Pam Webb

a writer's journey as a reader

Archive for the category “education”

10 Apr 2013

The Epicness of Poetry


Beowulf, The Iliad, and The Odyssey.  How could you get through public education and not have to study at least one of these? (Actually, I did–but that’s a different post). In our hurry-up world t’s not often we sit down and commit to reading 3,000 plus lines.  Welcome to Epic Poetry 101.

We tend to think of these triads of classic adventures as stories or myths.  Actually they are all poems.  Really long poems.  This is what makes them epic.

A brief pause…

Understanding Epic.

Today’s meaning:

image: suilynn.wordpress.com

Actual Meaning: (thanks Dictionary.com)

ep·ic

/ˈepik/

Noun
A long poem, typically derived from oral tradition, narrating the deeds and adventures of heroic or legendary figures or the history of…
Adjective
Of, relating to, or characteristic of an epic or epics.
Synonyms
noun. epos – epopee
adjective. heroic – epical

Back to our blog post…

Now that epic real definition versus epic contemporary understanding is out of the way, moving on to epic poetry will make much more sense. Epic poetry is epic because it is BIG. It’s big in scope, deed, theme, length–it’s just, well, epic (dude). Plus, it’s so big that it is italicized (or underlined or bolded) instead of the usually “quotes around poems” bit of mechanics.  Yup, this poetry is so big that it gets to change the punctuation rules.

Although technically I should address Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey first, I’m going with Beowulf, not so much because it’s considered the foundation of English literature and it introduces the dragon slayer archetype as well as mix pagan and Christian thematic elements–I choose it first because of Gerard Butler made Beowulf come to life for me.

image: tumblr.com

If you’ve never studied Beowulf, you should–don’t believe the Angelina Jolie version is Beowulf.  Nope. T’snt at all. Gerard Butler’s version isn’t either. So heads up Hollywood, we need a REAL version of this monumentally important epic poem.  Here’s to get you started…

Beowulf Key Facts ala Sparknotes:

full title  ·  Beowulf

author  · Unknown

type of work  · Poem

genre  · Alliterative verse; elegy; resembles heroic epic, though smaller in scope than most classical epics

language  · Anglo-Saxon (also called Old English)

time and place written  · Estimates of the date of composition range between 700 and 1000 a.d.; written in England

date of first publication  · The only manuscript in which Beowulf is preserved is thought to have been written around 1000 a.d.

publisher  · The original poem exists only in manuscript form.

narrator  · A Christian narrator telling a story of pagan times

point of view  · The narrator recounts the story in the third person, from a generally objective standpoint—detailing the action that occurs. The narrator does, however, have access to every character’s depths. We see into the minds of most of the characters (even Grendel) at one point or another, and the narrative also moves forward and backward in time with considerable freedom.

tone  · The poet is generally enthusiastic about Beowulf’s feats, but he often surrounds the events he narrates with a sense of doom.

tense  · Past, but with digressions into the distant past and predictions of the future

setting (time)  · The main action of the story is set around 500 a.d.; the narrative also recounts historical events that happened much earlier.

setting (place)  · Denmark and Geatland (a region in what is now southern Sweden)

protagonist  · Beowulf

major conflict  · The poem essentially consists of three parts. There are three central conflicts: Grendel’s domination of Heorot Hall; the vengeance of Grendel’s mother after Grendel is slain; and the rage of the dragon after a thief steals a treasure that it has been guarding. The poem’s overarching conflict is between close-knit warrior societies and the various menaces that threaten their boundaries.

rising action  · Grendel’s attack on Heorot, Beowulf’s defeat of Grendel, and Grendel’s mother’s vengeful killing of Aeschere lead to the climactic encounter between Beowulf and Grendel’s mother.

climax  · Beowulf’s encounter with Grendel’s mother constitutes the moment at which good and evil are in greatest tension.

falling action  · Beowulf’s glorious victory over Grendel’s mother leads King Hrothgar to praise him as a worthy hero and to advise him about becoming king. It also helps Beowulf to transform from a brazen warrior into a reliable king.

themes  · The importance of establishing identity; tensions between the heroic code and other value systems; the difference between a good warrior and a good king

motifs  · Monsters; the oral tradition; the mead-hall

symbols  · The golden torque; the banquet

foreshadowing  · The funeral of Shield Sheafson, with which the poem opens, foreshadows Beowulf’s funeral at the poem’s end; the story of Sigemund told by the scop, or bard, foreshadows Beowulf’s fight with the dragon; the story of King Heremod foreshadows Beowulf’s eventual ascendancy to kingship.

