Ban Catcher! (Response paper #3)

See this? This, my friends, is The Man. Yes, in some cases, The Man is a mean old lady, and this particular old lady, for the next two years of your high school life, is The Man. She’s the one who writes the various standardized tests you’ll be taking in 9th and 10th grade, and she’s the one who grades the essays you write on those tests. (She also poses for stock photos on the weekends.) She’s got some pretty specific things in mind when she’s reading your essays, and it’s my job to make sure you turn her frown upside down with your mad 5-paragraph skillzzz.

(Okay–I must confess that The Man who grades essay exams is not always an elderly lady such as the one pictured. In fact, younger gentlemen with generally sunny dispositions, such as myself, have been known from time to time to grade such exams to earn an extra penny or two to supplement the generous salaries provided us by our state legislators and taxpayers. Anyway, I’m just saying, The Man isn’t always an old lady, if that makes sense.)

So, in class this week we’ve been gathering ideas about the positive and negative aspects of using Catcher in the Rye as a required reading in public schools. Students made pretty extensive lists of pros and cons, and, perhaps not surprisingly, it was a lot easier to come up with reasons to censor the book than reasons to read it. I guess that’s because the negative aspects of the book are so prominent: the constant swearing, illegal behavior, general delinquency, frank sexual discussions, etc. But the ironic thing is that, as far as I can tell, no kid I have every taught has ever thought this book should be banned. It’s funny to ask a class why not, after we’ve gone through all these potentially offensive things, and the general response to that is, “Because we like it!”

But why do you like it? What is it about the book that speaks to you and tells you something useful about yourself and the world you live in? If you can answer those questions, you can come up with the reasons you’ll need to support your opinion in the 5-paragraph-ish essays we’re writing this week.

Here’s an outline of an outline (yeah, that’s what I mean) and a graphic organizer you can use to help you get ready for writing (Persuasive essay outline)–we filled this out in class today–and here’s the actual writing assignment:

Write a persuasive essay to your school’s administration and board expressing your opinion on whether or not Catcher in the Rye should be required reading in your school’s Language Arts classes. Include several reasons and examples why this book should be banned or included.

That’s it, short ‘n’ sweet. Well, “sweet” might be going a bit far…

A couple of things to keep in mind:

• Your introduction should not only state your opinion, it should do something to grab the reader’s attention. Think about what makes you want to read something, and try to replicate that kind of writing in your intro.
• Each body paragraph needs examples to illustrate the main idea of the paragraph. The “example” portion of each paragraph can include:
  • analogies (stories from the reading or real life)
  • analysis (where you explain what the stories mean, and why they’re relevant
  • evidence (statistics, interviews, etc.)
  • hypothetical (“What if…” kinds of statements. Many students overuse these–be cautious.)
• It’s good to include some counter-arguments in your paper. Imagine what a person who disagrees with you might say about each point you make. Consider the other opinion, then explain why you still think you’re right.

Yeah, I know. Persuasive essays like this are kind of dumb and artificial, much in the same way political debates and advertisements are insulting to the intelligence, but that’s pretty much what they ask us to do on state tests. That’s not to say that persuasive writing has to be like this. Later on in the semester, we’ll write persuasive essay about issues we (hopefully) really care about, and then hopefully we’ll see how powerful the form can really be. For now, just write yer darned 5 paragraphs and get on with life.

MT

Be, please (Hamlet, response paper #3)

This week we’ve made it about half-way through Act 3 of Hamlet. Every time I teach this play I feel like the first two acts are sort of a hump students have to get over before they really start to get into the story, the dramatic character development, the philosophical weirdness, and, well, the violent, bloody murder that we get to see in the remaining three acts.

Anyway, we made it over the hump, and in today’s reading we came across one of the most famous things ever written, the monologue that begins with that simple little phrase, “To be, or not to be.” Reading this monologue is pretty much the equivalent of taking the class to the Louvre to look at the Mona Lisa: Everybody knows what it is, but hardly anybody knows or cares why it’s actually cool. I love the look of lightbulbs going on above heads the moment I stand in front of a bunch of confused students with a toy knife pressed to my gut and say, “To exist…or NOT to exist.” (The effect might be more pronounced were the weapon slightly more realistic and less rubbery.) Suddenly, they see the serious business Hamlet is mulling over in his brain, and the whole monologue is redefined as a struggle with the big, existential question, dear to the hearts of all thoughtful people of all ages (and mocked by all non-thoughtful people): Is it really better to live than to die?

And that is our topic of writing for this week. Here’s the assignment:

Read through and annotate (if you choose) Hamlet’s monologue from Act 3, Scene 1 (included at the bottom of this post, if you need it).

Pay special attention to Hamlet’s arguments about living and dying in each section; see if you can summarize in your own head what he’s saying and how he feels.

