Deforestation art: emphasising what is there, and what isn't.

The eleventh grade are preparing to do analysis on an unseen passage of literary or non-literary text. They are expected to consider the text's audience, it's purpose, the style in which it is written, and whether/how it's cultural context is relevant. Yesterday I spent a long time looking at articles about deforestation, and ended up choosing visual art for us to analyse today. We started class with this bland description of deforestation:

#5. Deforestation is speeding up global warming.

→ Global warming is fueled by greenhouse gasses, which are absorbed by trees. As such, our forests help to regulate our climate and stabilize it, despite the pollutants we spread through the air. The more forests we lose, the less of a buffer we have, and the greater the impact of those unabsorbed greenhouse gasses.

I asked them to analyse the tone of the writer, and they had good comments about the informational, unemotional nature of this text, particularly compared to the style of the opinion article we looked at last week. Then I asked them, in the magic groups of three, to analyse and create artist's statements" for artwork inspired by the deforestation reality described above. Here are the images they got, in sets of three:

The Blue Trees, by Konstantin Dimopoulos







The first class took the cake with analysis of these blue trees. Not only did the blue emphasize the leaves and their importance, but it also showed the manipulation of nature that men execute. Also, they noted, the blue and green colour combo evokes the image of the world from a distance encouraging viewers to consider the big picture about climate change. 

It might also convey how from a distance, the complex living organisms and challenges of life on earth are not visible, and the same is true with climate change - we need to look closely to see the detailed truth of how our behaviour affects the environment. 



Ghost Forest, by Angela Palmer

 






Raja asked me if he could say that this tree symbolised the way that human beings rape nature. He knew he was pushing the bounds of what's appropriate, and at first I said it was a fine interpretation but not to put it in his presentation. Then when he and his group members discussed more the violation of nature and disrespect inherent in destroying rain forests, and they compared the language of virgin women to virgin forests, I thought, this is actually a good point to raise.

So I encouraged him to bring it up in his presentation. There were some titters in the class, and he himself struggled to stay composed, but then Wafa, one of the most articulate girls in the class, concurred, and said "I agree with Raja. Even though he is making a raw and harsh comparison, it's accurate because both acts are so violent." It was a strong close to the discussion.

Dr. Lain Woodhouse's photoshop skills:

Van Gogh "Olive Trees with Yellow Sky and Sun"

Most students didn't recognise either of these pieces of artwork. I explained that they are famous paintings and that this artist may have been targeting a art-savvy audience. They said, maybe that more affluent, art-educated crowd would have both a larger carbon footprint and a larger ability to change policy about climate change. 

Basket of Doom triumph of the day by Raya:

certain, exaggerating and deferred. 

Press Conference

Today the eleventh grade held a press conference activity, in which four world leaders were questioned on their stance on climate change by a well-informed press corps. Students heard speeches by these leaders delivered on Saturday/Monday and talked in groups about how to question the leaders on their positions and willingness to make sacrifices in other areas of domestic policy.

The leaders were: Ban Ki Moon, UN Secretary General, Barack Obama, US President, Narendra Modi, PM of India, and Mohamed Nasheed, President of the Maldives.

Press teams came to cover the event from : Palestine, The Maldives, a British publication in the UK, and a business-interest publication in India.

There were great questions, based neatly on text, and now the journalists will prepare a video presentation for their constituents on what the Paris Climate Talks outcomes mean for them.

From the Maldives team:
Mr. Obama, the US has only taken in 10,000 Syrian refugees. Are you prepared to absorb the nearly half a million refugees that would be driven to foreign shores if the Maldives were overtaken by rising sea levels?

From the India Team:
Mr. Moon: Most of the UN countries make significant money off oil and other fossil fuels. Don't you think that if fossil fuel consumption went down, the very funds these countries have pledged to create clean energy would be depleted because their economies would shrink?

From the Palestine team:
Mr. Moon, what needs to happen at these talks in order to improve transparency on all sides?

Here are a few pictures from class:

My classroom is freezing - we could actually use some global warming to encourage hats and jackets to come off.

Who said that?

What a triumph to get to a point in the Duchess of Malfi when I can give the students a selection of speeches by different characters and ask them to identify both the speaker, the person to whom the speaker is talking, and the possible context. I gave the twelfth grade speeches from a scene we hadn't looked at yet. They were beautifully able to identify who might have been speaking, and what they might have been saying. These were difficult speeches. Here are some of them. 

1. 

This proclaims your breeding.

Every small thing draws a base mind to fear,

As the adamant draws iron. Fare you well, sir:

You shall shortly hear form's.

2.

You counsel safely.

Best of my life, farewell, since we must part:

Heaven hath a hand in't: but no otherwise,

Than as some curious artist takes in sunder

A clock, or watch, when it is out of frame,

To bring't in better order.

3.

Look, madam, what a troop of armed men

Make toward us.

O, they are very welcome!

When fortune's wheel is over-charg'd with princes,

The weight makes it move swift: I would have my ruin

Be sudden. I am your adventure, am I not?

1. Student rightly identified that this is probably someone who is likely to insult someone. That put Ferdinand and Bosola in the running. Sama, brilliantly, identified that this would be another "Mean Bosola" moment like the time he insulted the old woman on stage. We've seen both good and bad sides to him, and this would be a bad side. Indeed it is Bosola, speaking to Antonio, saying his lowly birth makes it no surprise that he has a mind as easily drawn to fear as iron to a magnet (adamant).

