1. Read the following short story.
2. Write a one page, single spaced response answer to the following question: What was Vonnegut trying to say with this story?
Turn your TYPED written work in on Monday.
HARRISON BERGERON
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
Some things about living still weren't quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron's fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.
It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.
George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel's cheeks, but she'd forgotten for the moment what they were about.
On the television screen were ballerinas.
A buzzer sounded in George's head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.
"That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did," said Hazel.
"Huh" said George.
"That dance-it was nice," said Hazel.
"Yup," said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren't really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn't be handicapped. But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.
George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.
Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.
"Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer," said George.
"I'd think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds," said Hazel a little envious. "All the things they think up."
"Um," said George.
"Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?" said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. "If I was Diana Moon Glampers," said Hazel, "I'd have chimes on Sunday-just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion."
"I could think, if it was just chimes," said George.
"Well-maybe make 'em real loud," said Hazel. "I think I'd make a good Handicapper General."
"Good as anybody else," said George.
"Who knows better then I do what normal is?" said Hazel.
"Right," said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that.
"Boy!" said Hazel, "that was a doozy, wasn't it?"
It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling, and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples.
"All of a sudden you look so tired," said Hazel. "Why don't you stretch out on the sofa, so's you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch." She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around George's neck. "Go on and rest the bag for a little while," she said. "I don't care if you're not equal to me for a while."
George weighed the bag with his hands. "I don't mind it," he said. "I don't notice it any more. It's just a part of me."
"You been so tired lately-kind of wore out," said Hazel. "If there was just some way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls. Just a few."
"Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out," said George. "I don't call that a bargain."
"If you could just take a few out when you came home from work," said Hazel. "I mean-you don't compete with anybody around here. You just set around."
"If I tried to get away with it," said George, "then other people'd get away with it-and pretty soon we'd be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn't like that, would you?"
"I'd hate it," said Hazel.
"There you are," said George. The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?"
If Hazel hadn't been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn't have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.
"Reckon it'd fall all apart," said Hazel.
"What would?" said George blankly.
"Society," said Hazel uncertainly. "Wasn't that what you just said?
"Who knows?" said George.
The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn't clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, "Ladies and Gentlemen."
He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.
"That's all right-" Hazel said of the announcer, "he tried. That's the big thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard."
"Ladies and Gentlemen," said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred pound men.
And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. "Excuse me-" she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.
"Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen," she said in a grackle squawk, "has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous."
A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen-upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.
The rest of Harrison's appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever born heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.
Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.
And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random.
"If you see this boy," said the ballerina, "do not - I repeat, do not - try to reason with him."
There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges.
Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though dancing to the tune of an earthquake.
George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have - for many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. "My God-" said George, "that must be Harrison!"
The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in his head.
When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen.
Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood - in the center of the studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.
"I am the Emperor!" cried Harrison. "Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!" He stamped his foot and the studio shook.
"Even as I stand here" he bellowed, "crippled, hobbled, sickened - I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!"
Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.
Harrison's scrap-iron handicaps crashed to the floor.
Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.
He flung away his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder.
"I shall now select my Empress!" he said, looking down on the cowering people. "Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!"
A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.
Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all he removed her mask.
She was blindingly beautiful.
"Now-" said Harrison, taking her hand, "shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!" he commanded.
The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. "Play your best," he told them, "and I'll make you barons and dukes and earls."
The music began. It was normal at first-cheap, silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs.
The music began again and was much improved.
Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while-listened gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.
They shifted their weights to their toes.
Harrison placed his big hands on the girls tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers.
And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!
Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.
They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.
They leaped like deer on the moon.
The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it.
It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling. They kissed it.
And then, neutraling gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.
It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.
Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.
It was then that the Bergerons' television tube burned out.
Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer.
George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. "You been crying" he said to Hazel.
"Yup," she said.
"What about?" he said.
"I forget," she said. "Something real sad on television."
"What was it?" he said.
"It's all kind of mixed up in my mind," said Hazel.
"Forget sad things," said George.
"I always do," said Hazel.
"That's my girl," said George. He winced. There was the sound of a rivetting gun in his head.
"Gee - I could tell that one was a doozy," said Hazel.
"You can say that again," said George.
"Gee-" said Hazel, "I could tell that one was a doozy."
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"Harrison Bergeron" is copyrighted by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., 1961.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Project Due by Friday...upload your one page response to this space on the blog
http://projects.latimes.com/mexico-drug-war/#/interactive-map
Today, you get to solve a problem. You have just been elected president of Mexico. Congratulations. You get to run the country, but you must also solve a problem: drug violence.
Today, you get to solve a problem. You have just been elected president of Mexico. Congratulations. You get to run the country, but you must also solve a problem: drug violence.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Book Review of Epiphany
A collection of opinions from disgruntled students
Some people enjoy judging books by their covers and although the book “Epiphany” has a lovely cover, it’s not nearly as enjoyable as it appears. Elise Ballard’s book “Epiphany” is a collection of stories from a variety of people she conducted interviews with. She gave each story the unique voice of the person who was interviewed. The reader gets a sense of each contributor’s personality, philosophy, and history. There is an atmosphere of overly sentimental themes throughout Ballard’s book. The reader is quickly guided into a subtle version of the self-help genre.
This book could have been improved with the inclusion of research based ideas. The addition of examples of epiphanies which did not turn out well for the person having the experience could have been used as well. An example would be moving to Hollywood and retiring as a waitress without a SAG card, who enjoys simple, everyday conversations with people rather than applying make-up every day and acting in front of a camera. The writing structure was an issue as far as organization is concerned. Random thoughts seemed to occur throughout her paragraph introductions for a good majority of interviews.
This book may lead readers towards other genres of literature i.e. “Dostoevsky” or “Bukowski.”The epiphany of the class is that Ballard’s future works should be avoided if they involve written word.
Friday, May 13, 2011
Natural Intelligence
Outside Magazine, June 2011
Get Your Mind Dirty
In 2005, the author introduced us to the idea of childhood nature-deficit disorder. With The Nature Principle, he's back with a prescription for adults.
By Richard Louv
PERHAPS YOU RECALL A TIME when you took in more of the world. You were new and the world was new. As a boy, I would go out in the woods and sit under a tree, then lick my thumb and wet each nostril. I had read somewhere that people—perhaps pioneers or American Indians, I don't remember—did this in order to keen their sense of smell for approaching game or danger. I held perfectly still, my back against rough bark, all of my senses waiting. And slowly, animal life returned. A rabbit appeared under a bush, birds swooped low, an ant went on a walk-about over my knee. I felt intensely alive.
Can we be new again? In 2005, when my book Last Child in the Woods was published, I wasn't prepared for the movement that would follow, and for the reaction of adults when they considered their own lives.
In the book, I introduced the term nature-deficit disorder—not as a medical diagnosis but as a way to describe the growing gap between children and nature. By its broadest interpretation, nature-deficit disorder is an atrophied awareness, a diminished ability to find meaning in the life that surrounds us. When we think of the nature deficit, we usually think of kids spending too much time indoors plugged into an outlet or computer screen. But after the book's publication, I heard adults speak with heartfelt emotion, even anger, about their own sense of loss.
One day after a talk in Seattle, a woman literally grabbed my lapels and said, "Listen to me: adults have nature-deficit disorder, too." She was right, of course. As a species, we are most animated when our days and nights are touched by the natural world. While individuals can find immeasurable joy in a great work of art, or by falling in love, all of life is rooted in nature, and a separation from it desensitizes and diminishes us.
That truth seems obvious to some of us, though it has yet to take root in the wider culture. However, in recent years an emerging body of research has begun to describe the restorative power of time spent in the natural world. Even in small doses, we are learning, exposure to nature can measurably improve our psychological and physical health.
While the study of the relationship between mental acuity, creativity, and time spent outdoors is still a frontier for science, new data suggests that exposure to the living world can even enhance intelligence. At least two factors are involved: first, our senses and sensibilities can be improved by spending time in nature; second, the natural environment seems to stimulate our ability to pay attention, think clearly, and be more creative.
In 2008, for the first time in history, more than half the world's population lived in towns and cities. The traditional ways that humans have experienced nature are vanishing along with biodiversity. At the same time, our culture's faith in technological immersion has no limits. We sink ever deeper into a sea of circuitry. We consume breathtaking accounts of the creation of synthetic life, combining bacteria with human DNA; of microscopic machines designed to enter our bodies to fight biological invaders; of computer-augmented reality. We even hear talk of a posthuman era in which people themselves are optimally enhanced by technology. Aren't we getting a little ahead of ourselves?
By contrast, I believe the future can be shaped by what I call the Nature Principle, which holds that in an age of environmental, economic, and social transformation, the future will belong to the nature-smart—those individuals, businesses, and political leaders who develop a deeper understanding of nature and balance the virtual with the real.
The skeptic will say that this prescription is at best problematic, given the rate at which we're destroying nature, and the skeptic will be right. This is why the Nature Principle is about conservation but also about restoring ourselves while we restore nature; about bringing back natural habitats where they once existed or creating them where they never were—in our homes, workplaces, cities, and suburbs. It's about the power of living in nature—not with it but in it.
The more high-tech our lives become, the more nature we need.
MANY OF US DESIRE a fuller life of the senses. We city dwellers marvel at the seemingly superhuman or supernatural abilities of "primitive" peoples like the Australian Aborigines but consider those talents vestigial, like that remnant tailbone. Here's another view: such senses are in fact latent in all of us, blanketed by noise and faulty assumptions.
Ever wonder why you have two nostrils? Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley did. They fitted undergraduates with taped-over goggles, earmuffs, and work gloves to block other senses, then set them loose in a field. Most of the students could follow a 30-foot-long trail of chocolate perfume and even changed direction precisely where the invisible path took a turn. The subjects were able to smell better with two functioning nostrils, which researchers likened to hearing in stereo. And they found themselves zigzagging, a technique employed by dogs as they track. "We found that not only are humans capable of scent tracking," said study researcher Noam Sobel, "but they spontaneously mimic the tracking pattern of [other] mammals."
What else can we do that we've forgotten? Scientists who study human perception no longer assume we have only five senses: taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing. The number now ranges from a conservative 10 to as many as 30, including blood-sugar levels, empty stomach, thirst, and proprioception (awareness of our body's position in space). In 2009, researchers at Madrid's University of Alcalá de Henares showed how people, like bats, could identify objects without needing to see them, through the echoes of human tongue clicks. According to the lead researcher, echoes are also perceived through vibrations in ears, tongue, and bones—a refined sense learned through trial and error by some blind people and even sighted individuals. It's all about hearing a world that exists beyond what we normally mistake for silence.
This brings us to the so-called sixth sense, which to some means intuition, to others ESP, and to still others the ability to unconsciously detect danger. In December 2004, as the devastating Asian tsunami approached, Jarawa tribespeople of India's Andaman Islands reportedly sensed sounds from the approaching wave, or some other unusual activity, long before the water struck the shore. They fled to higher ground. The Jarawas used tribal knowledge of nature's warning signs, explained V. R. Rao, director of the Anthropological Survey of India, based in Calcutta. "They got wind of impending danger from biological warning signals, like the cry of birds and change in the behavioral patterns of marine animals." In the Jarawas' case, the sixth sense may be the sum of all the other senses combined with their everyday knowledge of nature.
