Caryl Churchill's Play

Here are two versions of the play I'm covering with the 12th grade HL section presently:

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JFpMH963sk

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWKGbjJ7LxE

It's called "Seven Jewish Children, a play for Gaza" by British playwright Caryl Churchill. I asked my students to watch both of these productions and compare them for what each production emphasises. I decided to do the assignment as well, and here's what I've written:

Audiences exposed to both the Jennie Stoller and the Warwick student drama productions of Seven Jewish Children might find themselves deliberating on what makes theater theater. The word theater comes from the Greek word theastrai, which means “to behold”. To behold is to see or observe. By this definition much of life could be considered theater; perhaps that it Churchill’s point. The Stoller production strips many of the elements of traditional drama that we count on to guide our understanding of what we observe, such as lights, sound effects, character development and staging. The Warwick production provides more encouragement for an audience member to draw certain conclusions about what he observes.

The Stoller show is theatrically barren. By removing all bells and whistles from the production, the director emphasizes the words of the script, and makes the audience do all the work of interpreting them. The viewer gets no help in deciding which of the rapidly delivered lines is true. Some are obviously biased, “Tell her she should be proud of the army”, some unsuspicious, “Don’t frighten her”. In between are dozens of lines that the viewer must quickly appraise as true or untrue; he realizes that distinguishing truth from falsehood is not easy. Typically in theater, a line’s truthfulness can be judged based on the known nature of the character who says it (Bosola’s criminal past makes all his lines suspect) or from a lighting, sound, or stage cue that indicates the integrity of the speaker (like Walter’s obvious drunkenness, or Lewis’s sneaky side glances to watch the effect of his lies on the doctors.)

        Stoller’s one-woman performance also emphasizes that one Jewish descendant could be experiencing all these contradictory voices. Her insistent tone at points also reveals the desperation people have, in general, to be in control of how a story is told. The fervor of her inner discussion shows a fear that the truth will be revealed despite whatever the parents decide to “tell her”.

        The Warwick production makes the viewer’s job of interpretation easier by including production elements which encourage the audience to be immediately suspicious of the conversation being held on stage. The darkness and sinister prelude of unintelligible whispers immediately indicates lies and hidden truths. The lamps give a ghostly appearance to the actors, and all deliberations about what to tell and not tell seem to be happening in dimly lit corners, where plots are hatched. In the Stoller production, it was possible to assume the innocence of the speaker; here innocence is not a plausible conclusion, because of the staging.

The multiple actors emphasize that the conflict is more about the parents’ feelings, not the actual dilemma of what to tell the girl (she probably won’t care as much as they do anyway). The discussion about what to tell the daughter is simply the catalyst for a debate about personal feelings on a cultural history, which may not be a topic the parents would bring up unless they were forced to, even if they had a lot to say (and they clearly do).

        The multiple actors also reveal, importantly, that one rancorous comment can fuel someone else’s rancor. At several points one person’s anger seems to provide justification for another person’s even more discriminatory statement. It’s as if one person’s small-mindedness frees another person to be even more bigoted. This is how hate becomes a cultural phenomenon, seen here at the root, in the family unit. Thus Churchill portrays a societal problem on a micro level. This is what Miller does in All My Sons when he shows the generational gap between those who lived through the Great Depression and those who have known only post-war prosperity. He also shows the conflict between capitalist values and citizen ethics within one family. Here, Churchill shows the conflicts that cause division within Israeli society regarding their past, their religion and their politics. The single family is a microcosm of a problem that exists in society at large.

The idea of gender enters the picture in the Warwich production. While sometimes Stoller impersonates a Jewish grandparent, her portrayals are androgynous; here, the men have the roles which most strongly discourage telling the daughter the unadorned truth. The men counsel against encouraging her to desire any form of connection with the Palestinians.