2. This is perhaps my favourite speech in the whole play. And I was astonished at how ably the students picked up on this simile in which "heaven" or "god" is compared to a "curious artist" who takes apart a malfunctioning clock or watch in order to put it back together in better order, or in better fashion. Our love is so right, he seems to say, that God would only separate us in order to bring us together again in more beautiful fashion later. Unfortunately they will only be brought together again in heaven.

3. Cariola informed the Duchess that there are armed men headed their way. The duchess says "They are welcome!" I was very impressed at how both classes identified the nuanced difference we see in the Duchess here - in the past she has been defiant, with a splash of sass (as Tamara would say). But here she is defiant but in a more defeated way. She seems to have given up on the game, the heist of keeping up with her brothers. In fact, winner of the "best comment of the day" context would be Nadia, who read and commented on this speech of the Duchess's, saying that Fortune's wheel, which represents the way the world works, is o'er charged with princes when people in positions of authority are too controlling, and overrun what nature would have had in store. Thus, they make the wheel turn too quickly, and bring on events that wouldn't naturally happen the way they do, like the death of the Duchess and Antonio. I was so impressed with this interpretation of a line I had been skipping over in my own reading because I didn't understand it.

This week we're going to cruise through as much of the last two acts as we can - this book has been one of the highlights of my teaching career. Along with Romeo and Juliet, Eveline, Raisin in the Sun, and Things Fall Apart. Can't wait for All My Sons in January.

When they lean in and... interrupt

One of my earliest Do Now activities at the beginning of an English A class last autumn was: "What is a pet peeve of yours?" One of mine, I remember writing, was "when other people finish my sentences."

Now I'm trying to reconcile the fact that I don't like it when others finish my sentences, with the fact that I find it ver satisfying when students finish my sentences when I'm lecturing. Yes, they are speaking out of turn, and technically I should give them a warning. But 9 times out of ten the word they come up with works, and 4 times out of 5 it is at least along the lines of what I wanted to say, and 1 time out of three it's a better word than I was about to come up with. It shows me so clearly that they are listening, and thinking along with me, and actively engaged. If no one ever interrupted, I'd never be sure that they aren't sleeping. The students who are most likely to interrupt and cause minor disruption are also the ones who are the most intently focused on what we're saying.

Then, my challenge is to encompass their energy, focus, and to an extent their ejaculations to keep the class dynamic but not chaotic. Whether I'm able to do this seems to depend entirely on how many students there are who are likely to try to finish my sentence. In one of my eleventh grade classes, there are about 8 or 9 people (out of 22) who would love to try to finish every sentence. It's a very vocal, but also very attentive class. The other class has more quiet attentive listeners, and only two really want to finish sentences. That works really well, since other people in the class don't seem to take these two outspoken students' lead. Everyone else raises his hand. That class is my favourite class. They have enough feistiness in them to keep discussion dynamic, and enough critical thinkers so that I never really have to make the "big reveal" about a text - they get to it on their own.

So the moral of the story is, there is no rule about how to run a good classroom. Now that I've gotten to know this class a bit, I'm getting more comfortable breaking rules with them that I wouldn't break with the other class. I love that this job keeps me on my toes.

Bosola, and the first sign of change

On Monday night when Monica and I talked to Olivia on Skype, we told her about our polite disagreement over the interpretation of Bosola's character. Monica thinks Bosola tells whomever he's speaking to what that person wants to hear, and isn't honest. She thinks he's motivated by money, and is driven by ambition.

I think, on the other hand, that he is always honest, and is in that way an anomaly when compared with any other character we have ever read in this course. I don't think he cares about the money, or of rising above his position. I think he only asks what's due to him, and doesn't "reach above what he can see" as he tells Antonio. I think he very much wants to be a good person, (he wants to be like Antonio) but he isn't strong enough to jump track from the criminal life he has led so far.

Basically, Monica condemns him as dishonest because he acts in a dishonest way, while his words imply he might be good. I think that he represents an exception to the rule that "actions speak louder than words". His words, I think, speak louder. He is bound by his past as a criminal and by his own sense of self-loathing, from doing the right thing. He succumbs to that little devil on his shoulder which says "Don't even try to change, bro - you're rotten, you have been since day one, and there's no point in trying to change now. Just take the money and do it."

Olivia encouraged us to air this scholarly debate before the students, to show them that multiple interpretations can be valid. After the class had discussed Bosola during the referred to conversation with Antonio (when Monica thinks he catering to his audience and I think he's being honest) we explained our standpoints. I think the class wasn't quite sure what to do with us. They don't often see teachers express their opinions about the class material, let alone in a way that reveals so much thought and studied contemplation. Monica works with me in one twelfth grade section, and the other section, I'm happy to say, came to almost all the same points that she and I raised in our discussion, without help. Their thoughts about Bosola dazzled me with their insightfulness. They are 16 and 17, and they get this jaded, criminal and tortured man in a remarkable way.

Antonio also says he "gets" Bosola. Take this conversation we looked at today:

Ant. I do understand your inside. 

Bos. Do you so?

Ant. Because you would not seem to appear to th' world 
Puft up with your preferment, you continue
This out-of-fashion melancholy: leave it, leave it.


Bos. Give me leave to be honest in any phrase, in any 
Complement whatsoever. Shall I confess myself to you? 
I look no higher than I can reach:
They are the gods that must ride on winged horses.
A lawyer's mule, of a slow pace, will both suit
My disposition and business: for, mark me,
When a man's mind rides faster than his 
horse can gallop, they quickly both tire.