In separate research, the U.S. military has studied how some soldiers seem to be able to use their latent senses to detect roadside bombs and other hazards. The 18-month study of 800 military personnel found that the best bomb spotters were rural people—those who'd grown up in the woods hunting turkey or deer—as well as those from tough urban neighborhoods, where it's equally important to be alert. "They just seemed to pick up things much better," reported Army Sergeant Major Todd Burnett, who worked on the study for the Pentagon's Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization. "They know how to look at the entire environment." And the other enlistees, the ones who'd spent more time with Game Boys or at the mall? They didn't do so well. As Burnett put it, they were focused on the proverbial "screen rather than the whole surrounding."
The explanation may be partly physiological. Australian researchers suggest that the troubling increase in nearsightedness is linked to young people spending less time outdoors, where eyes must focus at longer distances. But more is probably going on here. Good vision, acute hearing, an attuned sense of smell, spatial awareness—all of these abilities could be operating simultaneously. This natural advantage offers practical applications. One is an increased ability to learn; another is an enhanced capability to avoid danger. Still another, perhaps the most important, is the measurement-defying ability to more fully engage in life.
BUT LET'S BE REALISTIC. Even if we're lucky enough to have bonded with nature when we were young, maintaining that bond is no easy thing. Information has infiltrated our every waking minute. Unctuous personalities squawk at us from flat-panel TVs on gas pumps. Billboard companies replace pasted paper with flashing digital displays. Screens pop up in airports, coffeehouses, banks, grocery-store checkout lines, even restrooms. Advertisers hawk DVDs for preschoolers on the paper liners of examination tables in pediatricians' offices. This info-blitzkrieg has spawned a new field called interruption science and a newly minted condition: continuous partial attention.
There's no denying the benefits of the Internet. But electronic immersion without a force to balance it creates a hole in the boat, draining our ability to pay attention, think clearly, be productive and creative. To combat these losses, our society seems to look everywhere but the natural domain for the building of better brains, whether through supplements like ginkgo biloba or nootropics—so-called smart drugs—like Ritalin, the amphetamine Adderall, and Provigil. Some people need such medication, of course, but overreliance on these substances remains a massive experiment with long-term side effects that have yet to be determined. And an immediately available, low-cost intelligence-enhancing supplement already exists.
Environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan began foundational work in the study of nature's healing effect on the mind in the 1970s. Findings from their nine-year study for the U.S. Forest Service and later research suggested that contact with nature can assist with recovery from mental fatigue and can help restore attention. It can also help reboot the brain's ability to think. The Kaplans and their team followed participants in an Outward Bound–like program, which took people into the wilderness for up to two weeks. During these treks or afterwards, subjects reported experiencing a sense of peace and an ability to think more clearly; they also reported that just being in nature was more restorative than the physical activities, like rock climbing, for which such programs are mainly known.
Over time the Kaplans developed their theory of directed-attention fatigue. Paying conscious attention to something demands voluntary effort, they found, which can erode mental effectiveness and get in the way of forming abstract long-term goals. "A number of symptoms are commonly attributed to this fatigue," Stephen Kaplan and his colleague Raymond De Young wrote in 2002. "Irritability and impulsivity that results in regrettable choices, impatience that has us making ill-formed decisions, and distractibility that allows the immediate environment to have a magnified effect on our behavioral choices."
The Kaplans hypothesize that the best antidote to such fatigue is involuntary attention, a kind of "fascination," which occurs when we are in an environment that fulfills certain criteria: for instance, the setting must transport the person away from their day-to-day routine and allow the opportunity to explore. Furthermore, they found, the natural world is a particularly effective place for the human brain to overcome mental fatigue.
One reason for this might be right beneath our feet. A study conducted by Dorothy Matthews and Susan Jenks at the Sage Colleges in Troy, New York, found that a common soil bacterium given to mice helped them navigate a maze twice as fast. The natural bacterium in question, Mycobacterium vaccae, is usually ingested or inhaled when people spend time in nature. The effect wore off in a few weeks, but, Matthews said, the research suggests that the M. vaccae we come in contact with all the time in nature may "play a role" in learning in mammals. Smart pill, meet smart bug.
Taking this even further, can time in nature nurture genius itself? Creative genius is not the accumulation of knowledge; it's the ability to see patterns in the universe, to detect hidden links between what is and what could be.
When public-radio commentator John Hockenberry reported in 2008 on research at the University of Michigan that indicated greater mental acuity after a nature walk, he pointed out that Albert Einstein and the mathematician and philosopher Kurt Gödel, "two of the most brilliant people who ever walked the face of the earth, used to famously, every single day, take walks in the woods on the Princeton campus."
The science here is both incomplete and encouraging; we do know that, because of the brain's plasticity, moments of growth can happen throughout life. And so can the creation of new neurons, the brain cells that process and transmit information. It's reasonable to speculate, then, that time spent in the natural world, by both restoring and stimulating the brain, may lead to bursts of new neurons. Nature neurons.
SO DOES THIS MEAN that we should dispense with electronic media entirely? No, and for most of us that would be close to impossible. But we can cultivate a third way.
When my sons were growing up, they spent a lot of time outdoors, but they also played plenty of video games—more than I was comfortable with. Occasionally, they'd try to convince me that members of their generation were making an evolutionary leap; because they spent so much time texting, video-gaming, and so on, they were wired differently. In response I pointed out that my generation said something like that about recreational drugs. That didn't work out so well.
Gary Small, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles, suggests that the breakneck pace of technological change is creating what he calls a brain gap between the generations, and this gap is opening in a single generation.
Small and his colleagues used MRIs to study the dorsolateral area of the prefrontal cortex, which integrates complex information and short-term memory and is instrumental in decision-making. Two groups were tested: experienced, or "savvy," computer users; and inexperienced, or "naive," ones. While doing Web searches, savvy users had dorsolateral areas that were quite active, while in the naive users the dorsolateral area was quiet. As the Canadian magazine Maclean's reported, "On day five, the savvy group's brain looked more or less the same. But in the naive group, something amazing had happened: as they searched, their circuitry sprang to life, flashing and thundering in exactly the same way it did in their tech-trained counterparts."
Teenagers' brains are particularly malleable, apt to be shaped by technological experience. Is this a good thing? One view is that people who experience too much technology in their formative years experience stunted development of the frontal lobe, "ultimately freezing them in teen brain mode," as Maclean's put it.
More optimistic researchers suggest that all this multitasking is creating the smartest generation yet, freed from limitations of geography, weather, and distance—pesky inconveniences of the physical world. This vision calls to mind the sci-fi speculation of the 1950s and '60s that people would someday be freed from physical limitations and that, as they evolved, their brains—in fact, their heads—would grow larger and larger, until members of our species or what it becomes (Homo google?) just float around in space. We're not floaters yet. In his 2008 book The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein, a professor at Emory University, reels out studies comparing this generation of students with prior generations, finding that "they don't know any more history or civics, economics or science, literature or current events"— despite all that available information.
But here is a third possibility, and the one I prefer: the hybrid mind. The ultimate multitasking is to live simultaneously in both the digital and physical worlds, using computers to maximize our powers to process intellectual data and natural environments to ignite our senses and accelerate our ability to learn and feel—combining the resurfaced "primitive" powers of our ancestors with the digital speed of our teenagers.
Putting the Nature Principle to use in our lives won't, of course, be just about neurons and intelligence. A whole river is gathering force, its headwaters fed by science. New branches reach outward, producing exciting career possibilities: biophilic design, reconciliation ecology, green exercise, ecopsychology, place-based learning, slow food, and organic gardening. Generous future historians may someday write that those of us alive today did more than survive or sustain—that we brought nature back to our workplaces, our neighborhoods, and our families.
Few today would question the notion that every person, especially every young person, has a right to access the Internet, whether through a school district, a library, or a city's public Wi-Fi program. We accept the idea that the divide between the digital haves and have-nots must be closed.
But recently I've been asking another question of people: Do we have a right to walk in the woods?
Get Your Mind Dirty
In 2005, the author introduced us to the idea of childhood nature-deficit disorder. With The Nature Principle, he's back with a prescription for adults.
By Richard Louv
PERHAPS YOU RECALL A TIME when you took in more of the world. You were new and the world was new. As a boy, I would go out in the woods and sit under a tree, then lick my thumb and wet each nostril. I had read somewhere that people—perhaps pioneers or American Indians, I don't remember—did this in order to keen their sense of smell for approaching game or danger. I held perfectly still, my back against rough bark, all of my senses waiting. And slowly, animal life returned. A rabbit appeared under a bush, birds swooped low, an ant went on a walk-about over my knee. I felt intensely alive.
Can we be new again? In 2005, when my book Last Child in the Woods was published, I wasn't prepared for the movement that would follow, and for the reaction of adults when they considered their own lives.
In the book, I introduced the term nature-deficit disorder—not as a medical diagnosis but as a way to describe the growing gap between children and nature. By its broadest interpretation, nature-deficit disorder is an atrophied awareness, a diminished ability to find meaning in the life that surrounds us. When we think of the nature deficit, we usually think of kids spending too much time indoors plugged into an outlet or computer screen. But after the book's publication, I heard adults speak with heartfelt emotion, even anger, about their own sense of loss.
One day after a talk in Seattle, a woman literally grabbed my lapels and said, "Listen to me: adults have nature-deficit disorder, too." She was right, of course. As a species, we are most animated when our days and nights are touched by the natural world. While individuals can find immeasurable joy in a great work of art, or by falling in love, all of life is rooted in nature, and a separation from it desensitizes and diminishes us.
That truth seems obvious to some of us, though it has yet to take root in the wider culture. However, in recent years an emerging body of research has begun to describe the restorative power of time spent in the natural world. Even in small doses, we are learning, exposure to nature can measurably improve our psychological and physical health.
While the study of the relationship between mental acuity, creativity, and time spent outdoors is still a frontier for science, new data suggests that exposure to the living world can even enhance intelligence. At least two factors are involved: first, our senses and sensibilities can be improved by spending time in nature; second, the natural environment seems to stimulate our ability to pay attention, think clearly, and be more creative.
In 2008, for the first time in history, more than half the world's population lived in towns and cities. The traditional ways that humans have experienced nature are vanishing along with biodiversity. At the same time, our culture's faith in technological immersion has no limits. We sink ever deeper into a sea of circuitry. We consume breathtaking accounts of the creation of synthetic life, combining bacteria with human DNA; of microscopic machines designed to enter our bodies to fight biological invaders; of computer-augmented reality. We even hear talk of a posthuman era in which people themselves are optimally enhanced by technology. Aren't we getting a little ahead of ourselves?