If I didn’t know the situation of Palestine, I would think this play were a simple recounting of Jewish struggles until the final scene, when I would be made very uncomfortable with the declarations of the ranting speaker. Even then, though, I might think the play were making a statement about the dangers of individual extremism, not structural oppression and ongoing power imbalances between nations. Thus either production will promote justice for Palestine only if the audience has some idea of the political leanings of the playwright. When one character says “The whole world knows,” is it unclear which history she is referring to: the injustice committed against the Palestinians, or the Jews’ history? The possibility that she is referring to Palestinian suffering stings any viewer who is aware of how skewed is the world’s perception of the Palestinian narrative. I hope that viewers appreciate the play’s message that the phrases and claims we see splashed across newspapers as if they are incontestable fact, are in fact as flimsy as the one-liners flung across a living room in a domestic debate designed to preempt and silence a child’s legitimate questions.

Hiking in a wadi

On Friday morning a larger group than normal met at Al Manara central circle in Ramallah to go hiking. Abu Abed, the shared taxi driver who transports the group every week, had to recruit three other drivers, and we set off in our caravan, not in the normal northern direction, but toward Qalandia.

As we trundled past the checkpoint and the grafitti'd wall, nearly desolate at 7:30 am, we swung round a roundabout where Marwan and Leen jumped aboard one of the services. Marwan, coffee cup in hand, smiling, greeted all with a jovial wave. We continued in the direction of Jericho, and stopped at the sign marking sea level, where a camel sits perpetually, waiting for tourists. Leen, Marwan's fifth grade daughter, ate a Kinder Surprise egg for breakfast while the adults pinched her cheeks and asked her kee-fiq?

The photos which follow come from the hike which followed, one of the best I've taken since being here. The quotes in the captions are things Leen said along the way.

Sunrise in Ramallah before leaving the house

"Baba, if we get lost, just follow the poop."

"Do you want to have a barking lesson?"

"It's a good thing I have good instincts: they were divas."

"My good English comes from watching films."

"That dog was cray-cray."

"Yeah, I talk to her sometimes. Well, no, not really I don't."

"It looks like there's some skin [of an avocado] in it....  The skin's not bad. ....Just kidding it's disgusting."

"Don't you love tuna?"

"You took the boring way."

Comments that intend to derail the lesson

I read an article in Change English this weekend about a student in a class who was interesting in challenging the teacher's script for the lesson with her own questions designed to derail the discussion. The author of the piece noted that the girl was quite good at doing this. She raised reasonable and legitimate objections to the teacher's or the lesson's assertions. The teacher engaged her questions and was able to allow them to lead to significant learning for both the young girl and her classmates. 

In my eleventh grade classes there are some boys who regularly ask questions that are subtle attempts to derail the lesson. They are also adept at doing so, and point out inconsistencies in what I'm saying or what the text is presenting, or what the task is demanding. These boys are smart, dynamic, and engaged. They are able to ask such questions because they're paying attention. These are some of the highest value students in the class, both in terms of my development as a teacher, and as quality control officers for the rest of the class. If they weren't there, the others would get a less complete product. They catalyse lots of unforeseen learning. 

However, their questions are hard to field. I used to just shut them down all the time. "Not the time, A. Ask me after class." But when A. asked me during a discussion of a passage of Macbeth what the difference is between ' and ", I took a few moments to answer the question. I didn't really think about responding, I just did. Looking back on it later, I thought, "That question had nothing to do with the discussion at the time. Should I have engaged it or told him to ask me later?" I concluded that it was probably good to take a few minutes, because the class might not otherwise have ever learned the difference between the two marks. I'm not planning to include that point in any future lesson. And everyone was paying absolutely full attention when I was describing the difference in their use, probably because it wasn't part of my original lesson, but they saw that I deemed it important enough to cover together. 

What was strange was that later that same class, A. raised his hand during another intense moment of discussion and asked the meanings of all the thou/thee/thy variations. I completely shut it down, saying "A., let's stick to the question we're pursuing right now. That's not relevant to our understanding of this part." Anyone could have legitimately argued that the understanding of what thou/thy/thee means is far more relevant to their comprehension of the text than their understanding of the difference between ' and ". I think by the time he asked the second question I had run out of extra minutes I was willing to dedicate to anything outside my lesson plan. 

