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Grade 9Fahrenheit 451Teacher Tool Kit, Part 2Resources for Teaching the NovelFahrenheit 451:Teacher Guide to CCSS Aligned UnitFahrenheit 451: A CCSS Aligned UnitIntroduction and Rationale: The following several pages are resources based on current best practices in education at the high school level. Attention has been given to equipping students of various abilities with the skills to meet the demands of the Common Core State Standards. Regardless of teaching style, every teacher should be able to grab ready-to-use tasks that fit time, rigor, and variety demands of a given instructional period. Throughout the unit, emphasis will be given to the essential question on which the unit is based: TO WHAT EXTENT IS TECHNOLOGY TODAY FOSTERING INTELLIGENCE OR IGNORANCE? Another worthwhile question to consider is: IF A SOCIETY IS LITERALLY FALLING APART MORALLY, POLITICALLY, AND/OR ECONOMICALLY, IS THERE HOPE THAT THE SOCIETY CAN RECOVER? The unit will provide significant meaning-making opportunities in which students will be positioned to compose lists, paragraphs, and charts. Note that these moments serve to build their contextual knowledge for the culminating writing prompt and/or project at the conclusion of the unit. Little emphasis is given to mere comprehension of the text, activities are designed to dig for deep thinking. This unit assumes that students are between ninth and tenth grades at least. Therefore, essay-writing should not be a new concept. It assumes students have been taught about thesis statements, introductions, body paragraphs, and conclusions. Writing constantly occurs during this unit, and is viewed as a thinking process, not only an end product.Time is provided for reading in class as well as working in class. Schools differ in their demand of students’ time outside of class. Therefore, although this unit has been planned with rigor, it considers limitations of time and resources to the degree that a school might demand. Adjust to fit your own needs. This unit is to serve as a starting point for the teachers’ own personal spin on this unit. Use the activities herein, and make them your own. Choose additional resources that better fit your teaching style or use the ones provided here. It is the very essence of the Common Core State Standards to provide you with rigorous and meaningful examples of how to address the Standards, but still provide you with freedom as an instructor to address those standards in the way you see fit for your students.Fahrenheit 451: A CCSS Aligned UnitSuggested Pacing GuideThe following is a suggested pacing guide for a 9-week unit using Fahrenheit 451 as an anchor text and incorporating other supplementary texts that help to explore the themes presented in the book as well as the essential questions posed daily in the unit. Please keep in mind that a lesson may last more than one class period.Lesson 1: Introduction to Essential QuestionsOpinionnaire Walk and Class Discussionpg. 6Lesson 5: Think AloudCollaborative thinking leads to in-depth writingpg. 15Lesson 9: Allusions to Other LiteratureDiscovering how books are relatedpg. 24Lesson 2: A Lesson in Effective AnnotationIntroduction to the Annotation Key and Guided Practice through the first chapterpg. 7Lesson 6: The Truman ShowA comparison/contrast look into why perfection isn’t always perfectpg. 18Lesson 10: Culminating Writing Task (Choice A)Using the skills throughout the unit, write an informative look at the textpg. 28Lesson 3: Parallel SocietiesAn examination of USA vs. Montag’s Worldpg. 13Lesson 7: Using Evidence to Support ClaimsHow to cite and examine the effect of a powerful quotepg. 19Lesson 11: Culminating Writing Task (Choice B)Project-based examination of societal structure using a school modelpg. 30Lesson 4: Two Cents DiscussionWorthwhile student-led discussion of the novel and its characterspg. 14Lesson 8: Writing to the TextWrite in response to the book as well as the movie using textual evidence to support claimspg. 21Appendix:Related Texts for supplementary instructionpg. 33Lesson 1: Opinion Walk and Class DiscussionOpinion Walk: Place the following statements at the top of posters around the classroom. Each of them addresses a different theme in Fahrenheit 451 that applies to society today. Give students each a marker and the direction to quietly answer each. This should be done in the form of a claim (single statement that answers, agrees, or disagrees with the position stated or question posed), and two to three supporting sentences that express why the student feels that way. It is important for students not to read other responses. Their responsibility is to read statements, write a response, and move to another poster. For credit giving purposes, students might sign or initial their responses. America is headed in a right (as in correct) and positive direction. (theme(s): society, governmental control, censorship) Marriage still serves its intended purpose. True love exists. (theme(s): relationships, society’s expectations) Human-kindness still exists in our culture today. (theme(s): relationships, society’s expectations) How do you personally feel about the effectiveness of our school system? (theme(s): education, knowledge v. ignorance, censorship) Media (journalism, advertisements, social networking, and entertainment) significantly influences thought in this society. (theme(s): society, truth, education, knowledge v. ignorance) Technology has played a positive/negative role in society because… (theme(s): society, technology) Once all students have written about each topic, allow for a class discussion about each of the topics. Encourage students of various points of view to voice their thoughts. Conclude with the idea that Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in 1953 as a statement about a future society. This society would be a result of some of the situations he must have seen in his own society. Encourage students to watch for the cautions he tries to insert about the above topics throughout the text. In fact, if annotating the text, these are great themes to look for during reading. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.2 Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze in detail its development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details; provide an objective summary of the text. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.1 Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.Lesson 2: A Lesson in Effective AnnotationAnnotating the Text: In preparation for class discussion and other assignments, you will complete a color-coded annotation of the text. This will also encourage you to capture moments of significant insight. If writing in a book, feel free to underline and highlight. Write in the margins. If note-taking on binder paper, always note page numbers and copy short quotes. LOOK FOR… WHAT TO WRITE… Questions Every time it feels like there is a hole in the information given, ask questions of the author. Ask questions of clarification. Ask questions of characters. Ask questions that connect the text to our society today. Notes Anything you notice that seems important but unable to be categorized otherwise should be listed as a note. Any thought that jumps off the page at you, that Themes Notice and discuss themes of humanity, society, education, censorship, truth, knowledge v. ignorance, war, technology, and media among any others. Note what the author is saying about that theme. Character Development This includes descriptions of character, moments of change, moments of success or guilt, exchanges with new characters, physical descriptions, and mental and emotional descriptions. Symbols Every time an object has a meaning other than its stated or typically understood meaning, it may be serving as a symbol. Take note. When objects are repeated, predict why. Literary Devices Moments of figurative language should be noted. This includes metaphors, foreshadowing, similes, personification, imagery, irony, and in this piece, even poetic devices. Discuss what the author is using the device to achieve. Or, discuss the effect the device has on the reader. Mark Up That Text with Your Observations and Thoughts! As you thoughtfully read and focus on key passages of the novel, identify important or striking features, notice patterns, predict meanings, and annotate, or “mark up”, the text to show your observations and thoughts This kind of practice will help you read more closely and with greater thought and understanding! As you get more practice, you’ll develop your own system. Until then use the following system. Mark features of the text with a: ! for important events, decisions, or thoughts expressed by the author or a character ? to highlight confusing or puzzling ideas or events_________ to identify a literary technique used by the author. left214630 important, striking, or enchanting words, phrases, and sentences. 285758191500 sensory images figurative language, repetition, sounds, and unusual punctuation In the margins, write brief comments. If the margins are narrow, you may want to use post-it notes. When writing comments, you might … Observe what is being said or done. Define unfamiliar words.Identify a theme being developed Paraphrase or summarize a difficult phrase, sentence or passage Describe the effect of an image, sound, or word Identify a literary technique Infer a character quality Ask a thoughtful question or predict an outcome right571500Example of AnnotationTeacher comments: _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Final grade: ______/________Practice Annotation with Fahrenheit 451Practice Annotating for Reading Between the Lines: The following excerpts are from three different places in the first chapter. Each describes Mildred and Montag’s room, or what can be heard from the room. Annotate (or take notes) on this text for repeated themes. Assign each different theme a color or a marking. For example, if you repeatedly see the color white as described by pale complexions, or milky color, or an innocent character, maybe use [brackets]. A next theme should be assigned the *asterisk*. Comment in the margins about what messages you think the author is saying by using the themes. He felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over, and down on itself like a tallow skin, like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing and now blown out. Darkness. He was not happy. He was not happy. He said the words to himself. He recognized this as the true state of affairs. He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no way of going to knock on her door and ask for it back. Without turning on the light he imagined how this room would look. His wife stretched on the bed, uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of a tomb, her eyes fixed to the ceiling by invisible threads of steel, immovable. And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time. The room was cold but nonetheless he felt he could not breathe. He did not wish to open the curtains and open the french windows, for he did not want the moon to come into the room. So, with the feeling of a man who will die in the next hour for lack of air, he felt his way toward his open, separate, and therefore cold bed. (pg. 12) He made more soft sounds. He stumbled towards the bed and shoved the book clumsily under the cold pillow. He fell into bed and his wife cried out, startled. He lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend's house, a two-year-old child building word patterns, talking jargon, making pretty sounds in the air. But Montag said nothing and after a long while when he only made the small sounds, he felt her move in the room and come to his bed and stand over him and put her hand down to feel his cheek. He knew that when she pulled her hand away from his face it was wet. Late in the night he looked over at Mildred. She was awake. There was a tiny dance of