By contrast, I believe the future can be shaped by what I call the Nature Principle, which holds that in an age of environmental, economic, and social transformation, the future will belong to the nature-smart—those individuals, businesses, and political leaders who develop a deeper understanding of nature and balance the virtual with the real.
The skeptic will say that this prescription is at best problematic, given the rate at which we're destroying nature, and the skeptic will be right. This is why the Nature Principle is about conservation but also about restoring ourselves while we restore nature; about bringing back natural habitats where they once existed or creating them where they never were—in our homes, workplaces, cities, and suburbs. It's about the power of living in nature—not with it but in it.
The more high-tech our lives become, the more nature we need.
MANY OF US DESIRE a fuller life of the senses. We city dwellers marvel at the seemingly superhuman or supernatural abilities of "primitive" peoples like the Australian Aborigines but consider those talents vestigial, like that remnant tailbone. Here's another view: such senses are in fact latent in all of us, blanketed by noise and faulty assumptions.
Ever wonder why you have two nostrils? Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley did. They fitted undergraduates with taped-over goggles, earmuffs, and work gloves to block other senses, then set them loose in a field. Most of the students could follow a 30-foot-long trail of chocolate perfume and even changed direction precisely where the invisible path took a turn. The subjects were able to smell better with two functioning nostrils, which researchers likened to hearing in stereo. And they found themselves zigzagging, a technique employed by dogs as they track. "We found that not only are humans capable of scent tracking," said study researcher Noam Sobel, "but they spontaneously mimic the tracking pattern of [other] mammals."
What else can we do that we've forgotten? Scientists who study human perception no longer assume we have only five senses: taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing. The number now ranges from a conservative 10 to as many as 30, including blood-sugar levels, empty stomach, thirst, and proprioception (awareness of our body's position in space). In 2009, researchers at Madrid's University of Alcalá de Henares showed how people, like bats, could identify objects without needing to see them, through the echoes of human tongue clicks. According to the lead researcher, echoes are also perceived through vibrations in ears, tongue, and bones—a refined sense learned through trial and error by some blind people and even sighted individuals. It's all about hearing a world that exists beyond what we normally mistake for silence.
This brings us to the so-called sixth sense, which to some means intuition, to others ESP, and to still others the ability to unconsciously detect danger. In December 2004, as the devastating Asian tsunami approached, Jarawa tribespeople of India's Andaman Islands reportedly sensed sounds from the approaching wave, or some other unusual activity, long before the water struck the shore. They fled to higher ground. The Jarawas used tribal knowledge of nature's warning signs, explained V. R. Rao, director of the Anthropological Survey of India, based in Calcutta. "They got wind of impending danger from biological warning signals, like the cry of birds and change in the behavioral patterns of marine animals." In the Jarawas' case, the sixth sense may be the sum of all the other senses combined with their everyday knowledge of nature.
In separate research, the U.S. military has studied how some soldiers seem to be able to use their latent senses to detect roadside bombs and other hazards. The 18-month study of 800 military personnel found that the best bomb spotters were rural people—those who'd grown up in the woods hunting turkey or deer—as well as those from tough urban neighborhoods, where it's equally important to be alert. "They just seemed to pick up things much better," reported Army Sergeant Major Todd Burnett, who worked on the study for the Pentagon's Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization. "They know how to look at the entire environment." And the other enlistees, the ones who'd spent more time with Game Boys or at the mall? They didn't do so well. As Burnett put it, they were focused on the proverbial "screen rather than the whole surrounding."
The explanation may be partly physiological. Australian researchers suggest that the troubling increase in nearsightedness is linked to young people spending less time outdoors, where eyes must focus at longer distances. But more is probably going on here. Good vision, acute hearing, an attuned sense of smell, spatial awareness—all of these abilities could be operating simultaneously. This natural advantage offers practical applications. One is an increased ability to learn; another is an enhanced capability to avoid danger. Still another, perhaps the most important, is the measurement-defying ability to more fully engage in life.
BUT LET'S BE REALISTIC. Even if we're lucky enough to have bonded with nature when we were young, maintaining that bond is no easy thing. Information has infiltrated our every waking minute. Unctuous personalities squawk at us from flat-panel TVs on gas pumps. Billboard companies replace pasted paper with flashing digital displays. Screens pop up in airports, coffeehouses, banks, grocery-store checkout lines, even restrooms. Advertisers hawk DVDs for preschoolers on the paper liners of examination tables in pediatricians' offices. This info-blitzkrieg has spawned a new field called interruption science and a newly minted condition: continuous partial attention.
There's no denying the benefits of the Internet. But electronic immersion without a force to balance it creates a hole in the boat, draining our ability to pay attention, think clearly, be productive and creative. To combat these losses, our society seems to look everywhere but the natural domain for the building of better brains, whether through supplements like ginkgo biloba or nootropics—so-called smart drugs—like Ritalin, the amphetamine Adderall, and Provigil. Some people need such medication, of course, but overreliance on these substances remains a massive experiment with long-term side effects that have yet to be determined. And an immediately available, low-cost intelligence-enhancing supplement already exists.
Environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan began foundational work in the study of nature's healing effect on the mind in the 1970s. Findings from their nine-year study for the U.S. Forest Service and later research suggested that contact with nature can assist with recovery from mental fatigue and can help restore attention. It can also help reboot the brain's ability to think. The Kaplans and their team followed participants in an Outward Bound–like program, which took people into the wilderness for up to two weeks. During these treks or afterwards, subjects reported experiencing a sense of peace and an ability to think more clearly; they also reported that just being in nature was more restorative than the physical activities, like rock climbing, for which such programs are mainly known.
Over time the Kaplans developed their theory of directed-attention fatigue. Paying conscious attention to something demands voluntary effort, they found, which can erode mental effectiveness and get in the way of forming abstract long-term goals. "A number of symptoms are commonly attributed to this fatigue," Stephen Kaplan and his colleague Raymond De Young wrote in 2002. "Irritability and impulsivity that results in regrettable choices, impatience that has us making ill-formed decisions, and distractibility that allows the immediate environment to have a magnified effect on our behavioral choices."
The Kaplans hypothesize that the best antidote to such fatigue is involuntary attention, a kind of "fascination," which occurs when we are in an environment that fulfills certain criteria: for instance, the setting must transport the person away from their day-to-day routine and allow the opportunity to explore. Furthermore, they found, the natural world is a particularly effective place for the human brain to overcome mental fatigue.
One reason for this might be right beneath our feet. A study conducted by Dorothy Matthews and Susan Jenks at the Sage Colleges in Troy, New York, found that a common soil bacterium given to mice helped them navigate a maze twice as fast. The natural bacterium in question, Mycobacterium vaccae, is usually ingested or inhaled when people spend time in nature. The effect wore off in a few weeks, but, Matthews said, the research suggests that the M. vaccae we come in contact with all the time in nature may "play a role" in learning in mammals. Smart pill, meet smart bug.
Taking this even further, can time in nature nurture genius itself? Creative genius is not the accumulation of knowledge; it's the ability to see patterns in the universe, to detect hidden links between what is and what could be.
When public-radio commentator John Hockenberry reported in 2008 on research at the University of Michigan that indicated greater mental acuity after a nature walk, he pointed out that Albert Einstein and the mathematician and philosopher Kurt Gödel, "two of the most brilliant people who ever walked the face of the earth, used to famously, every single day, take walks in the woods on the Princeton campus."
The science here is both incomplete and encouraging; we do know that, because of the brain's plasticity, moments of growth can happen throughout life. And so can the creation of new neurons, the brain cells that process and transmit information. It's reasonable to speculate, then, that time spent in the natural world, by both restoring and stimulating the brain, may lead to bursts of new neurons. Nature neurons.
SO DOES THIS MEAN that we should dispense with electronic media entirely? No, and for most of us that would be close to impossible. But we can cultivate a third way.
When my sons were growing up, they spent a lot of time outdoors, but they also played plenty of video games—more than I was comfortable with. Occasionally, they'd try to convince me that members of their generation were making an evolutionary leap; because they spent so much time texting, video-gaming, and so on, they were wired differently. In response I pointed out that my generation said something like that about recreational drugs. That didn't work out so well.
Gary Small, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles, suggests that the breakneck pace of technological change is creating what he calls a brain gap between the generations, and this gap is opening in a single generation.
Small and his colleagues used MRIs to study the dorsolateral area of the prefrontal cortex, which integrates complex information and short-term memory and is instrumental in decision-making. Two groups were tested: experienced, or "savvy," computer users; and inexperienced, or "naive," ones. While doing Web searches, savvy users had dorsolateral areas that were quite active, while in the naive users the dorsolateral area was quiet. As the Canadian magazine Maclean's reported, "On day five, the savvy group's brain looked more or less the same. But in the naive group, something amazing had happened: as they searched, their circuitry sprang to life, flashing and thundering in exactly the same way it did in their tech-trained counterparts."
Teenagers' brains are particularly malleable, apt to be shaped by technological experience. Is this a good thing? One view is that people who experience too much technology in their formative years experience stunted development of the frontal lobe, "ultimately freezing them in teen brain mode," as Maclean's put it.
More optimistic researchers suggest that all this multitasking is creating the smartest generation yet, freed from limitations of geography, weather, and distance—pesky inconveniences of the physical world. This vision calls to mind the sci-fi speculation of the 1950s and '60s that people would someday be freed from physical limitations and that, as they evolved, their brains—in fact, their heads—would grow larger and larger, until members of our species or what it becomes (Homo google?) just float around in space. We're not floaters yet. In his 2008 book The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein, a professor at Emory University, reels out studies comparing this generation of students with prior generations, finding that "they don't know any more history or civics, economics or science, literature or current events"— despite all that available information.
But here is a third possibility, and the one I prefer: the hybrid mind. The ultimate multitasking is to live simultaneously in both the digital and physical worlds, using computers to maximize our powers to process intellectual data and natural environments to ignite our senses and accelerate our ability to learn and feel—combining the resurfaced "primitive" powers of our ancestors with the digital speed of our teenagers.
Putting the Nature Principle to use in our lives won't, of course, be just about neurons and intelligence. A whole river is gathering force, its headwaters fed by science. New branches reach outward, producing exciting career possibilities: biophilic design, reconciliation ecology, green exercise, ecopsychology, place-based learning, slow food, and organic gardening. Generous future historians may someday write that those of us alive today did more than survive or sustain—that we brought nature back to our workplaces, our neighborhoods, and our families.
Few today would question the notion that every person, especially every young person, has a right to access the Internet, whether through a school district, a library, or a city's public Wi-Fi program. We accept the idea that the divide between the digital haves and have-nots must be closed.
But recently I've been asking another question of people: Do we have a right to walk in the woods?
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
COMMON ERRORS IN CLASS WORK
Just to remind you, we worked in class on two common errors:
1. Commas with a list: 1, 2, and 3.
2. Possessive Apostrophes
1. Commas with a list: 1, 2, and 3.
2. Possessive Apostrophes
Epiphany Assignment
After reading Elise Ballard's book Epiphany, you will have the opportunity to write a 4 page (typed, double-spaced)essay responding to one of the following questions:
1. According to Mehmet Oz, "The goal is to move from just knowledge, which is information, to understanding, which is awareness." (72) Assess the validity of this quote based on this book, other reading, or any appropriate examples.