Today in the Macbeth discussion, what I had planned on being a very quick conversation about the distinction between saying someone is "mentally unstable" which some had claimed for Macbeth in last week's writing, and "emotionally unstable", turned into a much longer conversation about whether Macbeth is crazy or not. Does it make you crazy just to think about murdering someone? Is using "crazy talk" the same as "being crazy"? With each passing comment I was concerned that the rest of my lesson was getting squeezed, and wondered where to cut it off. But each comment was closely enough tied to Macbeth that I didn't want to close it down. Eventually we moved on, and even though the activity surrounding Macbeth's dagger monologue was not as lengthy as I hoped it would be, I don't think I would do things differently the next time around. 

I'm still struggling to know how to get more voices from this class involved. Perhaps it's unrealistic, but when there are 17 people in the class, (several absent today) I want to hear from everyone. At least i know that during pair work they're all talking to each other about the text. 

What happens after the good comment?

Sometimes when I'm planning a class I look at a piece of text and think, "I would really like them to see X." With the Sons passage we were looking at today I wanted them to see the ways in which George is different from the other characters so far, how he's much less concerned with maintaining the peace and marginalising the truth for the sake of those whose feelings might be hurt.

Sometimes, in the middle of discussion, someone will make a great comment pointing out exactly what I hoped they would catch onto.


....


And I'm never sure what to do at that moment! Of course, I want to shout out and say "YES! Fantastic! That's just what I was hoping you'd see!" But I usually end up responding in a way that's not too different from how I respond to other comments; I don't want to blatantly privilege some comments too highly over others that are also legitimate.

In my planning, I sort of think "OK, and we'll try to work toward a recognition of this point." But when that recognition comes neatly and clearly, the way it often does early on in 12-2's conversations, I wonder how I can help students dwell on a certain comment more than on others. I often ask a question like "What do others think of that idea?" which actually feels very obvious, and doesn't often solicit very good responses.

Is it enough that someone just says the good point? I almost want the whole class to stop and write on that idea for a moment, or everyone to turn to his neighbour to discuss the idea for a few minutes.

It's actually much easier when the make points I haven't thought of before, that I realise as they are saying them, are actually top notch. At that point, I am saved by my enthusiasm: I simply can't hold back the fact that I think their comment is brilliant, and follow-up questions bubble out of me. That usually does elicit good comments from others. I also realise that when a good comment is made by one student, it allows me to return to that point later on for reemphasis. A comment's value is rarely realised the moment it's shared - it's value is in the way it comes back in future discussions.

Tension in All My Sons

Today was our first day back in the class room after three snow days. It took a few minutes to warm back up to All Our Sons and re-establish the fairly complicated layering of characters and the way they relate to the truth at this point.

Mother knows her husband is guilty but won't acknowledge that he sent out bad airplane parts to the navy because that would implicate him in his own [pilot] son's disappearance.

Keller maintains that he is innocent, though he knows the full weight of his crime. It seems that to him, the idea of the truth being exposed is too frightening to contemplate. Not only does he want the truth concealed, he wants Deever to be vindicated, since Keller feels that if he can get the other characters to forgive Deever, he will essentially be earning their forgiveness himself, for a crime of which they don't know he's guilty.

What became interesting in the second class was their recognition of what a momentous moment this is for Chris if indeed he is starting to doubt his father. They listed the implications of this realisation on the board.
- My father sent faulty airline parts to the army. Hence, my father cares more about the business than the lives of America's soldiers.
- My fiancee will probably leave me because my father is guilty of a crime for which her father is serving time behind bars.
- I might have to cut ties with my father if this is true.
- My rather put an innocent man behind bars.
- My mother has been lying to me since the event happened.
- All the neighbours are right in their suspicions about my father's morals and conduct during the war.

Next class I hope we get a chance to return to this and acknowledge that the fall out from knowing the truth may be so large that we would do anything to keep it under wraps.