Ant. You would look up to heaven, but I think 
The devil, that rules i'th'air stands in your light. 

We talked about what we thought those devils could be, that are blocking Bosola out from the sunlight of heaven. I wish I had also the other class's comments, which we drew out even more, but this gives an idea of the thrust of the conversation, and the depth of the comments that this text is inspiring. 

Now, in the eleventh grade at the end of the day, it was time for role play. The prompt:

The first sign of change (a way of stirring up ideas before looking at how the white missionaries enter Umuofia in Things Fall Apart).

These notes came during the feedback after role plays about

- weather and plants growing. The first sign of change was the sun coming out, and other group members portrayed how that action sets in motion a chain of events

- a man who, after years of sitting dejected on the sidewalk as passers by abuse him finally takes a stand against someone who sneers an unkind comment for the umpteenth time.

-  a group of teens in which someone introduces a joint, and others take a hit. One girl refuses. The next day, everyone in the circle except her has a joint. She asks if anyone has an extra and lights up.

These points came during the feedback session. Everything above represents a student comment. When classes like this end, I basically want to give a medal to everyone in the class. I love this! What made this finally particularly satisfying is that at the end we saved three minutes for Basket of Doom and Noura spelled compassion, fulfilling and circumstances correctly, earning her class their first point of the new quarter.

The rich court the poor

Role play classes are my favourite. Monday was spectacular. 

The twelfth grade received this prompt: 

"A rich person courts a poor person."

The role plays showed both genders in each role. In every single role play the poor person was lower than the rich person on stage - some knelt, some were seated begging, others were low down in order to do a chore like washing the floor or shining someone's shoe. During feedback, students identified dynamics that come into play in such relations

- the skepticism of the poor person

- the desire in the rich person to play the "saviour" role or be powerful

- the rich person's desire to escape from the constraints of his own society, from the people who are all like him

- the seeming "purity" of poor people compared with rich people. Saja pointed out that in order to get rich, the rich people may have had to do bad things, rendering them impure. 

- the likelihood that the poor person will say yes, because his family will approve of an advantageous match

We then looked at how the Duchess courts Antonio, saying to him:

Sir, this goodly roof of yours, is too low built; 
I cannot stand upright in't nor discourse,
Without I raise it higher; raise yourself;
Or, if you please, my hand to help you: so.

They identified the symbolism of Antonio's taking her hand to rise up. He is rising in both stature and social class by agreeing to be wooed by and married to her. But he still hesitates:

Ambition, madam, is a great man's madness, 
That is not kept in chains, and close-pent rooms, 
But in fair lightsome lodgins, and is girt
With the wild noise of prattling visitants,
Which makes it lunatic beyond all cure. 
Conceive not I am so stupid but I aim
Whereto your favours tend: but he's a fool,
That being a-cold, would thrust his hands i'th' fire 
To warm them.

The students were so great with their dissection of his words here - looking at how ambition is a madness and prompts men to put their hands right in the fire. Antonio's wariness against ambition contrasts with the duchess's flippant attitude toward the threat her brothers pose to a peaceful union:

Do not think of [my brothers]:
All discord without this circumference
Is only to be pitied, and not fear'd:

Yet, should they know it, 
time will easily Scatter the tempest. 

Her motivation in pursuing this unapproved love may be that her passions are too strong to be contained, and she knows Antonio will never pursue her. As she says,

Now she pays it.
The misery of us that are born great!
We are forc'd to woo, because none dare woo us; 
And as a tyrant doubles with his words,
And fearfully equivocates, so we
Are forc'd to express our violent passions
In riddles, and in dreams, and leave the path
Of simple virtue, which was never made
To seem the thing it is not. Go, go brag
You have left me heartless; mine is in your bosom: 
I hope 'twill multiply love there. You do tremble:
 Make not your heart so dead a piece of flesh,
To fear, more than to love me. Sir, be confident: 
What is't distracts you? This is flesh and blood sir; 
'Tis not the figure cut in alabaster,
Kneels at my husbands tomb. Awake, awake, man! 
I do here put off all vain ceremony,
And only do appear to you a young widow
That claims you for her husband, and like a widow, 
I use but half a blush in's.

I love watching these students sift through and make sense of what these characters are saying. When they are getting at what a character says, I have the impression that they're getting at some core truth of human experience. So many speeches of Webster's quiver with relevance to this condition we all live. The continued relevance of the Duchess's, Antonio's and Bosola's feelings and behaviours is staggering and humbling. 

The Duchess and Antonio wed under Cariola's eye, but she seems to look askance at the man and wife as they exit the hall:

Whether the spirit of greatness, or of woman 
Reign most in her, I know not; but it shews

A fearful madness: I owe her much of pity. 

Cariola presides over the secret wedding of the Duchess and her Master of Household, Antonio

"Just"

I typically forbid the word "just". When I was wee, my big, bold, brilliant sister told me that "just" was a weak word to use, and I've never forgotten her comment. In almost any context, the sentence is stronger without "just".

On Saturday, I had 11th grade students analyse the effect of the opening line from The Stranger by Albert Camus.

"Maman died today. Or maybe it was yesterday. I don't know."

The students revealed their compassionate side by coming up with myriad excuses for Meursault to have such a reaction to his mother's death
- maybe he is overcome with grief, and doesn't know what day is which
- maybe he is trying to avoid thinking about it- the "denial" stage of grief
- maybe he lived far from his mother and messages are a long time in getting to him
- maybe he's trying to sound tough or manly in front of a crowd of buddies (who are thugs?)
- maybe he's suffered a brain injury and doesn't actually understand the facts of an otherwise straightforward report of his mother's death.