melody in the air, her Seashell was tamped in her ear again and she was listening to far people in far places, her eyes wide and staring at the fathoms of blackness above her in the ceiling. (pg. 41-42) A great thunderstorm of sound gushed from the walls. Music bombarded him at such an immense volume that his bones were almost shaken from their tendons; he felt his jaw vibrate, his eyes wobble in his head. He was a victim of concussion. When it was all over he felt like a man who had been thrown from a cliff, whirled in a centrifuge and spat out over a waterfall that fell and fell into emptiness and emptiness and never-quite touched-bottom-never-never-quite-no not quite-touched-bottom ... and you fell so fast you didn't touch the sides either ... never ... quite . . . touched… anything. The thunder faded. The music died. (pg. 45)_____________________________________________________________________________________CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.2 Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze in detail its development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details; provide an objective summary of the text. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.3 Analyze how complex characters (e.g., those with multiple or conflicting motivations) develop over the course of a text, interact with other characters, and advance the plot or develop the theme. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the cumulative impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.5 Analyze how an author’s choices concerning how to structure a text, order events within it (e.g., parallel plots), and manipulate time (e.g., pacing, flashbacks) create such effects as mystery, tension, or surprise.Lesson 3: Parallel Societies Have students brainstorm a list of 10 questions in pairs. Give them these topics to write about: ignorance, intelligence, society, technology, censorship. Encourage students to write questions that do not have yes or no answers. These questions can relate to the book so far or the world in general. Similarly encourage students to include two of the ideas on the list in each question. After all questions have been written, have pairs choose the most insightful question or the question with the most potential for a good discussion out of their ten. Report them out. Keep track of the best five as a class, put them on a poster on the wall for a later discussion. Distribute and complete Parallel Societies activity.Students should strive to find at least four features from the novel that have parallels in modern society. These items can then be discussed as a class or in small groups to delve into Bradbury’s reasoning behind the characters/events in the story.right781050_____________________________________________________________________________________CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.5 Analyze how an author’s choices concerning how to structure specific parts of a text (e.g., the choice of where to begin or end a story, the choice to provide a comedic or tragic resolution) contribute to its overall structure and meaning as well as its aesthetic impact.Lesson 4: Two cents discussionPreparation: Gather enough pennies for each student in the class to use two pennies; consider bringing in a bowl. Get post-it notes Procedure: 1. Using the following list that you place on the board for students to see, prompt them to write a paragraph that summarizes the first chapter. Encourage them to use at least 5 of the words and have them underline in their paragraphs to make grading easy. Students may use any form of the word. Illuminates, explores, broadens, considers, contemplates, fears, wavers, vacillates, ambiguous, clarifies, truth, credibility 2. Two Cents Discussion: Chapter 1 – Give every student two pennies with the direction that their job during the discussion is to offer their “two cents”, or opinion. Since they will have two pennies, they need to try to spend both of them (participate twice). You can put a bowl in the center of the desks circled around the classroom and let the students “spend” their pennies by shooting baskets at the bowl. Once students spend their pennies, encourage them to remain quiet so others can participate, but if they absolutely HAVE to say something every now and then, let them speak, just encourage that they are careful to limit their air time. The ideas they share can be in the form of reporting something that happened in the first chapter, asking a question about the first chapter, responding to someone else’s question, or connecting to themes. NOTE: One way to help keep a discussion alive is to have the class create a list of topics on the board worth talking about before the discussion begins. 3. In preparation to continue reading in chapter 2, direct students with a focus. Either encourage their continued annotation practice, or give them time to consider the evolution of Montag as a character, encouraging them to take notes to effectively complete the culminating writing task. 4. Give students time to read. While reading, give students a post-it note. Have them identify 5 good words to use. These should be like the vocabulary words offered in the beginning of the period. Some that they know, but often fail to use in writing. Some words may be words that they don’t know. Let this serve to create a list of words to learn and to use. _____________________________________________________________________________________CCSS.ELA-Comprehension and Collaboration.SL.9-10.1. Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grades 9–10 topics, texts, and issues, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and SS.ELA-Presentation of Knowledge and Ideas.SL.9-10. 