2. Albert Einstein had an epiphany that changed his life and the world. How would his epiphany be categorized by Ballard? Are there paralells between Einstein's epiphany and those described in Ballard's book? (obviously, you have to find this story)
3. Ballard desribes epiphanies in their social and spiritual context. Find examples of epiphanies in other areas of life such as business or sports. Explore the meaning of sudden insight in the non-spiritual realm.
4. Chloe Wordsworth writes, "Change has so much to do with our beliefs and how much we are willing to adapt them or let them go and open ourselves to new ones." (175)Assess the validity of this quote based on this book, other reading, or any appropriate examples.
5. It seems as though many of the stories in Epiphany happen to wealthy, highly materially successful individuals. Is epiphany only something that happens to the upper classes? Critique the book, finding stories of profound sudden insight from other sources.
6. CREATE YOUR OWN QUESTION: THIS MUST BE CLEARED WITH ME BEFORE THE ROUGH DRAFT IS DUE.
KEY DATES:
Typed Rough Draft Due in Class: Wednesday, June 1
No rough draft in class will mean no passing grade on this assignment.
Final Draft Due: Monday, June 6 as you walk into class
Final Draft Due to Turnitin.com: any time on June 6
1. According to Mehmet Oz, "The goal is to move from just knowledge, which is information, to understanding, which is awareness." (72) Assess the validity of this quote based on this book, other reading, or any appropriate examples.
2. Albert Einstein had an epiphany that changed his life and the world. How would his epiphany be categorized by Ballard? Are there paralells between Einstein's epiphany and those described in Ballard's book? (obviously, you have to find this story)
3. Ballard desribes epiphanies in their social and spiritual context. Find examples of epiphanies in other areas of life such as business or sports. Explore the meaning of sudden insight in the non-spiritual realm.
4. Chloe Wordsworth writes, "Change has so much to do with our beliefs and how much we are willing to adapt them or let them go and open ourselves to new ones." (175)Assess the validity of this quote based on this book, other reading, or any appropriate examples.
5. It seems as though many of the stories in Epiphany happen to wealthy, highly materially successful individuals. Is epiphany only something that happens to the upper classes? Critique the book, finding stories of profound sudden insight from other sources.
6. CREATE YOUR OWN QUESTION: THIS MUST BE CLEARED WITH ME BEFORE THE ROUGH DRAFT IS DUE.
KEY DATES:
Typed Rough Draft Due in Class: Wednesday, June 1
No rough draft in class will mean no passing grade on this assignment.
Final Draft Due: Monday, June 6 as you walk into class
Final Draft Due to Turnitin.com: any time on June 6
Friday, May 6, 2011
Friday, April 29, 2011
RUN ON EXERCISE
When going to the fair, one should always remember to bring a number of important items. First, there are many times when seating is limited, bring a chair. Once I had to sit on the back of a sheep while eating my deep fried avocado, which is another important thing to remember, bring an appetite. Third, bring plenty of money, in fact, if you can get a bank loan before going to the fair it will help, everything is so expensive! Finally, bring some friends. If you don't bring friends then there is a good chance you'll get taken away by the people who work at the fair and have to run one of those booths where people throw darts at balloons, this can be frightening because people also drink beer at the fair. Beer and darts don't mix. If you remember to bring each of these things, you'll be fine!
Online Exercises:
http://depts.dyc.edu/learningcenter/owl/exercises/run-ons_ex1.htm
Online Exercises:
http://depts.dyc.edu/learningcenter/owl/exercises/run-ons_ex1.htm
MULTI GENRE WRITING
ASSIGNMENT #2 MULTI-GENRE WRITING
The first draft of the assignment must be completed by Wednesday, 5/4.
The final draft is due on Friday, 5/6.
The assignment must be typed, unless one of the genres you include requires otherwise. We will generate a list of genres together, but remember, it is almost impossible to state them all, so if you find yourself dreaming of a new genre (are dreams in themselves a genre?) be sure to run it by me and then use it!
The difficult part of this assignment will not be finding the genres, it will be finding the theme. I will give you a few options, but remember, the best theme for you will be the one you come up with, so keep thinking!
If you get information about a certain topic, be sure to include the source of that information in your rough draft and final draft.
Here are some possibilities for themes: the moon, your major, gay marriage, marriage in general, religion, the color blue, skunks, death, love, hope, the beach, the Beach Boys, Boy Bands, fishing, goodbyes, good buys, Best Buy...and so on.
Here's a brief list of genres:
Acceptance speech, address to jury, adventure story, advice column, apology note, autobiography, biography, blog entry, business letter, book review, campaign speech, children's story, condolence letter, court decision, dedication, detective story, editorial, epitaph, free verse poem, ghost story, love letter, memoir, movie review, myth, news article, parody, narrative, play, poem, proverb, quotation, romance story, soap opera, sportscast, superstition, technical writing, novel, nursery rhyme, obituary...and on and on.
HERE ARE A COUPLE OF QUICK EXAMPLES:
Example #1
"Snakes"
Genre One: a Joke:
Two animals meet in the dead of night in the forst. They cannot see each other so they describe themselves. One says, "I am fluffy, with long floppy ears, and I hop on my hind legs."
The second animal says, "you are a bunny rabbit."
"Yes," exclaims the first animal. "Now describe yourself."
The second animal says, "I am slimy, a slither on the ground and have a forked tongue. People run in fear when they hear me. I embody evil."
The rabbit says, "I know. You're a lawyer."
Genre Two: A poem: "head of the department"
The snake rounded her hideous head, careful to hide her fangs until the final moment, licked kindly the ears of her prey, prayed gently for a bit of fight left in this pathetic squirrel, and enjoyed her dinner, although her dinner didn't fight at all.
Genre Three: A Scientific Report:
According to biologist William Dunson, in The Biology of Sea Snakes, "A single voyage of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography research vessel Alpha Helix, in December of 1972 to January of 1973, resulted in the collection of nearly 500 specimens of 16 species from the waters of northwestern Australia and West Iran." Such diversity amongst the sea snake population suggests that an internal eco-system most likely dictates the mating and feeding habits of the sea snake.
Example #2
Metamorphosis
Genre One: Poem: Title: "become the butterfly"
Oh how I long to stop this slithering mess, to eat your leaves and feel no more this earth's caress
Oh how I strive to dine and then slumber away, to drink the sorrow of a cacoon ablaze
Oh how this poem is more stupid than not, but I awaken and fly away, and am amazed, metamorphosis wrought
Genre Two: Rambling Journal Entry:
I wonder what Kafka was thinking when he wrote his book called Metamorphosis. In this simple book a man named Gregor Samsa must come to terms with being turned into a bug, a beetle of sorts. I think this would have been an even worse fate than the social invisibility suffered by Mersault. Kafka revels in the horrors of modern existence, and the awful torturous fate of a man taunted by his own existence. I think that Nabakov would later compare this to Jekyll and Hyde, but something is lost there, since there's only one essence left when the man is turned into bug...scary story. Could this have a bearing on our modern world? You better believe it, bug readers!
Genre Three: Obituary
It is with great regret that we announce the death of metamorphosis, a concept that gave its all until the very end but died after a long bout with complacency. Meta, as she was known to her friends, could be seen in the writing and thinking of numerous individuals over the years, from Bob Dylan to Abe Lincoln, but as of 2008, she met her match with the current society led by those formidable opponents Malaise and Apathy. Meta leaves behind no immediate family members. Services will be held at the Beale Library followed by a ceremonial book burning of all Kafka reading material. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to the SPCA, the only organization left that seems to want to affect change amongst the higher creatures of our globe.
The first draft of the assignment must be completed by Wednesday, 5/4.
The final draft is due on Friday, 5/6.
The assignment must be typed, unless one of the genres you include requires otherwise. We will generate a list of genres together, but remember, it is almost impossible to state them all, so if you find yourself dreaming of a new genre (are dreams in themselves a genre?) be sure to run it by me and then use it!
The difficult part of this assignment will not be finding the genres, it will be finding the theme. I will give you a few options, but remember, the best theme for you will be the one you come up with, so keep thinking!
If you get information about a certain topic, be sure to include the source of that information in your rough draft and final draft.
Here are some possibilities for themes: the moon, your major, gay marriage, marriage in general, religion, the color blue, skunks, death, love, hope, the beach, the Beach Boys, Boy Bands, fishing, goodbyes, good buys, Best Buy...and so on.
Here's a brief list of genres:
Acceptance speech, address to jury, adventure story, advice column, apology note, autobiography, biography, blog entry, business letter, book review, campaign speech, children's story, condolence letter, court decision, dedication, detective story, editorial, epitaph, free verse poem, ghost story, love letter, memoir, movie review, myth, news article, parody, narrative, play, poem, proverb, quotation, romance story, soap opera, sportscast, superstition, technical writing, novel, nursery rhyme, obituary...and on and on.
HERE ARE A COUPLE OF QUICK EXAMPLES:
Example #1
"Snakes"
Genre One: a Joke:
Two animals meet in the dead of night in the forst. They cannot see each other so they describe themselves. One says, "I am fluffy, with long floppy ears, and I hop on my hind legs."
The second animal says, "you are a bunny rabbit."
"Yes," exclaims the first animal. "Now describe yourself."
The second animal says, "I am slimy, a slither on the ground and have a forked tongue. People run in fear when they hear me. I embody evil."
The rabbit says, "I know. You're a lawyer."
Genre Two: A poem: "head of the department"
The snake rounded her hideous head, careful to hide her fangs until the final moment, licked kindly the ears of her prey, prayed gently for a bit of fight left in this pathetic squirrel, and enjoyed her dinner, although her dinner didn't fight at all.
Genre Three: A Scientific Report:
According to biologist William Dunson, in The Biology of Sea Snakes, "A single voyage of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography research vessel Alpha Helix, in December of 1972 to January of 1973, resulted in the collection of nearly 500 specimens of 16 species from the waters of northwestern Australia and West Iran." Such diversity amongst the sea snake population suggests that an internal eco-system most likely dictates the mating and feeding habits of the sea snake.
Example #2
Metamorphosis
Genre One: Poem: Title: "become the butterfly"
Oh how I long to stop this slithering mess, to eat your leaves and feel no more this earth's caress
Oh how I strive to dine and then slumber away, to drink the sorrow of a cacoon ablaze
Oh how this poem is more stupid than not, but I awaken and fly away, and am amazed, metamorphosis wrought
Genre Two: Rambling Journal Entry:
I wonder what Kafka was thinking when he wrote his book called Metamorphosis. In this simple book a man named Gregor Samsa must come to terms with being turned into a bug, a beetle of sorts. I think this would have been an even worse fate than the social invisibility suffered by Mersault. Kafka revels in the horrors of modern existence, and the awful torturous fate of a man taunted by his own existence. I think that Nabakov would later compare this to Jekyll and Hyde, but something is lost there, since there's only one essence left when the man is turned into bug...scary story. Could this have a bearing on our modern world? You better believe it, bug readers!