N's comment was good. She noted that when she's arguing with her sister, even when she realises herself that she's wrong, she doesn't submit to her sister, but just continues to listen and respond as if she thinks her sister is crazy. That's exactly what Chris does here, calling George's voice "The Voice of God!" and telling him he's a "Little boy" and threatening that if he doesn't "cut it out I'll throw you out of here." Both classes picked up on how suspicious this behaviour was in Chris, indicating that he may be experiencing doubts himself.

This scene is so tense. N and M were terrific readers in the second group. The readers in the first group didn't bring it to life quite as well, but the class's comments were just as astute. Which brings me to write the post above this one about whether talk is enough.

My new favourite literary device

Tomorrow with the 11th grade we're looking at Macbeth's first hallucination, in which he sees a dagger floating in the air before him. He says,

Come, let me clutch thee.

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still____

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight_____

or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain_____

I see thee yet, in form as palpable

As this which now I draw______

Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;

And such an instrument I was to use______

Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,

Or else worth all the rest_____

I see thee still,

And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,

Which was not so before______

I have taken out the end punctuation so students can add the punctuation they deem appropriate.

I am captivated by the effect of Macbeth's direct address of the knife. His childlike fascination with the vision, his misty-eyed, unselfconscious state of wonder, reveals a tenderness in him we haven't seen yet. He seems to have stopped thinking, and is just reacting to what happens in front of him. I find it endearing.

I want to be able to tell the students what kind of device this is, and so I searched "direct address of inanimate object." An apostrophe, I learned, is not always an address of an inanimate object, but it does have this same effect of breaking with the normal timbre of the play's flow of dialogue.

Look at this magnificent example from Julius Caesar:

• "O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, / That I am meek and gentle with these butchers! / Thou art the ruins of the noblest man / That ever lived in the tide of times." Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 1

And this one from Melville.  

• "Ah Bartleby! Ah Humanity!" Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener"

I think we all speak in apostrophe more often than we realise. I certainly do, during my own unpublished monologues. They capture our desire to be heard and not heard at the same time, I think. 

Are those the words of a lady?

Today in the 11th grade we introduced the idea of the "Great Chain of Being". We contrasted the idea with the study in "upward social mobility" that we talked about in September. In September we looked at this image:

And we read the scene from Raisin in the Sun from which these lines of dialogue come:

Walter: Son -- son, what do you want to be when you grow up?

Travis: A bus driver.

Walter: A what? Man, that ain’t nothing to want to be!

Travis: Why not?

Walter: ‘Cause, man -- it ain’t big enough -- you know what I mean.

Today we returned to this image and I asked them what they remembered about our discussion. They talked about following dreams and rising above difficulty, and being independent.

All good comments to contrast with the idea of the Great Chain of Being, which establishes the following power hierarchy:

We established that this was not considered a ladder in Renaissance Europe. You were born where you were born and didn't move from that point. In fact, people believed that violation of this "natural order" would result in disorder and chaos within the natural world. 

I asked students, in pairs, to find lines from the play that foreshadowed disorder in the natural world. They did so much better than I expected them to! They picked up right away on everything that the Witches tell Macbeth and Banquo, ("Thou shalt be King hereafter," "Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none.") By saying these things, argued A., they give rise to the idea in Macbeth's head that he ought to violate the chain of being. Besides, S. added, the witches indicate from the very beginning that "Fair is foul and foul is fair," foreshadowing chaos. 

Others noted that Macbeth is aware of the consequences that his rupturing the chain will have, and tells nature to look away: "Stars, hide your fires, let not light see my dark and deep desires". 

Banquo also identifies the "Instruments of evil" who will "betray us in deepest consequence." A. pointed out that when Macbeth talks about "bloody instructions which, being taught, return to plague the inventor", he expresses the idea of a "plague" that certainly violates natural order. 

I was so impressed how quickly they jumped on this idea, and the energy with which they pursued it in the text. 