If you are up for reading the poem:

Gutenberg Project

If you want an entertaining analysis:

Shmoop

If you want to skip Beowulf and go to The Iliad and The Odyssey

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07 Apr 2013
17 Comments

Coming to Terms with Poetry


education

education (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

They say the best education we receive is that learned while teaching.  I found this to be especially true for poetry fundamentals.

I don’t recall studying poetry in jr. high English, unless studying Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence” counts.  As for high school, I remember short stories, yet nothing on the poetry radar comes up for remembrance. College yes, ohmagoodness, poetry aplenty. I do recall a cacophony of emotions as I partook in the banquet of poets found in my Norton Reader. I transversed from embarrassment to  gratitude as I feasted on William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath and others I had not known existed.  Why, oh why, did I feel the compunction to resell my Norton at the campus bookstore?  College students out there?  Think twice before reselling your textbooks.  All those annotations and well-visited markings really do become appreciated some day.

norton reader

norton reader (Photo credit: cdrummbks)

These days I’m teaching to Common Core Standards and have come to terms with poetry.  They are an absolute on the schedule of attained knowledge.  I also have my AP crowd to cater.  Although I have over 200 literary terms we learn over the course of  the year in AP, I start out my ninth graders with double dozen or so.  How many do you know or remember?

  1. accent: emphasis or stress given a syllable or a particular word.
  2. alliteration: the reiterated initial consonants in prose or poetry.
  3. anaphora: repetition of an opening word or phrase in a series of lines.
  4. assonance:  the repetition of two or more vowel sounds in successive words, creating a type of rhyme.
  5. ballad: a song which tells a story; also be a poem with songlike qualities which tells a story.
  6. blank verse: the most common meter of unrhymed poetry in English; it lacks stanza form and rhyme.
  7. caesura: a pause within the line of verse.
  8. conceit: a fanciful expression, usually in the form of an extended metaphor or an analogy that usually displays intellectual cleverness due to the unusual comparison being made.
  9. consonance: a close similarity between consonants or groups of consonants, especially at the ends of words, e.g. between “strong” and “ring.”
  10. couplet: two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme, and often have the same meter
  11. diction: the selection of words in a particular literary work, or the language appropriate for a particular (usually poetic) work.
  12. doggerel: crude verse that contains clichés, predictable rhyme, and inept meter and rhythm.
  13. elegy: a poem which mourns the death of someone.
  14. enjambment: when one verse runs into another verse
  15. epic: a long narrative poem on a serious subject, usually centered on a heroic or supernatural person.
  16. epigram: a short poem, which can be comical.
  17. figurative language: language which goes beyond what is denoted (see denotation), and has a suggestive effect on the reader; a figure of speech is part of figurative language.
  18. free verse: poetry which lacks a regular stress pattern and regular line lengths (and which may also be lacking in rhyme). Free verse should not be confused with blank verse
  19. haiku: Japanese form of poetry of seventeen syllables with three unrhymed lines of five, seven and five syllables
  20. heroic couplet: a couplet with iambic pentameter
  21. iamb: a metrical foot of one short or unstressed syllable followed by one long or stressed syllable.
  22. imagery: often taken as a synonym for figurative language, but the term may also refer to the ‘mental pictures’ which the reader experiences in his/her response to literary works or other texts.
  23. kitsch: sentimentality, tastelessness, or ostentation in any of the arts.
  24. limerick: a five line humorous poem involving a fixed aabba rhyme scheme
  25. lyric: a short non-narrative poem that has a solitary speaker, and that usually expresses a particular feeling, mood, or thought.
  26. metaphor: a direct comparison–it does not use “like,” “as,” or “than.” In literature it is a figurative statement asserting one thing is something that it is not.
  27. meter: the recurrence of a similar stress pattern in some or all lines of a poem.
  28. ode: a relatively lengthy lyric poem, usually expressing exalted emotion in a complex scheme of rhyme and meter.
  29. onomatopoeia: a word or expression which resembles the sound which it represents, like the meow of a cat or the quack of a duck.
  30. pastoral: usually written by an urban poet who idealizes the shepherds’ lives. The term has now been extended to include any literary work which views and idealizes the simple life from the perspective of a more complex life.
  31. prosody: the rhythm of spoken language, including stress and intonation, or the study of these patterns
  32. repetition: the duplication of any element of language such as a sound, word, phrase, sentence, or grammatical pattern.
  33. rhyme: the identity of the sounds of the final syllables (usually stressed) of certain proximate lines of a poem.
  34. scan: to assign stress patterns to a poem.
  35. simile: a figure of speech that draws a comparison between two different things, especially a phrase containing the word “like” or “as,” e.g. “as white as a sheet.”
  36. symbol: a person, place, thing, or event that stands both for itself and for something beyond itself.
  37. syntax: how an author chooses to join words into phrases, clauses, and sentences; similar to diction which is focused on individual words, yet syntax is concerned with groups of words.
  38. theme:  the central idea or insight about human life revealed within the work.
  39. tone: the attitude, as it is revealed in the language of a literary work, of a personage, narrator or author, towards the other personages in the work or towards the reader.
  40. voice: the writer’s distinctive use of language, which is created through the use of a writer’s tone and diction.