We looked then at the following rewriting of the opening, from the perspective of a third person narrator:

"Meursault doesn't know on what day his mother died."

Again we had a round of comments, these identifying what different impression we get of Meursault from this opening. Some people found the narrator more credible, since he was not blinded by the event the way Meursault seems to be. Others were less trusting of the narration, and found Meursault's own words better conveyed the possibility for complexity in this circumstance.

Then we looked at how another character might talk about Meursault's reaction: first person narration, but not from the protagonist's perspective.

Yasmin said another character might say "Meursault knows when his mother died. He's saying that he doesn't." A few people commented on how this changes the reader's understanding of the scene, then Yasmin raised her hand again. "Can I add 'just' to the quote? 'He's just saying that he doesn't.'" Delighted, I asked her why she wanted to add just. She wasn't sure. I asked the rest of the class - what impact does it have to add "just"? Several comments moved in a convincing direction, then Laith clearly expressed what others had been getting at: the "just" diminishes the importance of what Meursault is doing, challenging the legitimacy and integrity of Meursault's behaviour, with one word.  Others chimed in that this gave us a clear impression of the other character's attitude toward Meursault, and it wasn't too favourable.

This was one addition of "just" which I was happy to entertain. The power of a word!

Buzzword

Sometimes I'm amused and puzzled when the same word crops up in a large percentage of the class's writing for a day. This week I've graded the twelfth grade's excellent first round of Paper 2's in which they compare two works of the same genre (drama, for us) and how they treat some theme or convention (jealousy and envy this time); the same students wrote about the sense they get of the court at Malfi in Webster's Duchess of Malfi. I've also graded the eleventh graders' analysis of the final scene of part I of Things Fall Apart, in which a tribesman starts to question the laws and traditions which govern his community.

Well, the word of the week is gloomy. There's a gloomy atmosphere; jealousy and envy are gloomy themes, and the feeling of the court in the Duchess of Malfi is deceptive and gloomy. In some cases this is true, and supported with evidence, in some cases it is entirely unfounded. I'm trying to remember if I said gloomy at some point, or if another students said gloomy, or if it ever appeared on the board... maybe it was simply making the rounds of Facebook. Anyway, I hope they get the gloom out of their systems now so we can move on to more accurate descriptions of our current texts.

They can whip out gloomy again when we get to Arthur Miller in January.

Soccer and settlements

Yesterday I listened to this podcast while walking around the track at the Friends School, where there were "Sports for Life" teams practicing while mums and dads chatted on the sidelines.

Football practice on the pitch behind the Friends School

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/570/the-night-in-question


Daniella Weiss, interviewed in the last segment of the story (starting around 50:00), is a right wing Israeli whose goal in life, as she puts it, is to further the settlement movement in the West Bank. Israeli settlements are established when Israelis (illegally) claim land in the West Bank, and build a wall around it that separates it from Palestinian land.

It was bizarre to listen to this women determined to a woman so bent on taking away the land that belongs to the families seated on the grass next to me, watching their young children play football after school on a Wednesday. Over the roofs of Ramallah, the Bet El settlement, where clashes have occurred during recent weeks, was clearly visible on the hill.

In talking to my colleague Elaine, who knows much more about the Palestinian situation than I do, I gained an appreciation for the way this TAL episode highlights the deep rifts within Israeli society. Too often, so says, the story is told as if the only problems are between the Israelis and Palestinians, but there are significant, irreparable fractioning forces in Israeli society by itself. If peace within each side is a prerequisite for peace between the groups, the prospects look dim, as dim as they would be if they depended on all Americans sharing a view on gun control. 

Group Commentaries in HL

Yesterday the twelfth grade HL class, which is in the middle of a unit working on commentary writing, looked at how to structure a linear essay about  a prose passage. Before we began, I passed around copies of these photos for them to look at in three's:

"Christmas, 1950s", by Saul Leiter

"Snow 1960" by Saul Leiter

Comments on the photos were good, starting with Fakher's "The person doesn't like to go outside" referring to the photographer. Shams thought the second one was probably in a restaurant and hotel, since she could discern that the writing said "seats and dining room". Anas noted, for the Christmas image, that the viewer gets the sense that it's cold ouside but warm inside. I hoped to emphasize that even when we don't know exactly what's going on, we can still discern a feeling and a certain beauty in a piece of art. The prose passages are often like this - sprinkled or even dominated by ambiguity in image or meaning. These images appeared in a March 2014 issue of the New Yorker.

Thus, I hoped, we were prepared to look at the following passage:

He slipped lightly downstairs into the dusky street, counting his money and smiling. It was the best hour of the day in Alexandria — the streets turning slowly to the metallic blue of carbon paper but still giving off the heat of the sun. Not all the lights were on in the town, and the large mauve parcels of dusk moved here and there, blurring the outlines of everything, repainting the hard outlines of buildings and human beings in smoke. Sleepy cafes woke to the whine of mandolines which merged in the shrilling of heated tyres on the tarmac of streets now crowded with life, with white robed figures and the scarlet dots of tarbushes.

Lawrence Durrell, Mountolive

Their task was to decide how to break up this passage for analysis, and what literary elements they would highlight in each section. They did this in groups of three, and the magic of three's presented itself. Reem, one of the strongest commentators in the class, helped Fakher and Ibrahim develop their own good ideas for interpretation. Anas worked with Bisan, who has great ideas but struggles to present them as clearly in writing as she can in speech. 