The rest of the class was dedicated to a game. Students were in teams of four. We established that the setting of our scene was Macbeth's castle when Duncan arrives for dinner. They were very familiar by this point with Macbeth's hesitations/vacillations on the subject of killing Duncan, and with Lady Macbeth's desire to encourage Macbeth to do the deed. I projected six quotes in sequence, and had them identify the speaker for each, and to note the use of either violent/masculine diction or gentle/feminine diction in one or two words. 

These are the quotes from scenes six and seven. 

1. We will proceed no further in this business.

He hath honored me of late, and I have bought

Golden opinions from all sorts of people. (Macbeth)

2. Conduct me to mine host. We love him highly,

And shall continue our graces towards him.

By your leave, hostess. (Duncan)

3. What beast was it

That made you break this enterprise to me?

When you durst do it, then you were a man. (Lady Macbeth)

4. If we should fail? (Macbeth)

5. Screw your courage to the sticking place,

And we’ll not fail. (Lady Macbeth)

6. I am settled, and bend up

Each corporal agent to this terrible feat. (Macbeth)

I was uncertain how this would go. I've never tried to use a guessing game to cover an essential scene like this - usually we do something more studious; I have often given a handout with the speeches like this and they have to identify the speakers, but it's not a game setting. But given how well they knew the context, this seemed to work, especially on a rainy day when many were absent taking the SATs. 

Once we clarified the answers, the bell rang, so we didn't get to discuss the diction choices very much, but this may be one of those cases where the learning is fairly complete by the end of the activity, even without the plenary. At any rate, we'll probably return to this scene at the beginning of next class just so we can watch this film adaptation with Judi Dench and Ian McKellan. The relevant scene starts at 29:00. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpKWWK0Pj34

Macbeth's Inner Committee

The 11th grade spent two full days on Macbeth's monologue, in which he vacillates between killing the King and remaining a loyal subject. Here's his monologue from Act I:

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well

It were done quickly: if the assassination

Could trammel up the consequence, and catch

With his surcease success; that but this blow

Might be the be-all and the end-all here,

But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,

We'd jump the life to come. But in these cases

We still have judgment here; that we but teach

Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return

To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice

Commends th’ingredients of our poison'd chalice

To our own lips. He's here in double trust;

First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,

Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,

Who should against his murderer shut the door,

Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan

Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been

So clear in his great office, that his virtues

Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against

The deep damnation of his taking-off;

And pity, like a naked new-born babe,

Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed

Upon the sightless couriers of the air,

Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,

That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur

To prick the sides of my intent, but only

Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself

And falls on the other.

On Wednesday we got into a circle and two students came into the middle, tasked with reading the monologue in alternation, switching speakers each time they reached a ; : or .

Both classes did remarkably well at this task and read the challenging language with confidence. Then, the entire class had the same task: we split into to sides of the circle, and alternated reading the whole thing together. Then, still in the circle, I asked them what seemed to be going on. I love this. They hear the words at first, and are completely convinced they have no clue what Shakespeare is talking about, then when they start to piece together meaning with little phrases, they put their powers of analysis and intuition seriously to work. I was particularly impressed with how the larger section honed in on some of the most important but also the most abstract and metaphorical lines right away: O. noticed the sense that something bad once created will return to plague the inventor. Bingo! S. saw that, yes, that was the same idea expressed by the poisoned chalice returning to our own lips. "Karma!" chimed in M. from across the circle.

With one class, I asked them to break into groups to split the monologue into six distinct voices in Macbeth's head. This was during first period, with the more generally focused class. This task produced some of the best group work I've witnessed - students perennially off task during group work were engaged in discussion of where the new argument or thought started.

With the other section, meeting during the notorious fourth period and generally less focused during group work, we established these six voices together, and they were brilliant. I was worried I'd have to find gentle ways to tell many people they were actually breaking sentences right in the middle of significant meaning, or to continually remind them that the end of a line doesn't mean the end of a thought. But they nailed it, every time. Some of their interpretations were new to me, but they defended them well.

Then, in their groups of six, they practiced reading the monologue in six parts, emphasising the different voices. Some entertained British accents for the occasion!

