Free Speculative Fiction Online is a great, centralized source for tracking down science fiction online. It links to online repositories and the websites of a wide variety of authors: from classics like Asimov to stalwarts like Gaiman. There are hundreds of authors, short stories, and novels (including any number of Hugo and Nebula Award winners), and all of them are free.
Tag: reading
Letter from a dying explorer
While discussing polar exploration, I mentioned the story of Amundsen and Scott’s race for the south pole. The fascinating blog, Letters of Note, has Scott’s last letter, written bit by bit, on the ice, to his wife back home. It starts, “To: my widow.”
P.S. Letters of Note is a great resource for examples of great letter writing.
What’s the difference between humans and animals?
In the field of cognition, the march towards continuity between human and animal has been inexorable — one misconduct case won’t make a difference. True, humanity never runs out of claims of what sets it apart, but it is a rare uniqueness claim that holds up for over a decade. This is why we don’t hear anymore that only humans make tools, imitate, think ahead, have culture, are self-aware, or adopt another’s point of view. – Frans De Waal (2010).
My students studied the question, what is life, last cycle, and through their readings and Socratic dialogue I’ve been trying to approach the question of what is sentience and what distinguishes humanity from other organisms (or robots for that matter).
We’ve found that the lines between us and them are very hard to draw.
Pushing the discussion into questions of morality, primatologist Frans De Waal has a wonderful post on where it comes from, and if there is any clear distinction between humans and other animals. He argues that morality is innate, a product of evolution, and there aren’t clear distinctions.
The full article is a worthy read, with good writing and well constructed arguments. It’s a bit too long for a Socratic Dialogue but might be of interest to the more advanced student, particularly those going through religious, coming-of-age, rites of passage, like preparations for confirmations and Bar Mitzvahs. While De Waal’s evolutionary reasoning has been used to argue against religion, he takes a much more subtle approach:
Our societies are steeped in it: everything we have accomplished over the centuries, even science, developed either hand in hand with or in opposition to religion, but never separately. It is impossible to know what morality would look like without religion. It would require a visit to a human culture that is not now and never was religious. That such cultures do not exist should give us pause. – Frans De Waal (2010).
Finding meaning in children’s poetry
The gingham dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the table sat;
‘Twas half past twelve, and (what do you think!)
Nor one nor t’other had slept a wink!
– From “The Duel” by Eugene Field
Metaphor for the cold war?
Children’s poetry can be simple yet contain intricate, layered meaning. Project Guttenberg has a number of nice poetry collections available. Since they’re free it’s mostly older stuff, but human nature hasn’t changed that much in the last few hundred years.
Mary E. Burt’s 1904 collection, “Poems Every Child Should Know“, contains quite the number of classics like the one excerpted above. I like it a lot because when we talk about themes and issues in texts it is usually better to start with things that are very obvious, with simple language and simple sentence structure, to reduce the cognitive load.
However, just because the language style is simple doesn’t mean we can’t very quickly get to the complex.
The meaning of art is partially, at least, subjective, depending on the values and experiences brought to by the individual. Thus we have Edna St. Vincent Millay writing about the extinction of the dinosaurs.
So. If we read “The Duel” one morning while during the cycle when we discuss the Cold War and Mutually Assured Destruction, will students make the connection?
I hope they do, because then we can broaden the context and talk about human nature and the power of the classics.
Socratic Dialogue: The God in the Machine
Synthesizing Cycle 1’s theme of, “What is Life”, I’ve given the students the option of choosing a personal novel where the question of life and sentience are important themes. Frankenstein and Feet of Clay were two suggestions.
For our Socratic Dialogue, I’ve found a nice article (via The Dish) from MIT’s Technology Review, which deals with the cultural differences that affect how Americans and Japanese view robots. They suggest it’s because Americans come from a monotheistic, jealous god culture where only god can create life, while the animism that permeates Japanese culture makes them more amenable to having self-actuating beings around them.
Apart from the theme, the article’s vocabulary is complex enough for lots of marking up and discussion, but it starts with the hook of warfighting mecha.
We’ll see how it goes over later today.
Reading poetry in the morning
Mrs. Z. donated two small books of poetry, The Best Poems Ever and Poetry Speaks (much thanks). The second comes with an audio cd, where many of the poems are read by the authors. Since some of the authors are adolescents themselves, their reading can be a little halting, but there is a nice authenticity.
The The Best Poems Ever has a lot of the classics. I read William Blake’s The Tiger as an example. The students though my reading was pretty lifeless so I recited it for them with a lot of emphasis and hand motions. They were pretty impressed that I’d memorized the poem so quickly, at least until I told them I’d memorized it years before (probably in middle school actually). I probably should have kept this secret. Sometimes you need the mystique.
We’ve come up with a schedule so someone different will read every morning at the end of community meeting. They’re required to choose their poem ahead of time and have practiced reading it before they present. We also take a little time for comments, the objective is to try to identify the issues and the subtexts. This is how I discovered, with much reasoned explanation, that Edna St. Vincent Millay metaphorically described the asteroid impact theory for the extinction of the dinosaurs over 30 years before scientists came up with the idea.
Edna St. Vincent Millay and the extinction of the dinosaurs
Travel
by Edna St. Vincent MillayThe railroad track is miles away,
And the day is loud with voices speaking,
Yet there isn’t a train goes by all day
But I hear its whistle shrieking.All night there isn’t a train goes by,
Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming,
But I see its cinders red on the sky,
And hear its engine steaming.My heart is warm with friends I make,
And better friends I’ll not be knowing;
Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take,
No matter where it’s going.
I discovered today, during our morning poetry reading, that Edna St. Vincent Millay‘s poem Travel is a metaphor for the asteroid collision that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. The train is asteroid bearing down on the Earth, the smoke from the train is the dust and ash kicked up by the impact, while the whistling of the train is the moan of the dying dinosaurs.
Remarkably perceptive of St. Vincent Millay since the asteroid impact theory was posited by the Alverezs’ group decades after her death in 195.
Jurassic Park: Web of Issues
Well we watched Jurassic Park last night and concluded it with a discussion about the issues underlying the movie, the same way we’ve been studying analyzing the issues underlying texts. Discrimination based on race and obesity came up first (the fat guy and the black people “always” die), but I was able to coax a bit of discussion about the role and responsibility of science and scientists. Our discussion is summarized in the graphic organizer above, but there are many more subtexts to the story that we did not have time to explore.
I like both the movie and the book because, like most good science fiction, they explore some interesting issues that relate quite nicely to the curriculum. Jurassic Park has a nice little introduction to DNA and gene sequencing that is tied to some the history of life on Earth. As works of art in their respective fields, however, I prefer the movie. The novel has a lot of wonderful detail, and the scientist in me loves the detail, but the characters are not as well drawn and the story seldom strays from its main thesis, scientific hubris. What it has to say about that issue is well expressed and well researched so it does capture the interest of the reader. (The follow-up book, “The Lost World”, sails adrift of the science, is logically incoherent and has a proportionate deterioration in the quality of the writing.) I do however recommend the original Jurassic Park book to my students as a personal novel.
Steven Spielberg makes a great movie, extracting empathetic performances from the actors. Since the book’s author, Michael Crichton, also wrote the screenplay, the movie stays true to the core issues in the text. I think its a great example of a successful, dare I say synergistic, collaboration.
Tomorrow, instead of retelling around the issues in writing, my students are going to try to do so in a skit. This could get interesting.