Genre Three: Obituary
It is with great regret that we announce the death of metamorphosis, a concept that gave its all until the very end but died after a long bout with complacency. Meta, as she was known to her friends, could be seen in the writing and thinking of numerous individuals over the years, from Bob Dylan to Abe Lincoln, but as of 2008, she met her match with the current society led by those formidable opponents Malaise and Apathy. Meta leaves behind no immediate family members. Services will be held at the Beale Library followed by a ceremonial book burning of all Kafka reading material. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to the SPCA, the only organization left that seems to want to affect change amongst the higher creatures of our globe.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Bets on the Royal Wedding...
Why are so many people so obsessed with the activities of the British Royal Family?
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Friday Online 1 of 2
Respond to the quote below. Do you agree with Aristotle? If not, why not? If so, how can you apply this quote to your life?
"We are what we repeatedly do, excellence then is not an act, but a habit."
--Aristotle
"We are what we repeatedly do, excellence then is not an act, but a habit."
--Aristotle
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
FRIENDLY FRIDAY REMINDER
Your entries must be written on Friday.
You should be writing more than a single line or two as your first response.
Your reactions to others may be shorter.
There will be two posts, Friday Online 1 of 2 and Friday Online 2 of 2.
Each of those posts must have at least 50 entries for us to consider doing this Friday Online thing.
You should be writing more than a single line or two as your first response.
Your reactions to others may be shorter.
There will be two posts, Friday Online 1 of 2 and Friday Online 2 of 2.
Each of those posts must have at least 50 entries for us to consider doing this Friday Online thing.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
FRIDAY WRITING #1...PART 1 (1 of 2)
WHAT IS THE INTENDED AND UNINTENDED MESSAGE THAT THIS ADVERTISEMENT SENDS?
FRIDAY WRITING #1...PART 2 (2 of 2)
Tattoos on the Heart: Find one sentence, one word, or one story that you do not understand. Write the bit here and write a brief statement indicating what it is about the sentence, word, or story that youdo not fully grasp. Ask for help from your classmates.
CLASSMATES, after you've written your own response to the prompt above, come back later today and respond to a couple of the pleas for help.
CLASSMATES, after you've written your own response to the prompt above, come back later today and respond to a couple of the pleas for help.
Friday, April 8, 2011
Restaurant Reviews
Here is where we are going to post the reviews. You should post your review and then read and comment on at least two other reviews.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
What is due on Friday?
1. Heavily Revised Final Draft of the Restaurant Review
(typed, double spaced, spell checked, heavily revised, a final product that you would be delighted to turn in to a boss at a law firm)
2. An Electronic Copy of the Restaurant Review
What is Due Soon thereafter?
Tattoos on the Heart and it must be read on Wednesday, the 13th, to discuss in class.
(typed, double spaced, spell checked, heavily revised, a final product that you would be delighted to turn in to a boss at a law firm)
2. An Electronic Copy of the Restaurant Review
What is Due Soon thereafter?
Tattoos on the Heart and it must be read on Wednesday, the 13th, to discuss in class.
Friday, April 1, 2011
DAVID BROOKS: THE SOCIAL ANIMAL
TWO QUESTIONS
1. What is the author’s argument?
Answer one of the following:
2.
What are the implications of this argument?
--or--
Assess the validity of the author’s point.
1. What is the author’s argument?
Answer one of the following:
2.
What are the implications of this argument?
--or--
Assess the validity of the author’s point.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Elements of a Good Restaurant Review:
Hello,
Based on our in class discussion, here are your thoughts regarding this first assignment. Feel free to add more as comments below:
--knows restaurant pretty well
--how food is cooked
--what people are wearing
--ambiance
--pricing
--description…sell the food
--vivid detail
--imagery of the scene
--booths, shacks, area
--paint a picture, reader should
visualize it
--setting aside bias…
--shrimp had some good karma…
Play with language
Mix senses
Synesthesia
Based on our in class discussion, here are your thoughts regarding this first assignment. Feel free to add more as comments below:
--knows restaurant pretty well
--how food is cooked
--what people are wearing
--ambiance
--pricing
--description…sell the food
--vivid detail
--imagery of the scene
--booths, shacks, area
--paint a picture, reader should
visualize it
--setting aside bias…
--shrimp had some good karma…
Play with language
Mix senses
Synesthesia
Monday, March 28, 2011
READING DUE ON WEDNESDAY
Excerpt from Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell
Outlier, noun.
1 : something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body
2 : a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample
1.
Roseto Valfortore lies one hundred miles southeast of Rome, in the Apennine foothills of the Italian province of Foggia. In the style of medieval villages, the town is organized around a large central square. Facing the square is the Palazzo Marchesale, the palace of the Saggese family, once the great landowner of those parts. An archway to one side leads to a church, the Madonna del Carmine—Our Lady of Mount Carmine. Narrow stone steps run up the hillside, flanked by closely-clustered two-story stone houses with red tile roofs.
For centuries, the paesani of Roseto worked in the marble quarries in the surrounding hills, or cultivated the fields in the terraced valley below, walking four and five miles down the mountain in the morning and then making the long journey back up the hill at night. It was a hard life. The townsfolk were barely literate and desperately poor and without much hope for economic betterment—until word reached Roseto at the end of the nineteenth century of the land of opportunity across the ocean.
In January of 1882, a group of eleven Rosetans—ten men and one boy—set sail for New York. They spent their first night in America sleeping on the floor of a tavern on Mulberry Street, in Manhattan's Little Italy. Then they ventured west, ending up finding jobs in a slate quarry ninety miles west of the city in Bangor, Pennsylvania. The following year, fifteen Rosetans left Italy for America, and several members of that group ended up in Bangor as well, joining their compatriots in the slate quarry. Those immigrants, in turn, sent word back to Roseto about the promise of the New World, and soon one group of Rosetans after another packed up their bags and headed for Pennsylvania, until the initial stream of immigrants became a flood. In 1894 alone, some twelve hundred Rosetans applied for passports to America, leaving entire streets of their old village abandoned.
The Rosetans began buying land on a rocky hillside, connected to Bangor only by a steep, rutted wagon path. They built closely clustered two story stone houses, with slate roofs, on narrow streets running up and down the hillside. They built a church and called it Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and named the main street on which it stood Garibaldi Avenue, after the great hero of Italian unification. In the beginning, they called their town New Italy. But they soon changed it to something that seemed more appropriate, given that in the previous decade almost all of them had come from the same village in Italy. They called it Roseto.
In 1896, a dynamic young priest—Father Pasquale de Nisco—took over at Our Lady of Mount Carmel. De Nisco set up spiritual societies and organized festivals. He encouraged the townsfolk to clear the land, and plant onions, beans, potatoes, melons and fruit trees in the long backyards behind their houses. He gave out seeds and bulbs. The town came to life. The Rosetans began raising pigs in their backyard, and growing grapes for homemade wine. Schools, a park, a convent and a cemetery were built. Small shops and bakeries and restaurants and bars opened along Garibaldi Avenue. More than a dozen factories sprang up, making blouses for the garment trade. Neighboring Bangor was largely Welsh and English, and the next town over was overwhelmingly German, which meant—given the fractious relationships between the English and Germans and Italians, in those years—that Roseto stayed strictly for Rosetans: if you wandered up and down the streets of Roseto in Pennsylvania, in the first few decades after 1900, you would have heard only Italian spoken, and not just any Italian but the precise southern, Foggian dialect spoken back in the Italian Roseto. Roseto Pennsylvania was its own tiny, self-sufficient world—all but unknown by the society around it—and may well have remained so but for a man named Stewart Wolf.
Wolf was a physician. He studied digestion and the stomach, and taught in the medical school at the University of Oklahoma. He spent summers at a farm he'd bought in Pennsylvania. His house was not far from Roseto—but that, of course, didn't mean much since Roseto was so much in its own world that you could live one town over and never know much about it. "One of the times when we were up there for the summer—this would have been in the late 1950's, I was invited to give a talk at the local medical society," Wolf said, years later, in an interview. "After the talk was over, one of the local doctors invited me to have a beer. And while we were having a drink he said, ‘You know, I've been practicing for seventeen years. I get patients from all over, and I rarely find anyone from Roseto under the age of sixty-five with heart disease.'"
Wolf was skeptical. This was the 1950's, years before the advent of cholesterol lowering drugs, and aggressive prevention of heart disease. Heart attacks were an epidemic in the United States. They were the leading cause of death in men under the age of sixty-five. It was impossible to be a doctor, common sense said, and not see heart disease. But Wolf was also a man of deep curiosity. If somebody said that there were no heart attacks in Roseto, he wanted to find out whether that was true.
Wolf approached the mayor of Roseto and told him that his town represented a medical mystery. He enlisted the support of some of his students and colleagues from Oklahoma. They pored over the death certificates from residents of the town, going back as many years as they could. They analyzed physicians' records. They took medical histories, and constructed family genealogies. "We got busy," Wolf said. "We decided to do a preliminary study. We started in 1961. The mayor said—all my sisters are going to help you. He had four sisters. He said, ‘You can have the town council room.' I said, ‘Where are you going to have council meetings?' He said, ‘Well, we'll postpone them for a while.' The ladies would bring us lunch. We had little booths, where we could take blood, do EKGs. We were there for four weeks. Then I talked with the authorities. They gave us the school for the summer. We invited the entire population of Roseto to be tested."
The results were astonishing. In Roseto, virtually no one under 55 died of a heart attack, or showed any signs of heart disease. For men over 65, the death rate from heart disease in Roseto was roughly half that of the United States as a whole. The death rate from all causes in Roseto, in fact, was something like thirty or thirty-five percent lower than it should have been.
Wolf brought in a friend of his, a sociologist from Oklahoma named John Bruhn, to help him. "I hired medical students and sociology grad students as interviewers, and in Roseto we went house to house and talked to every person aged twenty one and over," Bruhn remembers. This had happened more than fifty years ago but Bruhn still had a sense of amazement in his voice as he remembered what they found. "There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn't have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didn't have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. That's it."
Wolf's profession had a name for a place like Roseto—a place that lay outside everyday experience, where the normal rules did not apply. Roseto was an outlier.
2.
Wolf's first thought was that the Rosetans must have held on to some dietary practices from the old world that left them healthier than other Americans. But he quickly realized that wasn't true. The Rosetans were cooking with lard, instead of the much healthier olive oil they used back in Italy. Pizza in Italy was a thin crust with salt, oil, and perhaps some tomatoes, anchovies or onions. Pizza in Pennsylvania was bread dough plus sausage, pepperoni, salami, ham and sometimes eggs. Sweets like biscotti and taralli used to be reserved for Christmas and Easter; now they were eaten all year round. When Wolf had dieticians analyze the typical Rosetan's eating habits, he found that a whopping 41 percent of their calories came from fat. Nor was this a town where people got up at dawn to do yoga and run a brisk six miles. The Pennsylvanian Rosetans smoked heavily, and many were struggling with obesity.