Reem noted that when the persona in the passage "slipped lightly downstairs" it is as if he "slipped into a painting", since the rest of the passage flows with colours and smudged edges. "He is quickly enveloped in the dusky street," she wrote. Fakher noted that in the middle of the passage the main character seems to have faded into the larger movements of the city, where buildings and humans are painted "in smoke". 

Shams saw that the city was waking up quite gradually, since the "whine" of the mandoline was like the whine of an animal or human waking reluctantly from sleep. Yasmin wrote that the "metallic blue of carbon paper" suggested the specific colours and papers that artists use to paint their own images, so maybe our man is a painter who sees the city through the artist's lens. 

I am hopelessly smitten by literary prose. I find passages like this positively seductive, and wish I could teach paper 1 all year. Well, no I don't because I wouldn't be able to teach The Duchess of Malfi which we have started this week to great effect. Monica is here planning and teaching with me, and I'm so excited about the upcoming month of intense teacher training that her presence represents (on top of what the job offers naturally). 

Rain and Webster, the perfect Monday

This evening it rained for the first time since I arrived. There was even some thunder. I sat in the big chair in my apartment and just closed my eyes and listened. 

Fitting, I feel, that this mini storm (too short!) should come on the say when the twelfth grade began a dark Jacobean tragedy called The Duchess of Malfi which no one has ever heard of (in general, not just in my class of students) but is the best piece of drama I think I've ever read. It's like the HBO series Deadwood - so compelling that you are rapt, drawn into the story by the nature of the characters, who you also find repulsive and disquieting. 

Here, for example, is the way the spy Bosola describes the two brothers for whom he works: 

He and his brother are like plum-trees that grow crooked Over standing-pools; they are rich, and o'erladen with
Fruit, but none but crows, pies, and caterpillars feed
On them. Could I be one of their flattering panders, I
Would hang on their ears like a horseleech, till I were full, and
Then drop off. I pray leave me.
Who would rely upon these miserable dependencies; in expectation to 
Be advanced to-morrow? What creature ever fed worse, than hoping Tantalus? nor ever died any man more fearfully, than he that hoped

For a pardon. There are rewards for hawks and dogs,
When they have done us service: but for a soldier that hazards his 
Limbs in a battle, nothing but a kind of geometry is his last Supportation. 

We spent decent time discussing the simile at the beginning of this speech. These guys have moved on since the days of Langston Hughes's simple similes: a dream compared to a raisin. These are the major leagues. Some students were blindsided by the language, and decided right away they weren't going to try to understand it. The same thing happened last year when we tackled Romeo and Juliet with the tenth grade. I can't wait to watch the twelfth graders gain their sea legs with a text that is probably the hardest thing they've ever read in English. Aside from Spenser's The Faerie Queene, I think this is the hardest thing I've ever read. Monica is a splendid discussion partner and class planner for this book. In fact it's because of her recommendation that we're doing it at all. 

I'll be following closely the development of Bosola in the minds of the students. He is a remarkable character - I hope he speaks even to them even somewhat of how much he speaks to me. 

Things come together, or they fall apart

Discussion, man. Sometimes we nail it, sometimes it falls flat. Today the eleventh grade tackled a tricky subject: the extent to which the world that a writer creates in his piece of fiction is believable and what details allow us to see even bizarre phenomena as credible in the world the writer has created. One class did absolutely splendidly, the other class lagged significantly.

We listened to the opening of this This American Life segment

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/566/the-land-of-make-believe

 which talks about the importance of using details when creating fantasy worlds. The world of chapter nine in Things Fall Apart while not actually fantastical, presents several scenes which strain credulity.

There is the medicine man, who, in an effort to rid a body of an evil spirit, "brought out a short razor from the goatskin bag slung from is left shoulder and began to mutilate the child. Then he took it away to bury in the Evil Forest, holding it by the ankle and dragging it on the ground behind him. After such treatment it would think twice before coming again, unless it was on of the stubborn ones who returned, carrying the stamp of their mutilation -- a missing finger or perhaps a dark line where the medicine man's razor had cut it."

We also get details about one of Ekwefi's former children. A "man told [Okonkwo] that the child was an ogbanji, one of those wicked children who, when they died, entered their mothers' wombs to be born again." Okonkwo says of his wife, "Let her go and stay with her people. In that way she will elude her wicked tormentor and break its evil cycle of birth and death."

Achebe heaps a lot on his readers in this chapter, and I wanted students to consider whether he had sufficiently prepared us for this induction into the superstitious beliefs surrounding death in Umuofia. Do we know enough about the Igbo people that we can orient ourselves in this world so foreign from our own?

Students found their own bizarre moments in chapter nine, then decided in pairs whether they could contextualise them based on details Achebe had previously given. Then a wonderful thing happened. Thanks to comments from Ameer, they also started comparing the level of normalcy in Umuofia to the level of normalcy in their Arab culture. Perhaps we don't mutilate dead children, Ameer conceded, but we use similarly random ways of deciding a woman's value, and we give babies names that we hope will ward off evil later in their lives." Others chimed in with comparisons of "other" and "familiar" behaviour. It was fascinating to see them examine to where they could say "Ah, yes, I can relate to that practice in some way," and where they said "No, that is completely foreign and impossible for me to understand."

The second class never gained momentum about looking properly at the book, and so the discussion never had the grounding in the text that the first class did. The second class is more prone to being off task when doing pair or group work. Next time I would have given, only to that class, specific paragraphs to analyse in chapter 9, to keep them on task.