 Okay, there is about a triple dozen and a dose for good measure here. Some terms crossover into prose which is why we start off with poetry before short stories. We’ve found our students grasp analyzing smaller chunks of literary concepts and then retain those terms and skills for the longer works.

So, how did you do?  I didn’t include the various types of poems in this set.  Stay tuned…

Happy Poetry Month

Poetry

Poetry (Photo credit: Kimli)

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04 Jan 2013

The Ruing of Breaking


rue 1 (r)

v. rued, ru·ing, rues
v.tr.

To feel regret, remorse, or sorrow for.
v.intr.

To feel regret, remorse, or sorrow.
n.
It never fails.  About the time I begin to feel *normal* I go back to work.  For those of you who are not teachers I may not get much sympathy–after all, most of the world does not get large chunks of time off scattered throughout the year like educator types do.  Skip this post then.  I really don’t want to read comments about whatever am I complaining about getting almost two weeks off for Christmas Break.  This post is more about coping with the deprogramming I go through while on break.  I definitely feel regret, remorse, and/or sorrow; I rue.
Now don’t get me wrong.  I don’t rue my choice of career.  I love teaching.  Some days I even like it (old joke).  What I rue is how intensely I view my career.  I don’t stop thinking school during my break and I am constantly forming  lesson plans, looking up new sites, checking mail (answering questions from students–yes, I will write you a reference letter), and refining old units as I create new ones. That creative energy, that inertia of teaching doesn’t just quietly wait for me in the classroom; it follows me home and won’t let me enjoy reading a book without marking a passage to share with students, I can’t read the newspaper without clipping out an article that underscores a lesson recently covered, and I’m unable to work on my writing because of all those teacherly cobwebs covering up my creativity.
Until today.  Today I woke up and felt like teaching is a distant memory, a fond reminiscence, something I once did.  Today I really got the urge to write, write, write.  New ideas, a resurgence of purpose, a desire to edit and revise and investigate new publishing opportunities.  Aah, then there is the crashing reality of it being Friday and knowing I return to the classroom on Monday, meaning writing will once again take a nestled backseat to my day, that is f I have time and energy after grading papers and configuring another day’s set of lessons.
Today is today.  Monday is Monday.  I shall not rue my break, only embrace the fact it gives me glimmer of what retirement might be like.
P.S. I found this documentary at the library: American Teacher. Wow! What an eye-opener.
To all teachers out there: January is that much closer to June. Hang in there!
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27 Nov 2012
6 Comments