4. Present information, findings, and supporting evidence clearly, concisely, and logically such that listeners can follow the line of reasoning and the organization, development, substance, and style are appropriate to purpose, audience, and task. Lesson 5: Think AloudPreparation: Get 3x5 cards for everyone in the class Make Practicing Thinking Aloud copies. Procedure: 1. Have students pair up. They need one sheet of paper between the two of them. For each of the following categories, students are going to get 1 minute to write as many ideas as they can think of for each list: Features of society that foster ignorance (what makes us dumb?) Features of society that breed intelligence Upon completion of just these two, have groups read out their BEST and most original idea to the class. Names, adjectives, and labels of MILDRED. Names, adjectives, and labels of MONTAG. Names, adjectives, and labels of CLARISSE. Names, adjectives, and labels of FABER. Have students label each character as either ignorant or intelligent. Then, have students circle descriptors they wrote that help develop that label. 2. Separate students and have them each get out a half-sheet of paper. Have them choose one of the following claims: Montag is ignorant. Montag is intelligent. Schools today foster intelligence. Schools today foster ignorance. 3. Have students write a paragraph (7-8 sentences) that provides evidence to support the claim they chose. Encourage students to use examples from the book or society, and then carefully analyze and judge what the evidence proves. Encourage the use of convincing language. Once paragraphs are complete, have students switch papers with a friend. Students will read each other’s paragraphs and label paragraphs accordingly: Underline the most convincing sentence of evidence. Star (*) three words that demonstrate excellent word choice. Circle three words that could be improved for word choice. Suggest an improvement for each. 4. As students continue reading chapter two, pass out a 3X5 card and have them identify one good quote that makes them think. Have students copy the quote on one side and write what they think about it on the back side. Their goal is to fill the page. 5. Assign Practicing Thinking Aloud for homework. Practicing Thinking Aloud: Some people hate to read, others love it. Faber gives Montag a series of reasons why books are so important. Underline phrases or sentences that make you think. Then, jot down 15 comments, questions, or observations in the side margins about what you are reading. Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more `literary' you are. That's my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. "So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality. Do you know the legend of Hercules and Antaeus, the giant wrestler, whose strength was incredible so long as he stood firmly on the earth. But when he was held, rootless, in mid-air, by Hercules, he perished easily. If there isn't something in that legend for us today, in this city, in our time, then I am completely insane. Well, there we have the first thing I said we needed. Quality, texture of information." "And the second?" "Leisure." "Oh, but we've plenty of off-hours." "Off-hours, yes. But time to think? If you're not driving a hundred miles an hour, at a clip where you can't think of anything else but the danger, then you're playing some game or sitting in some room where you can't argue with the fourwall televisor. Why? The televisor is 'real.' It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be, right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest, 'What nonsense!'" "Only the 'family' is 'people.'" "I beg your pardon?" "My wife says books aren't 'real.'" "Thank God for that. You can shut them, say, 'Hold on a moment.' You play God to it. But who has ever torn himself from the claw that encloses you when you drop a seed in a TV parlour? It grows you any shape it wishes! It is an environment as real as the world. It becomes and is the truth. Books can be beaten down with reason. But with all my knowledge and scepticism, I have never been able to argue with a one-hundred-piece symphony orchestra, full colour, three dimensions, and I being in and part of those incredible parlours. As you see, my parlour is nothing but four plasterwalls. And here." He held out two small rubber plugs. "For my ears when I ride the subway-jets." "Denham's Dentifrice; they toil not, neither do they spin," said Montag, eyes shut. "Where do we go from here? Would books help us?" "Only if the third necessary thing could be given us. Number one, as I said, quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the inter-action of the first two. And I hardly think a very old man and a fireman turned sour could do much this late in the game..." "I can get books." "You're running a risk." "That's the good part of dying; when you've nothing to lose, you run any risk you want." "There, you've said an interesting thing," laughed Faber, "without having read it!" How do you feel about reading books? Do you agree or disagree with Faber? Why or why not? (Write a paragraph using the textual evidence and thoughts above) _____________________________________________________________________________________CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone, including words with multiple meanings or language that is particularly fresh, engaging, or beautiful. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.1. Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence. a. Introduce precise claim(s), distinguish the claim(s) from alternate or opposing claims, and create an organization that establishes clear relationships among claim(s), counterclaims, reasons, and evidence. b. Develop claim(s) and counterclaims fairly, supplying evidence for each while pointing out the strengths and limitations of both in a manner that anticipates the audience’s knowledge level and concerns. c. Use words, phrases, and clauses to link the major sections of the text, create cohesion, and clarify the relationships between claim(s) and reasons, between reasons and evidence, and between claim(s) and counterclaims.Lesson 6: The Truman ShowPreparation: Rent or purchase The Truman Show in preparation for viewing. Procedure: 1. Complete a five-minute write. (This is in preparation for two upcoming writing prompts.) Have students just write. They need to keep writing the whole five minutes. They can write to a focused topic like what would viewers see if your life were a movie? The goal is quantity. Research shows that ideas will come. Once finished, have students circle three insightful phrases. 