Shake the dust revisited

Today in working on extending our thinking about texts we revisited Anis Mojgani’s “Shake the Dust“. We started by reading and thinking about the text, then had a group discussion. I played the video at the end.

After we watched Mojgani, I asked the students to write down if, and how, his presentation changed what they thought about the issue they were most interested. Mojgani’s presentation is forceful, and it emphasizes different issues than you can gleam from a dry reading of the poem. Doing it this way, I think, allowed students to see that there are multiple ways of interpreting the same texts.

Forms of speech: Antithesis

EV from Somewhat in the Air has a great post on antithesis.

An antithesis … can be built by contrasting any of the different parts of a statement. But there is always a balance in the actual physical construction.
— EV (2011) in Antithesis – 15 minutes of writing

For example:

“Extremism in the defense of liberty is not vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” –Barry Goldwater (1964)

It makes for a nice little (15 minutes perhaps?) self-contained exercise.

Haiku Finder: Haikus are everywhere

Haiku Finder is a quick and extremely dirty way of finding haiku’s in any texts.

You may not want to let your students find out about this site, or, alternatively, having them plug in their existing texts might make for an interesting way of introducing haikus.

I’m not particularly poetic (tell me something I don’t know), I have to go back through a month of posts to get my first Muddle haiku:

One of those things is
that rabbits eat their own poop.
Well not exactly.

— from On Rabbit Digestion

Nuclear Fallout: Chernobyl pictures

Just in time for us to start reading The Chrysalids, David Schindler has a frightening gallery from the abandoned surroundings of Chernobyl, twenty-five years after the accident with the nuclear reactor.

The YouTube video below shows the same images as the gallery.

Lessons from the Arizona Shooting: Connecting texts and inflammatory rhetoric

The attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords will come up tomorrow, (I have one student who is extremely interested in politics who is sure to recognize the importance of this), so I’ve been trying to figure out how to approach the issue. The New York Times’ Learning Network Blog has an excellent resource on, “Ways to Teach About the Arizona Shootings” that starts with allowing students to have a personal response, provides lots of great links relating to political violence and inflammatory rhetoric, and ends with a review of the history of assassinations in the U.S..

For my class, however, the two places I see the most relevant connections, that are developmentally appropriate, are in our ongoing discussion of rhetoric and argument, and in the language lessons focusing on connecting issues in texts.

Reading List

In the wake of the shooting, as everyone’s been trying to make sense of the attacker, his reading list has been a key focal point for trying to understand his motives.

There are lots of ways to link Mein Kampf, Animal Farm, and Brave New World; the latter two are secondary school staples for one thing. However, considering the issues in these texts, here’s one interesting observation by adriejan from Light Sound Dimension, “While these are all masterpieces, they have in common that they deal with the topic of reality perception being controlled by higher powers.” Does this hint at someone struggling with their identity and feeling powerless in the face of a complex world? Perhaps. This is what Jacob Mooney at Vox Populism calls “forensic bibliography”.

Whether we recognize it or not, we most often connect with the themes of books, even more than the quality of the writing I think (how else to explain the success of the early Harry Potter books, or Twilight). So our preferred reading lists tell us a lot about ourselves.

Inflammatory Rhetoric

I’m glad I’ve started on rhetoric and argument this cycle, because that’s another key intersection with the curriculum given where my early adolescents are morally and philosophically. There two points about extreme rhetoric that need to be made here (at least). The specific point deals with the direct consequences of the language you use. Extreme language like the statement, “I’m going to kill you for that!” limits your options, even if meant as hyperbole. If it’s taken seriously, backing down from the threat diminishes your reputation, tempting you to try to back up your unintended extremism. And when it’s not taken seriously, you’re requiring the content of your statement to be ignored, which sets a precedent for everything else you say.