Now, “adapt” the monologue for a different character of your own choosing. To “adapt” means to keep most of the same basic ideas (and even a few of the same words), while changing other key characteristics. In this case, instead of a young European prince in the 1500’s (or whenever) discussing these issues, create a new character and setting. You might consider, for example, how some of the following people/things might express Hamlet’s feelings:

• A 15-year-old girl sitting next to her crappy boyfriend at a movie (I’m picturing Transformers, or any other Michael Bay film, for that matter)
• An elderly, homeless man living on the wintery streets of New York
• A mid-40’s, single, middle-manager type woman sitting in a boring business meeting
• A 2-year-old kid whose pile of blocks was just knocked over by another crazy 2-year-old
• A circus clown working the crowd for the 789th time before the elephant parade comes out
• A melancholy duck standing at the edge of a frozen pond next to a pair of duck feet sticking up through the ice
• A speck of dust, soon destined to become part of the life-matter of a high school English teacher, flying out at a zillion miles an hour from the center of the big bang
• That same spec of dust flying back in towards the center of existence, one zillion years later, speaking one zillisecond before passing the event horizon into the middle of everything, from whence it came

Use the language that character would use, and adapt Hamlet’s ideas to make them appropriate for that specific character and setting.

Remember: This is a monologue, which means it should be written in the first-person, present tense, as if the person is narrating exactly what’s on their mind at that moment. Feel free to let your character digress (go off topic) and rant even, if they feel like it.

Man, maybe I should write this assignment. It sounds kind of fun, actually. Here’s the text in question:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action

I invite you to mess with this text in any way you please. (I guess that’s my right, as a teacher of English and one of the holy defenders of Shakespeare…)

MT

q: where do the ducks go? a: nowhere (response paper #2)

A bunch of 9th graders and I started reading Catcher in the Rye last week, and we’re about 100 pages into it now. The book opens just as winter is starting to get serious in the East, the snow is falling and local lakes and ponds are starting to freeze over.

Our reading coincided with the arrival of serious winter weather here in Utah. Last Saturday we had an amazing snowstorm that left 8 inches of perfect snow blanketing everything, down to the tiniest twig at the end of the tiniest tree branches. Walking around the night after the storm, with streetlights illuminating everything in monochromes of white or yellow, it looked like the whole world had suddenly snapped into relief. With the snow highlighting every irregular nook and cranny, the hazy, grey, 2-dimensional valley popped into extreme 3-dimensionality. That’s how I remember it now, anyway. At the time of the walk, I was actually pretty scared I was going to fall and break my coccyx. I didn’t.

Anyway, I’m just saying that the weather in the book and the weather here are quite similar, which is why I’ve found myself asking, as Holden often does, Where do the ducks in the park go when the pond freezes over?

In real life, there is a simple answer to this simple question. I live near Liberty Park. The pond in Liberty Park is really just a little run-off reservoir which they can turn on or off with a button somewhere in the bowels of some city administration building. When it’s winter, they turn the pond off. What used to be the pond a couple of weeks ago is now 4-acres of gently-undulating mud and silt, imprinted with literally billions of the twiggy footprints of its fowl inhabitants. Well, maybe millions. And yes, the ducks are still there. See, global warming has treated the lazy duck well lately, as evidenced by the lovely, Spring-like rain shower we’re having today. Ducks, clothed as they are in their essentially impermeable cloaks of feathers and natural ducky oils, might as well be sipping Mai Tais on the beach in Fiji on a day like today. Because animals are stupid, they probably find the sludgy shores of Lake Liberty just as delightful.

But in a literary work like Catcher in the Rye, this simple question takes on much larger significance. What is it about the seasons, about the natural world and the struggle for survival, that so fascinates Holden?

This week in class we’ve started deciphering Holden’s heavily coded messages by going into some pretty deep analysis of his language. Specifically, we’ve collected extensive lists of “Holdenisms,” or characteristic words, phrases, and narrative structures that come up over and over in Holden’s narration. Of course, these lists have involved some “naughty” words, but I was very pleased with the maturity demonstrated by students as we probed deep into the subtleties of Holden’s use of words and phrases like “goddam,” and “moron” and “to give someone the time.”

Okay, once I get the class podcast up and running all you out there in Cyberlandia can recalibrate your “maturity” meters, because it’s not like there wasn’t the occasional giggle or wildly inappropriate, possibly illegal comment, but in general we went deep.

So far, we’ve determined that Holden is insecure, easily depressed, lonely, and, despite his basic sensitivity and affectionate nature, terrified of women.

To reinforce all this talk about the deep aspects of character that can be gleaned from language, I came up with a little theme for Response Paper #2 that I think will yield some interesting results:

Response Paper #2

Choose a simple theme, such as:

• My favorite family vacation
• My trip to the dentist
• My weekend
• My pet
• My hobbies

Remember to choose something ordinary, or mundane. In fact, the smaller the theme the better. Once you have a theme in mind, you’re ready for the second part of the assignment: Write it like Holden. Use the words, phrases, pacing, and details that Holden would use as you tell your little story.