I was planning to move on to Lady Macbeth's attack on Macbeth's manhood on Thursday, but I realised that the monologue still had some important potential. At the beginning of class I asked students to look at the graphic above and remember the class from the day before. Then I asked for an improvisation volunteer. B. came to the front, and I said "Please strike a pose that shows what you think Macbeth might look like during this monologue." He contemplated for a moment, then asked if he could do one simple repeated motion instead of a freeze frame. "Yes." He started pacing back and forth, using his hands to indicate contemplation of two paths. It was quite convincing. I asked him to continue and asked S. to show another image of Macbeth during the same monologue. She looked thoughtful. Then Z added a Macbeth brandishing a knife. I asked the class to identify lines or sentiments from the monologue they saw represented in their classmates' poses.

I remember doing this kind of thing with Monica last year with Romeo and Juliet. After a day of successful acting and role play, we once included a visual recap like this one, involving a gesture to the role play of the day before to bring that visceral understanding of the text back to the forefront ofthe students' minds. It worked quite well yesterday, as I then sent them to work in groups of three on a small section of the monologue (divided along colour lines above) to identify the meaning and the stylistic elements that contributed to meaning (the metaphors, similes, word choices).

Sometimes when I circulate I have the impression that groups I'm not working with are not doing anything productive. This impression is greatly diminished with Shakespeare - they carry the momentum of class discussions into group work because it's such a puzzle. Sometimes with simpler text they can easily convince themselves that they know what's going on even when there is much left to mine. With the Shakespeare, they know they have to work for it, and they want to.

With 20 minutes left, I asked them to annotate the projected passage, then the groups presented their findings. I'm so glad we spent another day on this passage, because by the end I think they must feel very good about the thorough understanding they have. Their homework is to write a paragraph about what makes the passage notable.

At the end of class with the larger section, they moved efficiently between their presentations and we had time for Basket of Doom- the last round of the semester. N. spelled sufficient, interrogation and accompany correctly to earn her class a star. That section is getting cookies for this quarter.

Money Matters

Last night I went through no fewer than 15 lesson plans (and many more partial ones) in my head, wracking my brain for what to do with the 12th grade today on All My Sons. I had designed a lesson on looking at Chris's "survivor's guilt" at being the only man from his military company in WWII to have survived and returned to a newly prosperous community. The more I read the scene, the more I was struck by Chris's ambivalent attitude toward money, and how it seems to be evidence of a larger ambivalence in society generally, epitomised in post-war America, where money is both vilified and glorified.

So I decided to make the lesson about dirty money.

Here's how class went.

"Do you know what a haiku is?"

(some general ideas - it's a poem, it's short)

We established that it was  Japanese poetry form consisting of three lines: the first and third lines have 5 syllables, the second line has 7 syllables.

Then I asked them all to write haikus. Subject: dirty money.

Here's the one I wrote:

Where did it come from?
Well, I don't want to tell you.
Where can I get some?

I didn't collect them, so I can't post theirs, but there was mention of "men inside suits", "the streets", "black market", "unearned capital", and "I'm-a get some, yo."

After delivering the haikus, I asked them what dirty money was, which led to a much more interesting conversation than I had anticipated. At first we were in rows and people were not listening well to each other, so I asked them to move into a circle. Immediately the quality of the discussion improved, and students in my smarter than smart 12-2 class pinpointed quickly the difficulty with defining what "clean" money is. Layali said that white-collar crime, like embezzling and money laundering, creates dirty money.

Others said anything illegal creates dirty money, but a handful contended that drug selling and prostitution don't necessarily earn "dirty money". If money is earned, it's clean, some said. Someone said "A teacher earns clean money." Phew! But then others pointed out  that some teachers write essays for their students, and take money for that, and then grade them highly, which they said is unethical. The understanding of the class changed quite dramatically, and it became clear quickly that it's hard to define dirty money.

I asked them to look at the text to find a line that revealed the nature of Chris and Keller's relationship to money. Their choices revealed the ambivalence I'd noticed in my own reading.