The more general point about using inflammatory rhetoric, that it’s bad for the political and social culture, is probably the harder one to get across, because in insisting on temperate language you’re ultimately arguing against free-speech. Free-speech is fundamental principle that idealists latch onto easily. Adolescents have a predilection for idealism. Principles also offer good, solid, defendable positions when dealing with complex issues. Put free-speech against the idea that inflammatory language helps create a culture of violence, especially when it’s difficult to find any clear link between the language and the action, and I have no idea where the discussion will end up. Yet I have some confidence that my students will see the point, even if they don’t concede it. They have dealt with this type of ambiguity before, especially when they’re arguing about the limits of my power in the classroom (“Let’s vote not to have any math this cycle”).

We’ll see how it goes.

Homo sapiens neanderthalensis?

In the binomial classification, modern humans are Homo sapiens (Genus and species). But you’ll frequently see us described as Homo sapiens sapiens, indicating that we’re a subspecies of Homo sapiens. One of the reasons for this is the still unresolved question of the neanderthals.

Some recent research suggests that 1-4% of our genes came from neanderthals. If true, this would mean that humans interbred, successfully, with neanderthals. Since one of the key parts of the definition of a species is that its members can produce fertile offspring, neanderthals would then be a subspecies of human. Thus we would be Homo sapiens sapiens and neanderthals would be Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, as opposed to being Homo neanderthalensis, a separate species in the same genus.

Sapiens_neanderthal_comparison — Skull differences between sapiens and neanderthalensis. Image by hairymuseummatt.

Perhaps even more interesting, the same researchers who did the gene work on neanderthal bones also sequenced some bones from Siberia, and found what may well be another subspecies of humans (the original article is at Krause et al., 2010). The genes are different from what’s been found before, but are in an area, and from a time period, shared both by modern humans and neanderthals. And, modern Melanesians (from the islands north and east of Australia) may share some of the genes of the new group. So this could even be another sapiens subspecies.

There are a number of caveats to this research, which is based primarily on gene sequencing and statistics. One key assumption that I’ve always been skeptical about is that DNA mutates at a fixed rate. However, this type of science ties very closely in to our discussions of evolution and themes of what it means to be human.

There are two great novels that address these two things, but I’ll only be using one of them. The one I’ll use is The Chrysalids by John Wyndham, which I’ve mentioned before (here and here). The other is War Games by Brian Stableford (aka Optiman). While the Chrysalids deals with accelerated mutation resulting from nuclear fallout, War Games considers the effects and moral implications of intentional genetic optimization (hence the other title for the book).

Connecting themes among texts

XVIII

Oh, when I was in love with you
Then I was clean and brave,
And miles around the wonder grew
How well did I behave.

And now the fancy passes by
And nothing will remain,
And miles around they’ll say that I
Am quite myself again.

– A.E. Housman -from A Shropshire Lad.

Over the last two days, I’ve been trying to focus a little on how different texts can be connected by their shared themes. Poetry is one of the options for students’ presentations during the community meeting every morning, and, to speed things up a little, I’ve been insisting that students have their presentations ready and approved by the facilitator, be it a poem or leading a discussion of one of George Washington’s Rules of Civility, before the meeting starts. Otherwise, I get to choose the poem they present.

So yesterday I chose Shelly’s Ozymandias, and this morning I picked Housman’s Oh, when I was in love with you.

When we do a poem or a rule of civility, the presenter leads a short discussion of the work. For poems this means identifying interesting aspects of the language, but mostly I’ve had them focusing on extracting themes. They’re getting better and better at that with practice, so today I explicitly asked, “What themes do today’s and yesterday’s poems share?”

It took us a while to unpack the two pieces, they had to hear them again, and finally I ended up giving them my opinion.

We need to work on these intertextual comparisons a bit more, but, hopefully, they’ll improve with practice.

I’m considering having them read the lyrics of James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful (the “clean” version) tomorrow, because it fits nicely with the other two poems and a contemporary work might offer them an additional connection to the work. We’ll see.

– Ozymandias – Percy Bysshe Shelly (via poets.org)

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”