If it wasn't diet and exercise, then, what about genetics? The Rosetans were a close knit group, from the same region of Italy, and Wolf next thought was whether they were of a particularly hardy stock that protected them from disease. So he tracked down relatives of the Rosetans who were living in other parts of the United States, to see if they shared the same remarkable good health as their cousins in Pennsylvania. They didn't.
He then looked at the region where the Rosetans lived. Was it possible that there was something about living in the foothills of Eastern Pennsylvania that was good for your health? The two closest towns to Roseto were Bangor, which was just down the hill, and Nazareth, a few miles away. These were both about the same size as Roseto, and populated with the same kind of hard-working European immigrants. Wolf combed through both towns' medical records. For men over 65, the death rates from heart disease in Nazareth and Bangor were something like three times that of Roseto. Another dead end.
What Wolf slowly realized was that the secret of Roseto wasn't diet or exercise or genes or the region where Roseto was situated. It had to be the Roseto itself. As Bruhn and Wolf walked around the town, they began to realize why. They looked at how the Rosetans visited each other, stopping to chat with each other in Italian on the street, or cooking for each other in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town's social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to Mass at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under 2000 people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the town, that discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.
In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills.
"I remember going to Roseto for the first time, and you'd see three generational family meals, all the bakeries, the people walking up and down the street, sitting on their porches talking to each other, the blouse mills where the women worked during the day, while the men worked in the slate quarries," Bruhn said. "It was magical."
When Bruhn and Wolf first presented their findings to the medical community, you can imagine the kind of skepticism they faced. They went to conferences, where their peers were presenting long rows of data, arrayed in complex charts, and referring to this kind of gene or that kind of physiological process, and they talked instead about the mysterious and magical benefits of people stopping to talk to each other on the street and having three generations living under one roof. Living a long life, the conventional wisdom said at the time, depended to a great extent on who we were—that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions people made—on what they chose to eat, and how much they chose to exercise, and how effectively they were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of a place.
Wolf and Bruhn had to convince the medical establishment to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new way: they had to get them to realize that you couldn't understand why someone was healthy if all you did was think about their individual choices or actions in isolation. You had to look beyond the individual. You had to understand what culture they were a part of, and who their friends and families were, and what town in Italy their family came from. You had to appreciate the idea that community—the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with—has a profound effect on who we are. The value of an outlier was that it forced you to look a little harder and dig little deeper than you normally would to make sense of the world. And if you did, you could learn something from the outlier than could use to help everyone else.
Outlier, noun.
1 : something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body
2 : a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample
1.
Roseto Valfortore lies one hundred miles southeast of Rome, in the Apennine foothills of the Italian province of Foggia. In the style of medieval villages, the town is organized around a large central square. Facing the square is the Palazzo Marchesale, the palace of the Saggese family, once the great landowner of those parts. An archway to one side leads to a church, the Madonna del Carmine—Our Lady of Mount Carmine. Narrow stone steps run up the hillside, flanked by closely-clustered two-story stone houses with red tile roofs.
For centuries, the paesani of Roseto worked in the marble quarries in the surrounding hills, or cultivated the fields in the terraced valley below, walking four and five miles down the mountain in the morning and then making the long journey back up the hill at night. It was a hard life. The townsfolk were barely literate and desperately poor and without much hope for economic betterment—until word reached Roseto at the end of the nineteenth century of the land of opportunity across the ocean.
In January of 1882, a group of eleven Rosetans—ten men and one boy—set sail for New York. They spent their first night in America sleeping on the floor of a tavern on Mulberry Street, in Manhattan's Little Italy. Then they ventured west, ending up finding jobs in a slate quarry ninety miles west of the city in Bangor, Pennsylvania. The following year, fifteen Rosetans left Italy for America, and several members of that group ended up in Bangor as well, joining their compatriots in the slate quarry. Those immigrants, in turn, sent word back to Roseto about the promise of the New World, and soon one group of Rosetans after another packed up their bags and headed for Pennsylvania, until the initial stream of immigrants became a flood. In 1894 alone, some twelve hundred Rosetans applied for passports to America, leaving entire streets of their old village abandoned.
The Rosetans began buying land on a rocky hillside, connected to Bangor only by a steep, rutted wagon path. They built closely clustered two story stone houses, with slate roofs, on narrow streets running up and down the hillside. They built a church and called it Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and named the main street on which it stood Garibaldi Avenue, after the great hero of Italian unification. In the beginning, they called their town New Italy. But they soon changed it to something that seemed more appropriate, given that in the previous decade almost all of them had come from the same village in Italy. They called it Roseto.
In 1896, a dynamic young priest—Father Pasquale de Nisco—took over at Our Lady of Mount Carmel. De Nisco set up spiritual societies and organized festivals. He encouraged the townsfolk to clear the land, and plant onions, beans, potatoes, melons and fruit trees in the long backyards behind their houses. He gave out seeds and bulbs. The town came to life. The Rosetans began raising pigs in their backyard, and growing grapes for homemade wine. Schools, a park, a convent and a cemetery were built. Small shops and bakeries and restaurants and bars opened along Garibaldi Avenue. More than a dozen factories sprang up, making blouses for the garment trade. Neighboring Bangor was largely Welsh and English, and the next town over was overwhelmingly German, which meant—given the fractious relationships between the English and Germans and Italians, in those years—that Roseto stayed strictly for Rosetans: if you wandered up and down the streets of Roseto in Pennsylvania, in the first few decades after 1900, you would have heard only Italian spoken, and not just any Italian but the precise southern, Foggian dialect spoken back in the Italian Roseto. Roseto Pennsylvania was its own tiny, self-sufficient world—all but unknown by the society around it—and may well have remained so but for a man named Stewart Wolf.
Wolf was a physician. He studied digestion and the stomach, and taught in the medical school at the University of Oklahoma. He spent summers at a farm he'd bought in Pennsylvania. His house was not far from Roseto—but that, of course, didn't mean much since Roseto was so much in its own world that you could live one town over and never know much about it. "One of the times when we were up there for the summer—this would have been in the late 1950's, I was invited to give a talk at the local medical society," Wolf said, years later, in an interview. "After the talk was over, one of the local doctors invited me to have a beer. And while we were having a drink he said, ‘You know, I've been practicing for seventeen years. I get patients from all over, and I rarely find anyone from Roseto under the age of sixty-five with heart disease.'"
Wolf was skeptical. This was the 1950's, years before the advent of cholesterol lowering drugs, and aggressive prevention of heart disease. Heart attacks were an epidemic in the United States. They were the leading cause of death in men under the age of sixty-five. It was impossible to be a doctor, common sense said, and not see heart disease. But Wolf was also a man of deep curiosity. If somebody said that there were no heart attacks in Roseto, he wanted to find out whether that was true.
Wolf approached the mayor of Roseto and told him that his town represented a medical mystery. He enlisted the support of some of his students and colleagues from Oklahoma. They pored over the death certificates from residents of the town, going back as many years as they could. They analyzed physicians' records. They took medical histories, and constructed family genealogies. "We got busy," Wolf said. "We decided to do a preliminary study. We started in 1961. The mayor said—all my sisters are going to help you. He had four sisters. He said, ‘You can have the town council room.' I said, ‘Where are you going to have council meetings?' He said, ‘Well, we'll postpone them for a while.' The ladies would bring us lunch. We had little booths, where we could take blood, do EKGs. We were there for four weeks. Then I talked with the authorities. They gave us the school for the summer. We invited the entire population of Roseto to be tested."
The results were astonishing. In Roseto, virtually no one under 55 died of a heart attack, or showed any signs of heart disease. For men over 65, the death rate from heart disease in Roseto was roughly half that of the United States as a whole. The death rate from all causes in Roseto, in fact, was something like thirty or thirty-five percent lower than it should have been.
Wolf brought in a friend of his, a sociologist from Oklahoma named John Bruhn, to help him. "I hired medical students and sociology grad students as interviewers, and in Roseto we went house to house and talked to every person aged twenty one and over," Bruhn remembers. This had happened more than fifty years ago but Bruhn still had a sense of amazement in his voice as he remembered what they found. "There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn't have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didn't have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. That's it."
Wolf's profession had a name for a place like Roseto—a place that lay outside everyday experience, where the normal rules did not apply. Roseto was an outlier.
2.
Wolf's first thought was that the Rosetans must have held on to some dietary practices from the old world that left them healthier than other Americans. But he quickly realized that wasn't true. The Rosetans were cooking with lard, instead of the much healthier olive oil they used back in Italy. Pizza in Italy was a thin crust with salt, oil, and perhaps some tomatoes, anchovies or onions. Pizza in Pennsylvania was bread dough plus sausage, pepperoni, salami, ham and sometimes eggs. Sweets like biscotti and taralli used to be reserved for Christmas and Easter; now they were eaten all year round. When Wolf had dieticians analyze the typical Rosetan's eating habits, he found that a whopping 41 percent of their calories came from fat. Nor was this a town where people got up at dawn to do yoga and run a brisk six miles. The Pennsylvanian Rosetans smoked heavily, and many were struggling with obesity.
If it wasn't diet and exercise, then, what about genetics? The Rosetans were a close knit group, from the same region of Italy, and Wolf next thought was whether they were of a particularly hardy stock that protected them from disease. So he tracked down relatives of the Rosetans who were living in other parts of the United States, to see if they shared the same remarkable good health as their cousins in Pennsylvania. They didn't.
He then looked at the region where the Rosetans lived. Was it possible that there was something about living in the foothills of Eastern Pennsylvania that was good for your health? The two closest towns to Roseto were Bangor, which was just down the hill, and Nazareth, a few miles away. These were both about the same size as Roseto, and populated with the same kind of hard-working European immigrants. Wolf combed through both towns' medical records. For men over 65, the death rates from heart disease in Nazareth and Bangor were something like three times that of Roseto. Another dead end.
What Wolf slowly realized was that the secret of Roseto wasn't diet or exercise or genes or the region where Roseto was situated. It had to be the Roseto itself. As Bruhn and Wolf walked around the town, they began to realize why. They looked at how the Rosetans visited each other, stopping to chat with each other in Italian on the street, or cooking for each other in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town's social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to Mass at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under 2000 people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the town, that discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.
In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills.
"I remember going to Roseto for the first time, and you'd see three generational family meals, all the bakeries, the people walking up and down the street, sitting on their porches talking to each other, the blouse mills where the women worked during the day, while the men worked in the slate quarries," Bruhn said. "It was magical."
When Bruhn and Wolf first presented their findings to the medical community, you can imagine the kind of skepticism they faced. They went to conferences, where their peers were presenting long rows of data, arrayed in complex charts, and referring to this kind of gene or that kind of physiological process, and they talked instead about the mysterious and magical benefits of people stopping to talk to each other on the street and having three generations living under one roof. Living a long life, the conventional wisdom said at the time, depended to a great extent on who we were—that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions people made—on what they chose to eat, and how much they chose to exercise, and how effectively they were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of a place.