Words APtly Spoken (and Written, too)


As Vera winds up her month long adventure with writing about writing a NaNoWriMo novel, I also am winding up my adventure of doing the same.  One thing I really like about Vera is how much she likes words.  Hmm, maybe a little bit of me slipped into my protag.  I’ve never had a French foreign exchange student as a BFF nor a crush on anyone named Eddie though.

Like Vera, I have collected a few words along the way as a writer, reader, and teacher.  I love to store them up, and find they pop out unexpectedly. My freshmen tend to give their, “What did she just say?” look when this happens.

Over the last week I’ve been preparing a list of words which will be handy for AP students looking and learning to broaden their working literature vocabulary.  Currently I have close to 160 terms that we will cover.  Most will be known; however, some might be new. I know there are a few I’ve just made acquaintance:

1. aphorism: a terse statement of known authorship which expresses a general truth
2.caesura: a pause within the line of verse.
3.Deus ex machina:a phrase from Greek plays where an actor was lowered onto the stage to solve the plot; an artificial contrivance that forces the solving or terminating of a plot.
4. doggerel: crude verse that contains clichés, predictable rhyme, and inept meter and rhythm.
5.enjambment: when one verse runs into another verse
6. hamartia: the central flaw of a character, usually in a tragic hero
7. litotes: a form of understatement whcih makes an affirmative point by denying the negative, as in “It isn’t very serious. I have this tiny little tumor on the brain.” (Catcher in the Rye)
8. metonymy: from the Greek meaning “changed label”; it’s basically a substitution, as in “the White House sent out this new announcement” instead of saying “the President issued an announcement.”
9.portmanteau word: an artificial word combining parts of other words; e.g. brunch
10. semiotics: semantics the study meanings of which they signify; semiotics studies the signs themselves

The whole “words aptly spoken” proverb takes on a new meaning and direction as I apply these to our Advanced Placement Literature lessons.

They say the best way to get an education is to become a teacher.  I couldn’t agree more. I’m always open to new terms.  Know some?  Send them my way!

English: So many words to keep track of!.

English: So many words to keep track of!. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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17 Nov 2012
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Serendipity and Fricatives


A sign that designates no swearing in a city.

A sign that designates no swearing in a city. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Serendipity.  That happenstance which is unexpected and delightful.  Like finding that forgotten twenty dollar bill in your jacket pocket about the time you need a spare bit of change to enjoy an impromptu gelato and a movie.

Serendipity also happens in writing.  For instance, the other day my NaNo protag went on a side rant about swearing and she wondered (as I do) why certain sounds satisfy that need of relieving vexation.  Those sounds are called fricatives.

Opening my latest version of Children’s Writer I experienced that serendipitous moment upon reading “Punch, Bold, Colorful: Fricatives” by Vera Boyd Jones. Here is her opening segment:


My friend Brendan, a brand-new teacher, sat at my dinner table complaining that a novel for junior high readers was totally unrealistic.
    “There’s no way a juvenile delinquent would talk like that. His language would be full of words like  *!&**## and $^*&$* and %(^*#. (Substitutes are mine.) Your ears would turn blue if you heard the kids talk in our school hallways, and they’re not in trouble with the law.”
   “That may be,” I said in the tone I reserve for talking to young friends I have known since their birth and who should not be cussing in front of me, “but the first reader of a novel is an editor and once it’s in print, the next readers are reviewers and librarians, and they are not going to buy a kids’ book full of profanity. And I won’t even address the role of irate school boards.”
    “But it’s not right,” he said.
    “It’s not accurate, but that’s where substitute fricatives come in.”
    “Fricatives?”
    “Phooey. Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of fricatives? Shoot, they’re such wonderful words.”

