Early storytellers, such as Arab griots and Anglo-Saxon scops, used poetry, music, and drama to keep the values of their cultures alive. Greek worshippers acted their stories out during celebrations at religious festivals and while sacrificing animals to the gods. Greek drama became "tragedy," from the Greek word tragos, meaning goat-song. This engraving was made by William Blake, a poet who lived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In class, we talked about what myth means and what it doesn't mean. Many people think that a myth is something people used to believe that has now been "busted" or disproven, as in the show Mythbusters. Today we learned that myths are stories we tell each other to tell us who we are. We also defined archetype as a symbol that transcends culture, time, and place, such as a dove symbolizes peace in much of the world. We established "theme" as expressed in a statement, usually a sentence, specifically what the author is trying to communicate, the lesson or moral of the story, or the deeper meaning (below the surface) that the author is trying to bring out in the work. In the World Masterpieces textbook, we read the First Garden story from the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament of the Hebrew Bible. Students found examples of archetypes, including the serpent, which they saw as evil, Satan, sin, fear, or deception; the tree, found in many cultures creation stories as the universal tree or spirit-indwelled tree; the forbidden fruit, which echoed many other myths, including Pandora (who opened the box and let out evil), Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and suffered punishment for it, and Victor Frankenstein who dared to create life without God, the fruit of which was the monster, who carried the curse and punishment in his own body. The students suggested possible themes. I asked the question: Why would the Hebrew parents tell their children a story about boundaries? They said the parents were trying to tell the kids: Be careful whom you listen to; Protect your innocence, because once it's gone, you can't get it back; You can't cross every boundary or break every barrier, because there will be consequences.
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Today we revisited the six-word memoir. Rather than writing a list of words to describe ourselves, I asked the students to write a six-word phrase that made sense. One student wrote, "Looks over shoulder; answer is C." We talked about how great writing creates mystery and wonder. It often leaves us with more questions than answers. We went over class rules, and I asked students to take notes on brightly colored paper, which I offered to keep because from this point on, all tests, quizzes, and exams are open note. We watched a motivational video in which Les Brown defined fear as "False Expectations Appearing Real" and gave advice on how to visualize the worst and best case scenarios when facing something that causes us to fear. You can go to the link here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq1X_GgmpX I asked students to write about a time when something they feared turned out not to be as bad as what they had imagined. We will finish this next week, and this will help me evaluate where individual students are in their ability to write reflectively. Today is the first day of school, the two-hour version. The task today requires that students describe themselves in six words. This description does not have to be a complete sentence and likely will not be. It can merely consist of adjectives or it can be a simple summing-up of oneself. It's important to remember that the art of writing is as much what we leave out as it is what we choose to leave in. Economy is preferred over paragraphs of repetition or lengthy description. Word choice, the skill of choosing what word belongs in what place, matters. So much of English class in the early years is grammar, a labeling of parts. Just because a person knows the parts of the engine doesn't mean he or she can put it together so that it runs. Writing is an act of choosing while at the same time it is an act of freedom.
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1984 linkhttp://www.mondopolitico.com/library/1984/1984.htm Archives
September 2019
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