___________

Later, the twelfth graders nailed an activity about identifying different uses of the conventions of drama. We looked at key moments in The Doctor's Dilemma and they identified how staging, props, costumes, and set influenced the audience's understanding of the action.


 

In this scene, the artist Louis offers Sir Walpole a pawn ticket, all that's left of the cigarette case Walpole lent Louis a few days before. "Was that yours? I wondered whose it was." says Louis disingenuously.

Those who worked with this photo took note of how static and child-like all the doctors look in the seats that Louis has deliberately placed them in. As a class we looked at how he has set them up on his model's stage, and he, next to his brushes, is set to make a drawing, dare we say caricature, of them. In fact that's exactly what he does in this scene - make them look ridiculous and silly for their moralising, and high and mighty attitudes.



In this image, Louis is dying of TB, giving a final speech, while the newspaper man takes (inaccurate) notes about his last words and wishes. Jennifer is disconsolate and BB is moved to tears. Shams made a brilliant comment when I asked her what effect the presence of the newspaper man had on the scene. She pointed out that he is writing the story about the man Louis, his life, his feelings, his wishes for his wife - a human interest story that will captivate his readers. That story contrasts with the "research paper" which BB is so keen to write about Louis's confounding medical case (BB has no idea why the cure has failed). BB cares little for the human side of the story, while the newspaper man indicates that general society doesn't care about the cold science, but is interested in the man himself.

Next week we move onto the Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster, which Monica will join us on. I can't wait! Also, everyone in the class except one student is going to see Hamlet when performed at Ashtar theatre at the end of the month. I picked up the tickets yesterday.

Thursday Squats

The other week I asked Monica how she provided feedback to students when they're writing in class. Do I crane over their shoulders and make comments, do I just respond to students who have questions? She said she's always gotten down on her knees next to the student. "Not very dignified," she acknowledged, "but it stops it from seeming like I'm towering over them."

I've adopted the practice, and when students write, I bob around the room, up to walk and down to read and make suggestions. These low-stakes check-ins with the students seem to build trust as well. I'm not the examiner of their writing as much as their partner on it. At least, that's the way I want to appear. I didn't do that at all last year. I just waited for the writing period to be over. Now, the periods where they're writing are some of my most tiring and most rewarding. The feedback that I give students while they're writing, especially when it stems from their own questions, feels more effective than anything I write in red pen that they see days later and might, just might remember to apply on the next assignment.

Yesterday I was quite out of sorts worrying about how to introduce the following question in my eleventh grade HL language and literature class:

How might two readers interpret the text differently?

For one of their external assessments they must write a critical essay that responds to one of six questions. So far I've been structuring our once-a-week HL session around getting to understand these questions better.

My main predicament was, do I give them something based on the text we're reading, or do I engage the essence of the question through different stimuli. Eventually I want them to be able to respond to this question by considering the perspectives relevant to TFA, like the Umuofians, present-day Nigerians, Europeans, women in more and less patriarchal settings than Umuofia... But I doubted whether they would be ready to jump into those perspectives right away. For example, I considered showing them different images about "progress" in Nigeria over the 100 since our story's setting. Various sources tout the economic progress, the boon to the economy that the discovery of oil provided, and the development of the society based on GDP etc. I thought I might ask them to consider how descendants of tribal Nigerians would view these announcements of "progress" under the European colonists' control.

When I picked up the new copy of This Week in Palestine (an English language cultural magazine) in the library, I looked at the pictures of the Palestinian landscape in it and thought, "I bet the students would *get* the different interpretations of certain views of Palestine. So I collected photos of Palestine-related images that the students could identify different interpretations of.

I was quite nervous, though, about introducing this potentially emotional stimulus into the class. I asked Monica about it and she noted that such discussions can get heated and I should have a contingency plan and be ready to "shut down" the activity if students got too impassioned for the classroom.

This morning before school I practiced a speech in which I told the students that mature conversations about political topics require both high analytical thinking ability, which they have, and an ability to have a measured, reasonable discussion about something they feel strongly about. I delivered the speech at the beginning of class, and we proceeded to discuss the following images. No shut-down required, I'm pleased to report.

We started out all together with this image:

The sign that greets travellers driving from Israel into the West Bank

We set about establishing how four different readers might interpret this sign.
Jeneen offered the opinion of a Palestinian teenager, who felt that it was a funny sign because it presented such a ridiculous misrepresentation of what Palestine is like by implying that it's "dangerous to your lives".
Murad pointed out that an older Palestinian, one who had been alive since long before the first Intifada, would feel angry about this sign, particularly because it would represent a deterioration of the Israeli-Palestinian situation since before 1987, when this sign didn't exist because Palestine wasn't chopped into zones A, B, and C. He also mentioned the anger he would feel at his country being referred to as a mere "area".
Layal assumed the identity of a 30-year-old German intern at a company in Israel, largely ignorant of Palestinian society. He would be scared by this sign, and scared to enter Palestine, this strange place behind the big wall, which would be visible from the checkpoint where the sign is posted.
Ahmad spoke on behalf of the Israeli 18-year-old who would feel good about himself and how civilised he was in comparison to the dangerous beings that exist in Area A. He might also feel indignant though, that this land which he considers part of Israel is not open to him.

After our class discussion Zein told me that she thought a Palestinian teenager would feel glad about this sign. She said she feels satisfied that Israelis would fear Palestinians. It gave her a sense of power over them, when so much of the power is stacked in the other direction.