Jones  goes on to discuss the role of hard consonant sounds (p, f, b, d, k, sh, etc.) in our most colorful (and frowned upon) language.  Fricative, itself, is a great fricative.  Substituting naughty words with imaginative and consonant-rich ones is a solution to being tsked in the classroom.  Chris Crutcher, a popular YA author, cares not for substitutes and runs through as many of the real thing as possible (it seems) in his writing.  He’s proud of it too.  I’ve had him as a guest in my classroom and the students are split between liking the realism of his language usage and being uncomfortable with reading it.

For now, Vera will stick with her frick-atives.  After all, if I’m self-conscious saying them, how can I possibly have my characters utter them?

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08 Nov 2012
3 Comments

Push Day


image: southcentralusd.org

I’m madly trying to get my day eight NaNo post done before I trot off to school for round two of PTC. Yesterday was a twelve hour day split between half teaching the other half conferencing with parents.  PTCs are not my favorite part of my schedule, yet I do enjoy meeting with parents and getting to know them and encouraging them about their student.  I’ve been on the other side of the conference table and I know what it is like when a child is not doing the best possible in class. Hearing words of praise, encouragement, suggesting a plan of action, and even sharing student work helps strengthen the teamwork bond because while I’m not sure about needing an entire village to raise a child, I do know it helps when the parents are contributing members of getting the child through school.

So while I’m putting in another day at school “Vera” my NaNo character gets to sleep in.  Lucky. Today she’s contemplating what she should do for her novel.  She better get on it soon, daylight’s burning.  But don’t mention Daylight Saving Time–she’s kind of sensitive about that subject. If you feel like popping by and seeing how my NaNo is doing, that would be great.  www.veranano.wordpress.com

Well, off to school. Today should be a bit easier with half the day in curriculum meetings and the other half conferences.

Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to school I go.  I like my work, I shall not shirk, Hi ho, hi ho.

image: freewebs.com

 

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06 Nov 2012
6 Comments

DST and a Tough Week Ahead for Me


First page of Benjamin Franklin's anonymous le...

First page of Benjamin Franklin’s anonymous letter to the editors of the Journal de Paris, April 26, 1784. The letter is a satire proposing various methods to awaken Parisians early in the morning in order to save money on candles, and presages the idea of daylight saving time. The letter is untitled and appears in the “Économie” section of the journal. The original letter was in English but this, its first publication, is a French translation. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

No matter when I go to bed I automatically wake up around 5 am.  Good thing I’m a morning person.  This usually is not a problem for me because I actually enjoy getting up early and having the best part of the day to myself. I find myself embracing the cadence of morning. However, I do not embrace 4 am, which DST has reinstated since Sunday.  I can push the clock back an hour, not so easily my body clock.  Daylight Saving Time and I do not see eye to eye.

Which brings me to notion of how art imitates life.  Currently I am involved in NaNoWriMo and have even gone as far as inflicting sharing my daily NaNo entries with readers as a separate blog.  Consider this an invitation: www.veranano.wordpress.com.  The main character has many of my tendencies, dark chocolate breaks, being one of them.  “Vera” also dislikes DST as much as I do.  In fact, she turned her rant against Ben Franklin, the inventory of Daylight Saving Time, into a scathing persuasive essay called “Death to DST” (or words to that effect) as an English assignment.  I’m hoping she’ll get a good grade on it.

This week is a good week for that extra hour of sleep, although getting up earlier seems to nullify the bonus time. Yes, this week is the official beginnings of second quarter and with it comes Parent-Teacher conferences.  My school runs them two nights and gives teachers Friday off.  We are very much ready by then for a long weekend. We teach all day on Wednesday and then PT until 7 pm–basically a twelve hour day.  Thursday we meet as departments and then meet with parents from 3:30 until 7 pm once again.  It’s part of the job, yet it is grueling.  I actually like meeting with the parents and discussing their student, except there is usually a buffalo herd of moms and dads hanging out in the hall waiting their turn.  I try not to drink too much water because breaks are far and few between.