Yeah, that’s right. I want to know what Holden would say about the attractive, nazi-like dental hygienist who scolds him for not flossing twice daily. What would Holden think about during hour 8 of driving in the family van from Butte, Montana to Topeka, Kansas?

You get the idea. Response paper #2 is due Monday, Dec. 10, by 3:45 pm.

I’m going to go check on the ducks. See if anyone needs their Mai Tai refreshed or whatever.

MT

moons over my hammy (and response paper #2)

I’m supposed to write something about Hamlet here, but that’s really hard. So instead, I’ve been typing various titles for this post, most of which involved puns, including the title I finally settled on which refers, of course, to the classic Denny’s sandwich, which is both disgusting and embarrassing to order. Originally, the title was a pun, but I decided in the interest of marketing my blog to the general public, and possibly picking up some totally random hits off of Google searches, I would go with the unadulterated original in all its cheesy glory.

And I have now successfully begun my post, and progressed 6 or 7 full sentences into it, without having to formulate a single thought on Hamlet. Let me try that now.

The thing that makes Hamlet so hard for me to write about it is the same thing that makes it kind of hard to read: The play is full of emotional possibilities, which are fun to read about and contemplate, but which really require the input and interpretation of a director and actors in order for them to come alive. There is so much that is unclear or indeterminate in the text of the play. For example, there are several scenes in which certain characters may or may not be eavesdropping on other characters as they soliloquize. And the soliloquists, in turn, may or may not be aware that they are being listened to. The assertion that “all the world’s a stage” certainly explains Hamlet’s attitude to life in Elsinore, but we usually rely on a director’s vision to show us when Hamlet is acting and when he’s not.

We’ve only read the first act, and half of act two, at this point, so it’s not too hard at this point to make judgements about characters and motivations on our own. But it gets more complicated: The emotional environment and specific conflict involved in each scene depends more and more on what Hamlet, Claudius, Pollonius, and Gertrude know and when they know it.

So far, really the only big judgement we’ve had to render as a class is concerning whether or not this ghost thing is real. We know that Hamlet sees something, and we know he thinks he talks to something (while no one else is around to observe…or are they?), and we know that the ghost gives him some pretty specific and testable information about the death of his father. As a class, we’re going to assume that the ghost is real, and that it really is the spirit of the dead king.

Which brings me to our response paper assignment for this week.

One of the major themes of this play has to do with this big word: Epistemology. An “epistemology” is a theory of knowledge: where does knowledge come from, what are the limits of human knowledge, etc. In this play, we can boil it down to three big questions: What do you know? How do you know what you know? And, how do you know you know it? If that looks like I’m repeating myself (blah blah blah), look again.

I have devised a writing assignment relating to Hamlet that will help us as a class to tease out the deeper issues of epistemology represented in the play. Here it is:

Response paper #2 (due Monday, Dec. 10) 

What is a ghost? Write a 5-paragraph-ish persuasive essay (intro, some evidence, a conclusion) explaining what you think a ghost is. For evidence, you can draw from personal experience (or lack thereof), interviews, and other sources in books and online. Each body paragraph should focus on one piece of evidence, considering the strengths and weaknesses of that particular way of “knowing.”

Most importantly: BE HONEST. Stories about dark and stormy nights and hauntings by random killers and creeps are boring. Much more interesting are family stories where the emotional energy generated by loss and longing lead to paranormal-ish events. As with all writing, the honest-er the better.

That’s it. Next week, as a class we’ll be producing some detailed character sketches of the main players, which I hope to report on here.

Maybe I’ll stop at Denny’s for lunch…

MT

oops

So, throughout the day yesterday, I demonstrated to my classes the proper way to post response papers on their blogs. I thought I deleted all the fake response paper posts I created while demonstrating, but apparently one post had the burning desire to survive, and there it is, right below this one, in all its redundant glory. In addition to the brilliant content in the latter ‘graphs, you will also have noticed my special grammatical construction in the first sentence, placed there, as I’m sure you guessed, in honor of national Talk Like a Pirate Day. Yeaargh!

Response paper #1: Real title

Joe Student

Matt Thomas

Language Arts 9 (or 10)

2 December, 2007

A Very Creative Title

            I’m going to start me first paragraph here. The first paragraph should grab the reader’s attention. There are lots of ways to do this, some of which we’ll discuss this semester. I’ll take care of business here by saying: Look out! There’s a psychopathic killer standing right behind you with his hands stretched out towards your neck! There—got your attention now? Also, notice how the first line of each paragraph is indented 1-tab.

            Here’s another paragraph to show you that indentation business. Also, when you quote from books we read in class, you need a citation to let me know what page number you got the quote from, like this (45). Notice how the period comes after the parenthetical info. Anyway, with the rest of my paper, I would just continue on, responding, like this: Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

            Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

            Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.