And who are the police? Who’s side are they on?

An Egyptian anti-government activist kisses a riot police officer following clashes in Cairo. Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP (via The Guardian live updates)

It reminds me of this picture from the protests last November in London over university tuition increases:

Schoolgirls join hands to peacefully stop attacks on a police van during student protests in London. Photograph: Demotix/Peter Marshall (via The Guardian)

So some questions:

  • What would it take for you to go out and protest (have you done it before)?
  • What would you do under these circumstances?

Extending Thinking with Calvin and Hobbes

My students have been asking to write “book” reports on movies or Dr. Seuss picture books instead of novels. I am not theoretically opposed. Our theme this cycle is literary essays, with a focus on extending our thinking about issues, which can be done to any type of media: books, movies, music or even art for example. A great example is of what can be done is Richard Beck’s series of essays on the theology of Calvin and Hobbes.

… given the fact that the two lead characters are named after John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes, Calvin and Hobbes presents a dim view of human nature. … a running theme in Calvin and Hobbes is why virtue is so hard and vice so fun.
–Beck (2008) in The Theology of Calvin and Hobbes, Part 1: Human Nature Chapter 1: “Virtue needs some cheaper thrills”.

Although he’s an experimental psychologist at Abilene Christian University, Beck’s essays are fairly easy to read, and are great in how they analyze the subject work, in this case the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons, while drawing comparisons to other theological texts, from the original Hobbes’ Leviathan to recent analyses by authors like Alan Jacobs.

I think, as a condition for using an alternative to the novel, I’ll require students to read one of Beck’s essays. In fact, maybe I’ll have the entire class read the first one, “Virtue needs some cheaper thrills”, as an example of a literary essay.

The Chrysalids, Godwined

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.
— Mike Godwin, 1989.

Our daily discussions of The Chrysalids have gone on long enough that Hitler came up. I can’t remember the details, but somehow, it occurred to one of my students that, since we don’t know exactly when the story is set, and given the outstanding question, “Did they ever find Hitler’s body?” what if Hitler turned up in the book.

Sigh.

Quite coincidentally, I ran into this article today, about Hitler’s last bodyguard. Apparently, he’s getting too old to answer all his fan mail. Tennessee gets a mention.

Sigh.

On a final note, the above quote about Godwin’s Law is a nice one to use in a cycle where we’re talking about probability.

Cheers.

Words you shouldn’t say

Age-appropriate is quite the interesting phrase, particularly when it comes to adolescents. They are making the big transition to adulthood, but their maturity can vary widely even within the same age group.

Image by E.W. Kimble (via Wikipedia Commons)

Michael Chabon has a fascinating post on his, partially successful, attempts to read Huckleberry Finn to his pre-adolescents without the racial slurs. There is even going to be a edition of the book put out that replaces all the n-words with “slave”. I can see their point, but I’m not sure I’d go for it, even in the middle school.

The internet poses its own set of conundrums. One of my students mentioned a certain website on their blog that they, “do NOT recommend it for kids under 12 due to foul language”. The recommended site is quite fascinating and entertaining (I got sucked into it for quite a while), if a bit harsh to the denizens of the website, etsy, but the writing can be quite adult. I’m not quite sure how to address this. I really appreciate how forthright the student was with the (convenient?) age recommendation, but I’d probably make the cutoff a bit older myself.

Differentiating what’s age-appropriate and what’s not is so terribly subjective. I guess the key difference between the website and Huck Finn is in its purpose and relevance within the text. Twain’s harsh language to makes a specific point about race relations that’s relevant to middle-schoolers. The website takes uses a more adult language to relate to an older audience.

Minorities working together

One night in Georgia in the summer of 1962, Dresner and King were trapped with other activists in a house surrounded by hundreds of members of the local White Citizens Council.

While they were waiting for help, King told Dresner about the Passover seder he’d attended that spring at a Reform synagogue in Atlanta. He particularly recalled reading the Haggadah and hearing the phrase “We were slaves in Egypt.”

“Dr. King said to me, ‘I was enormously impressed that 3,000 years later, these people remember their ancestors were slaves, and they’re not ashamed,” Dresner said. “He told me, ‘We Negroes have to learn that, not to be ashamed of our slave heritage.’”
— Fishkoff (2010) in A half-century later, rabbis recall marching with Martin Luther King

Prejudice is one the major themes that’s come up in our discussions of the novel The Chrysalids. Students raised the idea that different minority groups might band together to fight for rights. I offered the examples of Jews in the civil rights movement in the 1960’s. Just in time, Sue Fishkoff has an article on rabbi’s who worked with Martin Luther King Jr.

The rabbis who joined these efforts were arrested, jailed and sometimes beaten, protected by the color of their skin from the worst physical dangers, but nonetheless threatened on a daily basis.
— Fishkoff (2010) in A half-century later, rabbis recall marching with Martin Luther King

Genetic testing: What it can do, and where we are.

“On average we found that each of us carries two or three mutations that could cause one of these severe childhood diseases.”
–Stephen Kingsmore, physician, Children’s Mercy Hospital in Greenfieldboyce (2010), New Genetic Test Screens Would-Be Parents.

NPR’s All Things Considered had two related articles on last night that deal with the specific topics we’re covering this week: genetic disease and recessive alleles.

The first one is about the latest in genetic screening technology, for determining if potential parents have recessive alleles that could combine to produce children with genetic diseases. Recent research has made this much easier.

The second touches on the ethical consequences of genetic screening. It could lead to an increase in abortion rates and leads us along the slippery slope of eugenics.

Beggars in Spain, by Nancy Kress
What if we engineered for intelligence?

This second story would make an interesting basis for a Socratic dialogue. As would, I think, the movie Gattica, which deals with the consequences of genetic screening and genetic customizations. I see it’s PG-13 so we may be able to screen it. Similarly, I may recommend Brian Stableford’s War Games to my eight graders who might like a military science fiction book that deals with genetic optimization. Alternatively, Nancy Kress’ Beggars in Spain might offer another interesting perspective on this issue.