DST, NaNo, and PTs–it’s one of those weeks of sucking it up yet needing to find time to breathe.

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08 Oct 2012
14 Comments

Has Dewey Metis Match?


SLJ1210w FT Dewey Are Dewey’s Days Numbered?: Libraries Nationwide Are Ditching the Old Classification System

image credit: School Library Journal

Recently I received a shock: the Dewey Decimal system might be at death’s door.  Yes, sit down.  I can see the news has hit you just as hard.  My first thought is, “What’s next? Abandoning order in the grocery store? Arranging by content or by color?” Metis is menacing the time-honored and respected DDC system. Then I thought I should be more  opened-minded. Maybe there is a sound reason why Dewey might possibly be ringing the death knell chimes.

After reading the SLJ on-line article my open-mindedness gave way to absolute rejection of the new kid on the block: Metis. The Dewey Decimal Classification system was thoughtfully developed to create order out of chaos.  Before Dewey came along, libraries would willy-nilly shelve their books.  Some methods included alphabetizing, shelf placement, and random subject designation. Then along came Mel.

Melvil Dewey, the designer of DDC, was an amazing guy.  I could write an entire blog post about him, and if you are interested in finding out more about you should link over to this article  to become enlightened to how dedicated he was to libraries.  He even risked his life saving books from a library that was on fire.  That’s my kind of Book Booster.

The SLJ article focused on a real-life library that has changed over to what they call Metis, who was the Greek goddess Athena’s mama. Metis supposedly reigned in the clever department, and the Metis system relies on clever deductive association when searching for a book. The librarians in the Metis library believe the system is much better for kids since it encourages them to associate ideas into reality.  For instance, Johnny the second grader, comes bouncing in and says, “I want to read a mystery story because Dad and I watch Sherlock Holmes and I want to be a detective, too.”  Betsy, our intrepid librarian points to the shiny sign that says, “Scary, ” and says, “That’s where you’ll find it, sweetie.”  Yup, mysteries are scary because they are associated with the unknown, and the unknown is associated with being nervous, and nervous is associated with frightened, and frightened makes leads to thinking of ghosts which are as you know, scary.  This If You Give a Mouse a Cookie logic is not working for me.  A mystery to me is how anyone could think this Metis system is going to fly.  Dewey’s been doing fine all these years.  Why the sudden backlash against shelve and order?

If you aren’t familiar with Dewey, here is a crash course.  It’s divided up into categories and those categories can have subcategories.  It’s quite neat and tidy.  Take a look:

HOW DEWEY DECIMAL CLASSIFICATION (DDC) WORKS

000 General Works (Miscellaneous)

100 Philosophy

200 Religion

300 Social Sciences

400 Languages

500 Pure Sciences

600 Technology (Practical Arts) including medicine, engineering, business accounting, agriculture, salesmanship, etc.

700 Fine Arts (including architecture, painting, photography, music, amusements, etc.)

800 Literature

900 History, Geography, Biography

What is there not to like about this system?  One reason, declares the article, for the reconsideration is because kids don’t even learn their decimals until fourth grade.  Umm, excuse me.  Dewey’s decimals are filing markers and not mathematical.  This associative logic and deductive reasoning could explain why Metis is so appealing to these particular librarians. And what will these students do when they go to their public library and it’s still the DDC?

I’m thinking as I read the article, “One giant leap backward for mankind.” Dewey put order into the system.  Order is a good thing.  Metis is kind of subjective touchy feely nonsense organization that could create unilateral universal chaos.  One person’s science could be another person’s science fiction.

Now, I ask you, are we dumbing down our society even more by taking away Dewey’s decimals and putting up shiny poster board subject signage?  If you want to read up on Dewey, you can find him in the 921 section of your friendly neighborhood library–any library that speaks Dewey.  Or you could get Metisphysical and look for the sign that spouts “People Who Once Were Alive And Are Now Dead.”

 

English: From left to right: R. R. Bowker, Mrs...