After our group discussion, each pair got its own photo to work with. For each photo I've included one of the four readers they described.

A goatherd and the separation wall behind him

German foreigner: "OH MY GOD, IT JUST LOOKS LIKE THE BERLIN WALL, BUT KIND OF BIGGER." It's a symbol of a racist, discriminating regime that aims to divide people and ruin their lives.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli PM Benjamin Natanyahu

American, 50 years old
This makes her feel that everything is going to be all right as long as the negotiations go on. And that this whole issue could end as long as both sides agree on peace terms.

A Palestinian throwing rocks at the separation wall

Radical Israeli Mom:
Astonishment at how a Palestinian mother would let her kid go out and do such a horrible thing. He must be raised barbarically, radically, viciously. Disgusted by how a child who is meant to have a pure soul is out fighting against what's right. She hates Palestinians and wishes they would all die. She thinks "this land belongs to us."

The Temple Mount and Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the third most important holy site for Muslims and inaccessible to most.

Palestinian teenager:
Feels anger and rage due to metal wires and stolen religious area. Feels sadness, disappointment of what has become of this beautiful holy place. Feels disgusted by Jews. Feels the urge to resist force.

The Taybeh brewery Oktober Fest in the West Bank

German tourist
Omg, they are civilised. Such wannabes. I didn't know they have parties. I thought they all live in tents. And I also thought they they were strict Arab muslims.

Fallen bodies in the classroom

Headlines are describing how violence is escalating in Jerusalem and the Occupied West Bank. Aside from a larger number of keffiyes around students' necks these past few days, there is little indication of the violence at school. However, in my twelfth grade HL literature class today we got up close and personal with some characters who had been knocked flat by life, like so many Palestinians and Israelis in this conflict. 

The first passage I read to them without them seeing it. It was the opening passage from James Joyce's short story "Grace."

"Two gentlemen who were in the lavatory at the time tried to lift him up: but he was quite helpless. He lay curled up at the foot of the stairs down which he had fallen. They succeeded in turning him over. His hat had rolled a few yards away and his clothes were smeared with the filth and ooze of the floor on which he had lain, face downwards. His eyes were closed and he breathed with a grunting noise. A thin stream of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth."

Then I asked the students to write down all the words they remembered (they didn't know they were going to have to do this.) I had them compare their lists with a partner, then categorise the words based on whether they had a positive or negative connotation. We talked about the overall impression the passage makes. It is truly incredible how much they absorbed in that one reading, and once they had the key, memorable words on their paper, how much analysis of a passage they had never seen they were able to offer.

Someone pointed out that there were two men that helped the guy, which gave a nice feeling to the passage. Reem countered, "but they couldn't help, so it was useless." I asked whether their ability to help was all that mattered. Saja said "Well, at least they tried," and we acknowledged that our sense that this is a setting in which people help each other is comforting, regardless of the success of their efforts to help.

Then I gave them this magnificent passage by Yashar Kamal, featuring another man lying flat out- this one perhaps less fortunate.

"He lay mouth up on the bank, a long, long body with his arms and legs spreadeagled. Beside him a wide pool of blood had soaked into the ground and dried into a crust. His striped shirt was torn from his right shoulder down and a dark streak of hairy chest showed through like a festering wound in the sun. On the left side of the shirt the blood had hardened into a large patch as stiff as a block of wood. Midges swarmed over his face, fighting for his eyes, and now and then a bright-winged green fly whizzed by, slashing through the sunlight like a long flash of lightning. His hands lay wide open, huge wet hands. The pebbles, the dusty burdock shrubs, the tamarisks, the laurels, the plane trees shone wetly as the sun rose. His grey hair fell over his forehead. His head, half sunk in the stream, lay pillowed against a large striated stone. Shoals of tiny fish skimmed up, sniffing at his right ear, then swam off like quicksilver to rally against the next instant. The sluggish river flowed, crystal-clear in the sunlight, its polished green-lichened stones bright as darting fish. The sun was higher now, warming up the earth. A bitter smell rose from the burdock shrubs as the sultry heat sank deeper into the water, the trees and the grass."

For this particular HL class we were in Ustaz Habbas's classroom, a small classroom which has no overhead projector. I had put the text of the passage on the powerpoint I planned to use so we could look at it as a class and annotate it after they had written on their own papers. Since we didn't have the projector, I ended up having us move into a circle to discuss the passage, which in fact was much more effective. I beamed with pride as the students offered top notch analysis of the passage. Saja pointed out that he had probably been dead a while, since the blood had crusted on him. Yasmin built on that, describing how graphic the description of the body was, and how it appealed to touch and visual senses. Tareq pointed out the way the body seemed to be becoming part of the environment, sinking into the mud, getting wet like the other natural elements of the environment. In fact he pointed out how all human qualities and dignity seemed to be fading from this figure, as the only beings paying attention to him are the flies and the minnows, feeding on him as if he were prey, a mere link in the food chain. Shams saw things slightly differently. She noted the more positive imagery describing the setting, while the body was described in negative imagery. 

Much of the imagery of the setting could also be considered violent or disturbing. Her comment led directly to Fakher's contribution about the brightness of the environment compared to the dullness of the body: "It's like, life goes on, but not for this dead man." Dina added to this, pointing out that the sun's motion up into the sky, and the warmth it offers to the environment, doesn't touch or seem to affect the body, emphasising the "stopped" quality of life. I was pleased to see how far these students' analysis has come since a year ago.