Wolf and Bruhn had to convince the medical establishment to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new way: they had to get them to realize that you couldn't understand why someone was healthy if all you did was think about their individual choices or actions in isolation. You had to look beyond the individual. You had to understand what culture they were a part of, and who their friends and families were, and what town in Italy their family came from. You had to appreciate the idea that community—the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with—has a profound effect on who we are. The value of an outlier was that it forced you to look a little harder and dig little deeper than you normally would to make sense of the world. And if you did, you could learn something from the outlier than could use to help everyone else.
SYLLABUS
GRADING SCALE Epiphany Essay: 30% Profile Essay: 10% Restaurant Review: 10% Friday Writing: 10% In Class Essay: 15% Multi-Genre: 5% MWL: 10% Participation: 10% Spring 2011 English 100-4 (CRN 31393) Mon/Wed/Fri 10:55-12:15 Mon and Wed Classroom Bldg DDH103G Fri Classroom Bldg WSL 5 Dr. Schmoll Office Hours: MWF 12:15 to 1:45 bschmoll@csub.edu 661-654-6549 The blog name for this class is http://english100spring2011.blogspot.com/ Dear Class, Welcome to this course. This quarter, we will enjoy numerous experiences together, traveling on countless mental journeys. To start things off, I have constructed a syllabus that will guide the class, hopefully answer many of your questions, and become the official constitution and law of this course. REQUIRED READING: Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart How is epiphany an important theme throughout this book? Elise Ballard, Epiphany: True Stories of Sudden Insight to Inspire, Encourage, and Transform There will be other readings, but these are the only required books. You may buy any edition of these books. Attendance: Just to be clear, to succeed on tests and papers you really should be in class. That’s just common sense, right? To pass this class, you may not miss more than two classes. Why is that? Does it sound harsh? Every class meeting matters. If you miss two classes that’s bad; how can you expect to do well doing that? Certainly your participation grade will suffer if you do that, but we’ll talk about that later. For now, if you miss that third class meeting, you are missing 10% of the quarter. You cannot do that and pass. So, here’s what we do. Do your darndest to not miss any class unnecessarily. Let’s say your boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, or wife calls and wants to take you to Tahiti this weekend, but you won’t be back until late Tuesday night. Here’s what you say: “Honey, I love you, but Dr. Schmoll seems to value my education more than you do, so we are breaking up.” Ok, that may be harsh, so don’t do that, but just make sure that you do not miss any class until the 8th week. What I’ve found is that it seems inevitable that those who miss two classes early for pathetic reasons like doctor’s appointments that should have been more carefully scheduled get to the 8th week and then have to miss for a legitimate reason (like a surprise meeting at work, a sick child to take care of, or a flat tire). If you get to that 8th week and then have to miss your third class, it’ll be bad. By that point, I’ll be kind, compassionate, a real shoulder to cry on, if you want, when telling you that you’ve now failed the course. Now, if you make it to the 8th or 9th week and you have not missed those two classes, then you have some wiggle room, so that if, heaven forbid, your cat Poopsie gets pneumonia and you have to sit up all night bottle-feeding her liquid antibiotics, you and I don’t have to have that ugly conversation where I tell you that Poopsie gets blamed for you failing the course. Let’s put this another way; do you like movies? No way, me too! When you go to the movies do you usually get up and walk around the theatre for 15% of the movie? Let’s say you do decide to do that, out of a love of popcorn and movie posters, perhaps. If you did that, would you expect to understand the whole story? Okay, maybe if you are watching Harold and Kumar, but for anything else, you’ll be lost. So, please, get to class. Being Prompt: Get to class on time. Why does that matter? First, it sends the wrong message to your principal grader(that’s me). As much as we in the humanities would like you to believe that these courses are objective (at what time of day did the Battle of the Marne begin?), that is not entirely the case. If you send your principal grader the message that you don’t mind missing the first few minutes and disturbing others in the class, don’t expect to be given the benefit of the doubt when the tests and papers roll around. Does that sound mean? It’s not meant to, but just remember, your actions send signals. Being late also means that someone who already has everything out and is ready and is involved in the discussion has to stop, move everything over, get out of the chair to let you by, pick up the pencil you drop, let you borrow paper, run to the bathroom because you spilled the coffee, and so on. It’s rude. So, what are the consequences of persistent tardiness? What do you think they should be? Remember that 10% participation? You are eligible for that grade if you are on time. Get here on time. And no, I’m not the jackass who watches for you to be late that one time and stands at the door and points in your face. One time tardiness is not a problem precisely because it is not persistent. It’s an accident; maybe Poopsie turned off your alarm. The Unforgivable Curse: Speaking of one time issues, there is something that is so severe, so awful, that if it happens one time, just one time, no warning, no “oh hey I noticed this and if you could stop it that’d be super,” you will automatically lose all 10 percent of the Participation grade. Any guesses? Cmon, you must have some idea. No, it’s not your telephone ringing. If that happens, it’ll just be slightly funny and we’ll move on. It’s a mistake and not intentional, and the increased heart rate and extra sweat on your brow from you diving headfirst into an overstuffed book bag to find a buried phone that is now playing that new Cristina Aguilera ringtone is punishment enough for you. So, what is it, this unforgivable crime? Texting. If you take out your phone to send or receive messages you will automatically lose 10% of your course grade. That means, if you receive a final grade of 85%, it will drop to 75%. If you receive a final grade of 75%, it will become a 65%. Why is that? The phone ringing is an accident. We laugh at it; we move on. Heck, my phone my even go off during class. Texting is on purpose and is rude. It, in fact, is beyond rude. It wreaks of the worst of our current society. It bespeaks the absolutely vile desire we all have to never separate from our technological tether for even a moment. It sends your fellow classmates and your teacher the signal that you have better things to do. Checking your phone during class is like listening to a friend’s story and right in the middle turning away and talking to someone else. Plus, the way our brains work, you need to fully immerse yourself, to tune your brain into an optimal, flowing machine (see Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s incredible book Flow) that can grasp and can let itself go. Students now tend to see school as a stopover on their way to a career. Brothers and sisters, that’s deadly! I wish that I could pay for you all to quit your jobs and just focus on the mind. I can’t yet do that but if I could I would, because it’d be worth every penny. Devoting time to the mind and to thinking deeply about your world will change who you are and how you approach your future, your family, your job, and your everything. Is that overstated? I believe it to be true. So, until my stock choices really take off so that I can pay all of your bills, promise me one thing. When you are in class or preparing for class, you have to be fully here. Oh crap, now it’s going to sound like a hippy professor from the 1960s: “I mean, like, be here man, just be here.” Maybe the hippies had something. Devote yourself fully to your classes by unplugging from the outside world for awhile. Laptops: The same principal goes for laptops, too. Remember, if you are taking notes on a laptop, something I think is great, you may not be on the internet at the same time. Yes, you may go to the course blog for the outline or to a document we are using in class, but you may not check email or facebook, or access anything else online. The reason why merits repeating; devote yourself fully to your classes by unplugging from the outside world for awhile. Class Climate: No, I don’t mean whether it’s going to rain in here or not. Sometimes I’ll lecture at you, but even then, your participation is vital. How can you participate when someone is lecturing? Any ideas? Turn to a neighbor and tell them the story of your first day at school in kindergarten. Now, if you are the one listening to the story, right in the middle look away, look at your watch, sneer at them, roll your eyes, yawn, wave to someone across the room, nudge a person next to you and tell them a joke, all while the other person is telling about his or her first day of kindergarten. If this happens in social setting we call it rude, and we call the people who listen in that way jackasses. They are not our friends precisely because we deeply value listening and do not put up with those who do not listen well. Right? So, there will be lecturing, and if you abhor what we are doing, then fake it. I used to do that sometimes too: “oh no, professor, I love hearing you talk about President Reagan’s supply side economics.” If we listen to psychologists, by faking interest you’ll be learning much more than if you show your disinterest. The next time you are sad force yourself to smile and you’ll see what I mean. So, sometimes there will be lecture. At other times there will be discussion of short readings that we do in class. During these times, it’s crucial that you do the silly little exercises: turn to a neighbor; find someone you don’t know and discuss this or that; explain to your friend what we just went over in lecture; pick something from the reading to disagree with; find two people on the other side of the room; throw cash at your professor…ok, maybe not that last one. This class is a bit unique in that it violates the normally accepted activity systems of college history classrooms. What we do in discussion will help solidify the concepts of each section of this course in your brain. If you are active in class, you will have to study less, and you’ll find yourself remembering much more. Mining: Have you ever wanted to be a miner? They do have those cool helmets with the lamp on top. Think about what miners do. They dig and dig, into the earth, looking for gold, coal, silver, or other valuable rocks. Sometimes all their digging amounts to nothing. They have to stop, change directions, and dig again. But sometimes they hit a productive vein. Our class will be a little like that. We’ll do some exercises that will amount to nothing and go nowhere. Who is the best judge of that? That’s right; you are! Sometimes we’ll do a written piece that will be fabulous and will produce beautiful golden prose. You will want to polish those pieces with your writing group and turn them into even more brilliant and shining jewels. Reading: How many of you love reading? I did not read a book until I was 18, so if you have not yet started your journey on this ever widening path, it’s never too late. In any course, there’s no substitute for reading. Jim Moffett says that “all real writing happens from plentitude,” meaning that you can only really write well about someone once you know about it. Reading is one way to know—not the only, by any means! I want you to have experiences with great texts. I can show you voluminous research proving why you nee to read more, but then if I assign a stupid, long, expensive textbook you probably will end up not reading, or only reading to have the reading done, something we have all done, right? The economy now requires much high literacy rates (see The World is Flat), and even though reading levels have not gone down in the last 40 years, it is crucial that you start to push your own reading so that your own literacy level goes up. For these ten weeks, diving wholeheartedly into the course reading is vital. Remember to read in a particular way. As reading expert and UCSB professor Sheridan Blau has argued, “reading is as much a process of text production as writing is.” Reading involves revision? Does that sound silly? As you read, think about the different ways that you understand what you read. Most importantly, when you read, think about the words of E.D. Hirsch, who says that we look at what a text says (reading), what it means (interpretation), and why it matters (criticism). Hey, but if you are in a history course, aren’t you supposed to be reading for exactly the number of miles of trenches that were dug in World War One, how many railroad workers died from 1890 to 1917, or what the causes