English: From left to right: R. R. Bowker, Mrs. Dewey and Melvil Dewey (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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22 Sep 2012
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Burn and Turn: Censored and Challenged Books/BB Week #1


What have To Kill A Mockingbird, The Awakening, Huckleberry Finn, and The Hunger Games all have in common?  Easy. Besides making the bestsellers list, they have also made the banned books list. And let’s pause this opening for a bit of clarification. Banned Book Week is actually misleading, since books aren’t technically banned anymore–they are challenged, since we all have, at least in the US of A, the ability to procure what we want to read.

Banned Book Week is the annual emphasis that occurs during the last week of September, and serves as a reminder how society, during given points and times in history, get tweaked about what is available to read.  However, it is not only in the United States that books have created ire in the powers of say so.  Read Tweak happens around the world.  For instance:

Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland:  Used to be banned in the province of Hunan, China, beginning in 1931 for its portrayal of anthropomorphized animals acting on the same level of complexity as human beings. The censor General Ho Chien believed that attributing human language to animals was an insult to humans. He feared that the book would teach children to regard humans and animals on the same level, which would be “disastrous.”

Then again sometimes banning is not good enough–let’s just burn the bugger and totally purge society’s ability for intellectual discernment.  Burned books would include:

  • Ulysses, by James Joyce–Burned in the U.S. (1918)
  • The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck—Burned by the East St. Louis, IL Public Library (1939)
  • The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway–Burned in Nazi bonfires in Germany (1933)
  • Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut–Burned in Drake, ND (1973)

Although there haven’t been any recent burnings, Ray Bradbury (rest in peace, Ray, you are missed) foresaw a day when all books would be burned. Not because of poisoned opinion, offended sensibilities, or societal outrage–no, Ray thought books would be burned due to lack of interest.  Intellectual thought via the printed page would be overridden by the quest of Jello entertainment(that ubiquitous substance which has form but no true nutrition and is quite similar to most television programming). In the near future Bradbury believed it would be illegal to own or read books so the government created a mockery out the fireman and had him burn books instead of saving that which would burn.  The paradox is stunningly brilliant, which is why Bradbury and his insights will be missed.

The book I refer to is, of course, Fahrenheit 451. The delicious and sad irony is that F451 was censored for its language in order for school districts to allow it on reading lists.

This week I will be posting views, trivia, and insights about banning, censoring, and challenging intellectual matter, because it does matter.

Banned Book Week.  Read a book and challenge your brain.

Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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Posted in Books, creativity, education, Reading, reviews, Uncategorized and tagged , , , , , ,
14 Sep 2012
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The Wanders of Spillchick


Various flavours of gelato

Various flavours of gelato (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Second Friday of the new school new year.  And I’m  heading downtown for a gelato–not because I need the endorphin boost, it’s cause for celebration.  It’s basically two weeks into the new year and I’ve decided I still like teaching, even though I have five sections of freshmen instead of the usually two or three.

One thing that does amaze me is the first batch of papers I receive from my freshies.  I encourage them to type because 1) it’s easier to read and 2) they can plug in spell-check and grammar-check.  But do they?  Mmmm, not really.

Here are some true-life examples.

* Names have been withheld in case my students have figured out this is my blog and I end up as a Yahoo News item blurb.

Some of the activities I like do out side of school are skiing, golf, and lacrosse.

My biggest influence would be my dad. He has Ben that for years!

So I would have to say my favorite subject is Band or Jazz Band, it in cooperates gratis faction and challenges.

Shakespeare influenced me because of this plays, it helps me know that even people who started out as regular people can make history.

I don’t want to pick on them too much because I know they are still learning. And I know I make mistakes as well.  My AP students caught this doozy the other day.

Typing is NOT an option. Times Standard or Ariel, 12 font.

Okay, I meant “is not optional”–they gave me the sidewise eye on that one. (“You mean you don’t want the essays typed?”)

Here is the revision: “Typing is NOT an optional.”

Yes, it’s Friday. I need a gelato.

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