Perhaps it seems silly for these students to be inside analysing prose while the clashes rage in other parts of the city. But literature teaches compassion and understanding, and we may consider the fallen fighters on both sides differently because of today's analysis.

Qavi's contribution

Lucky for them, most students at FBS live in Ramallah. Travel around the West Bank is fraught right now. Ahmad, who comes from Nablus, told me today that he left home at 5:30 and arrived in Ramallah at 8:30 on a route that usually takes forty five minutes on public transportation. The checkpoints are closed and ID-checking is meticulous and time consuming. Visit from college representatives are cancelled this week. Two girls in my homeroom described to me how they had ordered food from a restaurant last night, then Israeli soldiers started making the rounds of the neighbourhood, and they called the restaurant to cancel the order, not wanting to bring the delivery person out, and not wanting to open the door to outsiders. 

It feels strange to see headlines on Al Jazeera that are so close to home, yet feel no direct impact myself. I haven't seen soldiers in the streets of Ramallah, and my assessment schedule on poetry analysis is moving ahead as usual. 

But there is a stress in the air, perhaps a lingering impression from the images of young Palestinian men holding white flags as they carry wounded protestors away from the scenes of action. In some ways it feels like a triumph for life to go on unperturbed, with students discussing the SAT II's they took on Saturday, and me planning the next grammar lesson. In other ways it feels as though everyone should be talking of nothing other than the clashes. 

On Sunday at the Ramallah Friends Meeting Qavi shared a reading from the Britain Yearly Meeting's Faith and Practice. It was about how hard it is sometimes, even for those who profess love of humanity, to feel neighbourly towards other imperfect human beings when they confront us. Here's the excerpt:

Qavi read the piece from Phyllis Richards

I suppose the most profound thing we can do, when hatred fuels violence between factions of believers, is to love our immediate neighbours. 

Explaining the happy housewives

A touch of role play goes a long way. 

Last week as we dug into Things Fall Apart with the 11th grade, student comments and writing deplored the treatment of women in Umuofia. The women marry young, bear children, keep house, and never question their husband Okonkwo's authority. Notably, we never actually hear from an unhappy housewife. (We'll look at that this week with HL, in response to their essay question: Which social groups are marginalised, excluded or silenced within the text?)

We also see women in roles of authority over men, we see women honoured and dignified in certain ceremonies, and we see female goddesses like the earth goddess, whose power and authority are indeed awesome. In today's class I wanted to explore with them whether the role of women could be painted with a broad brush. They are inclined to offer opinions and responses which they know to be politically correct and progressive. With regards to women, they are prone to hate on male leaders even if they are benevolent, and to paint women as "slaves" if they are seen serving men. I know that their understanding of women's roles is more nuanced, especially given their context in Arab society, and I wanted to draw it out.

Nour and Kareem were called up to the front and each given a sticky. Kareem's sticky note said "Happy housewife." Nour's sticky note said "Frustrated housewife." I had envisioned them performing separately, but they ended up doing their own improvised dialogue. Kareem sashayed across the front of the class, stirring a bowl of "... yogurt!" and exclaiming how happy he was to be making it. He said "My husband will be home soon, and he'll probably bring me flowers, and chocolates, and then we'll have dinner all together as a family!" Nour looked uncomprehendingly at him and asked how on earth he could be so happy. "We cook, we clean, we stay home, we have to do what others say. What kind of life is this? I want relaxation." When Kareem said "but if you wanted relaxation why did you become a mother?" Nour hesitated, looked in desperation at the audience, and said "One second," and she put her finger to her chin in thought. The class waited, watching her. A second later she raised her face triumphantly and declared: "It was an accident".

It is amazing to me how role play oils the discussion machine. Hands shot into the air to describe what we had seen. Dalia was the first to go beyond observation and point out that one wife seemed to have a sense of honour in her position. Building on that, I asked what seemed to contribute to each person's perspective. We established these notes on the board.

What determines the woman's attitude?

- Did I choose this?
- Do I have support?
- Do I accept that this is my role?
- Do I feel honored?
- Am I willing to follow a routine?

We then looked at the following passage from TFA.

"Anasi was a middle-aged woman, tall and strongly built. There was authority in her bearing and she looked every inch the ruler of the womenfolk in a large and prosperous family. She wore the anklet of her husband’s titles, which the first wife alone could wear.

She walked up to her husband and accepted the horn from him. She then went down on one knee, drank a little and handed back the horn. She rose, called him by his name and went back to her hut. The other wives drank in the same way, in their proper order, and went away."

They annotated in pairs for how the woman is portrayed, and then we discussed as a class. They had good comments on the use of particular language, but what really hit the nail on the head was that they noted how this woman has a strictly defined role, but seems to have honour and fulfilment too. 

Jeneen said "No woman wants to stay home and cook and clean, so it's obvious that the women in this village are unhappy." Many students had a reaction to that, and pointed out that loads of women, including their own mothers, are happy to be home as mothers and wives. Hala recalled the character in the movie "Mona Lisa Smile" who has the opportunity to go away to college but chooses to get married and start a family. 

Shady referred to his mother's research in feminist studies, for which she has conducted interviews with mothers which revealed their contentedness in their domestic roles. Basel pointed out that many women who do feel honoured and supported are happy to be housewives. I promised Jeneen an opportunity to respond at the end of class, and she said indignantly, "What I meant was..." Jeneen is not the only person in this class who often says or writes things she doesn't mean. I hope she'll (they'll) think twice before making a broad statement about "how women feel" again.

Mohammad almost won a point for the class in Basket of Doom, but "pursue" doomed the effort.