of the Great Depression were? Anyway, the answer is yes and no. There are two types of reading that you’ll do in college. As the literary goddess theorist Louise Rosenblatt explains, there is aesthetic reading, where you are reading to have an experience with the text, and there is efferent reading, where you are reading to take away information from the text. You do both types all the time. Think about a phone book. You have probably never heard someone say of a phone book, “don’t tell me about it, I want to read it for myself.” Reading a phone book is purely efferent. In this course you will practice both types of reading. I have chosen texts that you can enjoy (aesthetic) and that you can learn from(efferent). I want to see and appreciate the detail in our reading, but in this course I’ll give you that detail in class lectures. In the reading, it’s much more important that you read texts that will live with you forever and to inspire you to think more thoroughly about your world. As you read, you should be working hard to create meaning for yourself. As Rosenblatt asserts, “taking someone else’s interpretation as your own is like having someone else eat your dinner for you.” Please, don’t let the numbskulls as wikipedia or sparknotes eat your dinner for you. Rough Drafts: To receive credit for any of the out of class essays this quarter, you must have a complete, typed rough draft in class for revision. If you are absent on the day we revise, you will not receive credit for the essay. Why is this? While many college writers see writing as something done at the last minute and only when the due date is imminent, the only way to improve as a writer is to put your writing through numerous revisions. That is why you must bring a complete typed rough draft to class. GRADED BUSINESS My Writing Lab: This is a computer-based program that will help you tackle your writing problems with exercises. While the best way to learn to write better is to write and read more, this program will give you specific assistance in your areas of greatest need. Participation: You do not need to be the person who speaks out the most, asks the most questions, or comes up with the most brilliant arguments to receive full credit in participation. If you are in class and on time, discuss the issues that we raise, avoid the temptation to nod off, to leave early, or to text people during class (the three easiest ways to lose credit), and in general act like you care, then you will receive a good participation grade! Just being here does not guarantee a 100% participation grade, since you must be regularly actively involved for that to be possible. Restaurant Review: Do you love to eat as much as I love to eat? Good. Go to a restaurant and take notes on the ambiance, the service, and the food. Write a review and post it to the website Bakersfield.com. Multi-Genre Writing: Multi-Genre Writing: For this assignment you must complete a writing topic in five different genres. The theme of your multi-genre assignment will be up to you, but I would strongly suggest using some of the writing that you have already completed this quarter. Use something that you or your writing group valued. In-Class Essay: We will write two essays in class. You will choose which one you want to have graded and recorded. To be eligible to pass this course you must earn a C- or higher on one in-class essay. Final Assignment: EPIPHANY: The culminating written work of the quarter, we’ll discuss this in class. Friday Writing: This course is partly being run as a hybrid, meaning that for the first few Fridays of the quarter we are going to meet online rather than face-to-face. There will be assignments on the blog that MUST BE WRITTEN ON THE FRIDAY WHEN THEY APPEAR. The blog will be checked each Friday. Your responses to the assignment and to fellow students will be recorded and you will earn 10% of your quarter grade by simply writing online. DEPARTMENTAL POLICY STATEMENTS: To advance to English 110, students must earn a grade of C- or higher in English 100. To be eligible for a C- in English 100, students must earn a C- or higher on at least one in-class writing assignment and a C- average on all other course assignments. Writing Workshop You are responsible for completing 15 MyWritingLab topics in conjunction with your English 100 class. This requirement is worth 10% of your overall English 100 grade. To receive full credit, you must (1) take the pre- and post diagnostics (Sentence Grammar and Basic Grammar) and (2) master approximately one and a half of the below assigned topics per week, for a total of 15 topics by the end of the quarter. To master a topic, you must earn a score of 80% or higher on both the Recall and Apply sections for each of the following MyWritingLab topics. Note that topics mastered through the pre-diagnostic will not count towards your 15 topics. You must master the below 15 topics through the Recall and Apply sections. Prewriting Thesis Statement Essay Organization Developing and Organizing a Paragraph Parts of Speech, Phrases, and Clauses Fragments Run-On Sentences Subject-Verb Agreement Pronoun Agreement Misplaced or Dangling Modifiers Commas Apostrophes Semicolons, Colons, Dashes, and Parentheses Parallelism Easily Confused Words You will be held responsible for these new skills every week in your writing. Since this is an online workshop, you can work on these topics outside of class at your convenience, so long as you master approximately one and a half topics per week, for a total of 15 topics. This means that if you wait until the end of the quarter to complete all fifteen topics, you will not receive full credit and your essay grades may suffer. You will need an access code, which is packaged with your Quick Access text and the following course identification number: Course ID#--#### A time will be scheduled during your first or second week of class to help you register to the site and create your user profile, and you will need your MyWritingLab code and course identification number to do this. If you have already registered to the site in a previous class, you do not need to register and create a new user profile. Instead, you will need to login to the site, click on “join a different class,” and follow the directions from there. For additional information on MyWritingLab, view the power points at the following Web sites: How to register for MWL http://www.csub.edu/mwl/updated mwlreg.ppt How to switch classes in in MWL http://www.csub.edu/mwl/mwlswitchclass.ppt How to get around MWL for English100 http://www.csub.edu/mwl/mwleng100.ppt Note: If you exhaust a topic before mastering it, let your instructor know, and he or she will have it “unlocked” for you. Note: Please let your instructor know if you are enrolled in Humanities/Behavioral Sciences 277, which also uses MyWritingLab, while enrolled in English 80 to avoid any confusion. COURSE SCHEDULE WEEK ONE Mon 3/28 Syllabus Opening Exercise: “Bakersfield Brett” Assign Restaurant Review Explain First In-Class Reading (typed, presented to your writing group, fairly short) Wed 3/30 Make a List of what makes good writing Profile Interviews Stories and Meaning Exercise: “McDonalds and ‘Honey’” Story Told Two Ways When you start dating someone you tell them stories about yourself. Think of some of those and give them titles. Now tell one of those stories. Two other people will tell what it means. What’s the point? Look again at your list of what makes good writing? Explain Writing Groups: you will meet with this group all quarter long. Before you read any piece to the group, you should tell the group what you want as feedback: just listen, look at word choice, does it flow?, is it funny?, is it worth pursuing and polishing? Is it too long? Is it too short? Also, no excuses from the reader: “this is no good.” The rule is simple; just read the crap! After you read the piece, someone in the group will say “thank you.” It seems odd, right? It’s a nice way to break the ice, and it really is nice to thank the author for having been so bold as to read something. Meet with Writing Group Fri 4/1 Fridays online: WEEK TWO Mon 4/4 Rough Draft of Restaurant Review Due Focusing Exercise (Start in the Middle) Reading Groups Wed 4/6 Final Draft of Restaurant Review Due (due to turnitin by midnight tonight) Dan Kirby Exercise: _____ at your age. _____ at half your age. _____ at twice your age. Observe the person from the outside. For each time period, take a picture of yourself in words. For each time period, start with a place: for example, “I am sitting on the hood of my 1981, dog dirt brown Dodge Omni, waiting for my bobbed blond haired 5 foot nothin’ tall girlfriend Beth Anne to finish working at the Wherehouse Music store on Columbus Street…” Meet with Writing Groups Fri 4/8 Fridays online: WEEK THREE Mon 4/11 First Assignment/Profile Due George Hillocks Exercise on Analyzing Evidence: Slip or Trip? First In-Class Reading Wed 4/13 DISCUSS Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart Poetry is Cool: Barry Spacks: “let’s get some poetry in the air.” Yates: “every poem sings a little tune.” Everyone is a Poet Exercise: Think about the last time you were enraged, absolutely incensed, full of anger. Why were you so mad? With whom were you mad? Now, on paper write a description of the feeling, the setting, the reason for your anger, and how the whole thing was resolved, if it was resolved. Finally, circle key lines, words, or phrases in that piece. Write the circled lines in a row, in any order. IDIOMS EXERCISE (linguistic collocations): Hit the Road, Air your dirty laundry in public, all hell broke loose, alive and kicking, backseat driver, keep in mind, par for the course, hit the road, got up on the wrong side of the bed, as sharp as a tack, piece of cake. kick the bucket…what do these mean? Draw them as literal statements. Fri 4/15 Fridays online: WEEK FOUR Mon 4/18 Crickets: http://audiopoetry.wordpress.com/category/poet/aram-saroyan/ or try http://www.mtraks.com/artist/aram_saroyan/track/498707-crickets_1965/ by Aaron Saroyan (Is this poetry?) Haiku: 5-7-5 Fall in Bakersfield Leaves change but heat will not cease Burn, infernally, summer Crime Story (Porphyria’s Lover) R.J. Blick, Mrs. R.J. Blick, Porphyria Blick, Hubert Fenston, R. Emerson Chandler What kinds of writing would this crime produce? Wed 4/20 ESSAY DUE: Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart Neighborhood Map Creation Stories: Blood Clot Boy Write your own creation story, giving personality to animals or other natural forces. Explain some aspect of nature. Meet with Writing Groups Fri 4/22 Fridays online: WEEK FIVE Mon 4/25 Ellis Island Photo Writing (with photos from Ellis Island, write a first person narrative) Compare and contrast the following two videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lk1awSIang (outkast) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0FuMRHRCVY (hayseed) Wed 4/27 IN CLASS ESSAY #1 Fri 4/29 Fridays online: WEEK SIX Mon 5/2 Write Around with Quotes Assignment #3: Look back at the “Everyone is a Poet Anger Exercise” as a Sample. For this assignment you must complete a writing topic in five different genres. Let’s start by making a list of genres: college essay, apology, bedtime story, movie script, description…. Next, decide on a written topic, either something you’ve already started or something new you would like to write about. Now, brainstorm a list of genres that seem to fit this topic. Think broadly here. For instance, even if your topic is Sen. Obama you can still write a speech, recipe, bedtime story, or telenovela (soap opera). Wed 5/4 Work on Multi-Genre Assignment Meet with Writing Groups: Answer multi-genre questions. Fri 5/6 Fridays online: WEEK SEVEN Mon 5/9 MULTI-GENRE ASSIGNMENT DUE Recall your favorite place to play as a child. Write about something that happened there. What was so great about the place? Take three stories from around the room and answer the following questions: who do these stories have in common? taken together, what does it mean to play? Answer them in your group. Wed 5/11 Discuss the Epiphany book Meet with Writing Group Fri 5/13 Fridays online: WEEK EIGHT Mon 5/16 Start the final assignment making each other authorities assignment: interview a neighbor and incorporate their feedback into your own writing. Wed 5/18 Defining Academic Writing Writing Groups Deconstructing the English 110 Research Paper (as a class we are going to analyze the structure, through several good models, of the 110 paper) Fri 5/20 Fridays online: WEEK NINE Mon 5/23 Tone Joan: Who is she? What makes her Tone Joan? Wed 5/25 Writing about Art: Is this beautiful? http://wallpaper.travelblog.org/Wallpaper/pix/tb_fiji_sunset_wallpaper.jpg Is this beautiful? http://www.artinthepicture.com/artists/Gustav_Klimt/kiss.jpeg Is this beautiful? http://img207.imageshack.us/img207/5448/198420afghan20girlhz1.jpg Now, define beauty without using examples. Is it possible? What does it mean to be beautiful? Fri 5/27 Individual conferences WEEK TEN Mon 5/30 MEMORIAL DAY SCHOOL CLOSED Wed 6/1 Individual conferences Fri 6/3 Individual conferences Mon 6/6 Final Assignment Due FINAL EXAM: FRIDAY, JUNE 10, 11 TO 1:30
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