Chris: "[when I came home from the war] I felt...what you said...ashamed somehow. Because nobody was changed at all. .... I felt wrong to be alive, to open the bank book, to drive a new car, to see the new refrigerator. I mean you can take those things out of a war, but when you drive that car you've got to know that it came out of the love a man can have for a man, you've got to be a little better because of that. Otherwise what you have is really loot, and there's blood on it. I didn't want to take any of it.

Compare that sentiment to this open embrace of surplus and prosperity, only a paragraph later:

Chris: "Oh Annie, Annie ... I'm going to make a fortune for you!"

For Chris, the returned soldier, money is the problem, but it's also the solution.

Analysing Keller, several students said that his repeated insistence that the money he earns from his successful business is clean reveals that he doesn't actually feel good about it - otherwise why would he force the issue so much? His poorly concealed hesitation is also contrasted with his overt embrace of material wealth.

Keller: "It's good money. There's nothing wrong with it."

"I'm going to build you a house, stone, with a driveway from the road. I want you to spread out, Chris, I want you to use what I made for you. I mean with joy Chris, without shame... with joy."

Then later, unabashed enthusiasm about his wealth:

"There's gonna be a wedding, kid, like there never was seen! Champagne, tuxedos...!"

I was so pleased that in each class students identified that Chris feels guilty just for being alive and having money, not for having done anything wrong in the war (while his father actually did make unethical business decisions during the war, which makes his money more technically "dirty").


I posed the question to the class in light of Chris's sentiments: "is it possible to have clean money, after a war?" We identified that when others have died to provide us with the opportunity to live free and prosperous, there is a guilty burden that accompanies it. Fabulously, two students pointed out that if we all followed Chris's logic, we'd all be dealing in dirty money. "I shop at H&M, and I know they use sweatshops, but I still do it. It's easier not to think about it."


Another pointed out, "If that's we use Chris's logic, than any time we buy diamonds, it's with dirty money, since people died in Africa to procure those diamonds." They continued to discuss the reasons we are not moved by the suffering we know went into the products we consume. The young man (for indeed, today they were not boys and girls but young men and women!) who raised the point said, "we're too far from them. We don't have enough reminders of them being there, suffering." Others pointed out that such consumer behaviour is normalised, and since we know everyone else is doing it, we're likely to keep it up.

Not to tout my subject area, but I feel that the literature does a much better job of bringing up conversations about ethics than any "ethics" class that blatantly posed the question "Is it OK to buy sweat shop clothes?" would. I like it when the students raise the ethical questions, having been spurred by the literature to think beyond the text. So cool.

At the end of the class we spent several minutes comparing the portrayal of money in All My Sons to the portrayal of money in other plays we've studied. Ameer pointed out that the doctors who made money unethically in "The Doctor's Dilemma" had no qualms about what they were doing. They didn't distinguish between clean and dirty money. That provided a salient contrast to the Keller men, who seem painfully aware that they are implicated in the "crime of prosperity" that underscored post-war American life in the comfortable suburbs.


We returned for a moment to Bosola to consider whether the money he earned for spying was "dirty". Everone said "Yes" at first, which is rare. Of course, my heart jumped out because I have a soft spot for Bosola. I pushed them on it, saying "You said if someone works hard for the money, it's clean. No one works harder than Bosola in Duchess." One of the smartest students in the class said, "I don't know how to define dirty money." I think that for the other students to hear someone who is usually so confident admit uncertainty was important. My repeated assurance that "It's ok not to know!" is surely much more powerful coming from a star peer. 

Fathers and Sons

Today in the twelfth grade we looked more closely at the setting of Arthur Miller's All My Sons,  and at a conversation between the man of the household, Joe Keller, and his son Chris.

The play opens on a scene in the back yard of an American family, "August of our era," writes Miller. Miller also described the initial atmosphere of the play as one of "undisturbed normality". Last class we actually watched the opening intro clip to Desperate Housewives season 1 so everyone had an image of what suburb life looks like.

