First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.
-Martin Niemöller
I used the Martin Niemöller poem in our lesson on “marking-up” today and, in groping for modern analogies, I ended up asking what if “they” started rounding up Muslims in the name of preventing terrorism. My students voiced the opinion that it would be a violation of their rights and we got into a little discussion about how they could “speak-up”, which was a nice precursor that I’ll have to refer back to when we have our upcoming civil-society/governance projects.
38 percent of Americans in 2006 said they would never vote for a Muslim for president, just about the number who said they would never vote for a gay person. In December of 2004, Cornell released a survey showing that half of Americans consciously told a pollster that they would favor a curtailment of civil rights for Muslims. – Armbinder, 2010 (my emphasis)
(I’m not sure where he gets the 38% from, but Armbinder does cite a Gallup report on the topic.)
I was curious to see what my students thought about the possibility that half of Americans would favor less rights for Muslims. They seemed somewhat surprised. They seemed to think that adults should know better.
Regarding Niemöller poem, Harold Marcuse has an interesting webpage dedicated to the history of the words quoted above. There is some controversy, since Niemöller used different groups at different times, trading out Communists for socialistist or trade unionists for example. This is a nice illustration of the fact that although the words change, the meaning remains the same.
DNA interactive is another great resource for studying the history of genetics and how we manipulate and use it today (recommended by the indispensable Anna Clarke). They have lesson plans and nice pages on the modern techniques used to work with DNA.
Image from the DNAi webpage on gel electrophoresis. Electrophoresis is a bit like chromatography which might make for a good demonstration.
I have not done much with genetic sequencing myself and I found the website interesting and informative. I have, however, written programs to get and work with the GenBank database, which is not that hard since they have some easy tools to work with. I would love to figure out how to get a sample sequenced and then run it through GenBank to identify it. It would so nicely integrate the curriculum, using a practical exercise to solve a problem (like what species are on the nature trail), while using the same tools and resources that scientists use, and tie wonderfully into the short stories in Mirable.
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.
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.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall;
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the King’s horses
And all the King’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again!
I often tell my students that the meaning of a piece of literature, or really any piece of art, depends both on the intended meaning of the author and the experience-colored interpretation of the observer; any piece can have as many meanings as there are observers.
We also sometimes talk about the multiple meanings the author may be trying to convey; when they use metaphor in a single sentence or thread subtle, acerbic, poignant satire through a piece.
I can’t remember ever getting to the point of talking about unintentional meanings that seep into the work from the author’s unconscious, but these, sometimes I suspect, tell us the most about the nature of our shared humanity than intended meaning can.
Adolescents like to tick you off. Push all of your buttons to see what happens. And you want to ask, “Who are you really?” and, “Do your really not care?” We probably did the same when we were that age, but do you also remember how idealistic we were? The video below, from Penguin Publishing (found via The Dish) captures a bit of that duality of the adolescent mind. The use of white space and of just simply words also ties it quite nicely into our ongoing discussion of poetry in a “spark the imagination” kind of way.