We talked about how setting up a scene of perfect normality creates the expectation of a conflict to come - we have a sense of apprehension, as if we're experiencing the calm before the storm.

Today, we looked at these more historically accurate portrayals of suburban life after the war (the play was first performed in 1947).





And we talked about the transition between the extreme lack of the Great Depression with the extreme abundance and prosperity of the post-war era, and how each family felt entitled to its own piece of land, its own house, car, appliances and happy family.

We recognised that we, at the beginning of the play, zoom in on the back yard of a house very much like one of these in the planned suburb of Levittown, PA:



Then, we looked at this conversation on the board, and I had two students read the exchange. After reading it, I asked them to try to identify which party was the father, and which the son.

_______________: {after slight pause} What was she doing out here at that hour? {_______________ silent.  With an undertone of anger showing} She's dreaming about him again.  She's walking around at night.

_______________: I guess she is.

_______________: She's getting just like after he died. {slight pause} What's the meaning of that?

_______________: I don't know the meaning of it. {slight pause} But I know one thing.  We've made a terrible mistake with _______________.

_______________: What?

_______________: Being dishonest with her.  That kind of thing always pays off, and now it's paying off.

_______________: What do you mean, dishonest?

_______________: You know Larry's not coming back and I know it.  Why do we allow her to go on thinking that we believe with her?

_______________: What do you want to do, argue with her?

_______________: I don't want to argue with her, but it's time she realized that nobody believes Larry is alive any more.  {_______________ simply moves away, thinking, looking at the ground}  Why shouldn't she dream of him, walk the nights waiting for him?  Do we contradict her?  Do we say straight out that we have no hope any more?  That we haven't had any home for years now?

_______________: {frightened at the thought} You can't say that to her.

_______________: We've got to say it to her.

_______________: How're you going to prove it?  Can you prove it?

_______________: For God's sake, three years!  Nobody comes back after three years.  It's insane.

_______________: To you it is, and to me.  But not to her.  You can talk yourself blue in the face, but there's no body and no grave, so where are you?

_______________: Sit down, _______________.  I want to talk to you.

_______________: (_______________ looks at him searchingly a moment) The trouble is the Goddam newspapers.  Every month some boy turns up from nowhere, so the next one is going to be Larry, so...

I was so pleased with their work. They noted that the one who sympathised with the mother was probably the father, since the father is more likely than the son to think of Mother's feelings. The son was probably the one who expressed frustration with lying and anything that holds people in the past. In both classes, students picked up on the fact that the father was more likely to be "frightened at the thought" of something, since older people are more conservative and resistant to change (they referred to Mama in A Raisin in the Sun) and both classes also noted that the only line that represented an anomaly was the line in which it appeared that the son was saying "Sit down, Dad, I want to talk to you." All agreed that this sounded like the kind of thing a father would say. But then they considered their (nascent) knowledge of Chris and Keller, and remembered that Keller is described as being uneducated, and so that might prompt Chris to take a more measured, even patronising tack with him. It also might show a son who's aware of his father's conservatism and knows he needs to introduce new ideas delicately.

I was so, so pleased with their work on this section. Then they continued to have great comments on Keller's desperation when Chris threatens to leave the business and establish his family elsewhere. "Don't be thinking like that..." Keller repeats to his son, fairly begging him, unhinged by the idea that his legacy, the business, would die out like a flame upon his own retirement.


Later on in the day, the 11th graders did fantastic work on Macbeth passages. I felt like a banshee, jumping between groups encouraging students to pay attention to the words they knew, not the words they didn't know. They really are very perceptive, if they can just get over the initial shock of Shakespeare's language. It's very hard text for them, but I look forward to watching them grow more confident in their interpretation.

This evening I was positively engrossed in the following article on a female Iranian activist, Asieh Amini. She and her colleagues are true heroines. What a powerful reminder to count my blessings, as a woman and a resident of a culture that honours my freedom of expression. Warning, it's a heavy hitting article.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/04/war-of-words-annals-of-activism-laura-secor