2. Preface viewing The Truman Show with a few ideas. Students may take notes. They will be looking for the parallels between the lives of Burbank and Montag. They may create venn diagrams or comparative charts to help track information for an eventual compare and contrast essay. 3. Noting that The Truman Show is like a dystopian novel, review the following information about dystopian novels: Plot lines follow one of two directions: terrible things happen to the characters, but the characters either (a) escape their fate, or (b) the “establishment” wins. Structurally, dystopian novels are usually divided into three acts: Act I is largely exposition, establishing the parameters of the society and introducing the characters. Usually some precipitous event occurs toward the end of Act I that introduces the conflict and begins the rising action. Act II contains most of the rising action as it follows the attempts of the main character to either escape or change the society. The climax—the point at which the character’s attempts to fulfill his/her desire and the society’s attempts to thwart him/her reach the point at which one side or the other must win—usually occurs either at the end of Act II or the beginning of Act III. Act III contains the falling action, the aftermath of the action in Act II. The theme is derived from the resolution of the plot: if the attempt to escape is successful, or the dystopian society is changed, the novel has a positive theme. If, however, the attempts at escape or change fail, the novel has a negative theme. Common characters in the dystopian novel include: Representative(s) of the powerful, those in control. Representative(s) of the “typical” citizen, perfectly happy with the society or blissfully unaware of the society’s flaws. Sometimes these characters are staunchly patriotic and cannot comprehend anyone’s dissatisfaction with the society. Sometimes these characters naively take for granted that the way things are is simply the way things are. Sometimes these characters are passive/philosophical: they are aware of the flaws in the society (though not necessarily troubled by them), but they accept the flaws. They believe either there is no need to change or no point in trying to change. At least one character disenfranchised by the society, who desires either to escape or to change. Sometimes these characters begin the novel loving the society (and holding a high rank within the society), but events in the novel cause a change in belief. Sometimes these characters begin the novel already disliking the society. Often, at the beginning of the novel, they desire change but feel powerless to effect any change. Their attitude toward society may be based on events that occurred prior to the beginning of the novel, or due to some personal quirk or defect that makes the character aware of the flaws in the society. The narrative point of view of a dystopian novel is almost always from the inside— either a member of the society itself or someone who enters and is adopted by the society. Rarely will an outsider offer a convincing evaluation of the dystopian nature of the society of the novel. Common philosophical or thematic traits of the dystopian novel include: The individual is worth nothing more in a dystopian novel than his or her value as part of the governmental or the “establishment” machine. Power can reside either in a single dictator or in a larger governmental organization. Major forms of control in many dystopian novels include the means of communication, education, mass media, and popular culture. Military control can be a factor in the dystopian novel, but to a lesser extent than other, more subtle forms of social control. The controlling body (person or party) often uses pop culture to distract its members and thus control them (e.g., allowing, even encouraging, drug and alcohol use, rampant consumerism). The controlling body finds and uses a scapegoat to deflect the blame for the suffering of the people (e.g., a foreign enemy, a disenfranchised group within the society, etc.) 4. View The Truman Show. Consider stopping a couple of times to have students discuss similarities they are beginning to see between the two characters in small groups. Ask the groups to consider what the similarities might mean, what they reveal about each character or the nature of man when pressed by “the establishment”. Extension Activity: Get The Truman Show cued up in preparation for viewing. Get 5 butcher-paper posters up around the room with the following labels: Loneliness Unfulfilled Limited Un-thinking Betrayal Procedure: 1. Write a journal entry: Why is Truman’s perfect life an unacceptable life? Discuss answers as a class. 2. Complete viewing of The Truman Show. 3. Give students time to complete reading of chapter 2 in Fahrenheit 451. 4. Have each student find 2 quotes. These quotes must be able to support one or two of the concepts above. Each student must copy their quotes onto posters in which their quotes fit the topic. Lesson 7: Using Evidence to Support ClaimsPreparation: Gather enough 3x5 cards to distribute to class. (Optional) Prepare a document camera or the board to write a corporate paragraph. Procedure: 1. Distribute a 3x5 card for students to use. Have students identify a quote they would like to talk about, and write what they think about it. They should address why the quote is important, or how it connects to our society, or what messages Bradbury is revealing through the quote. Their thoughts may include a question. The quote and analysis must occupy the front side of the card. On the back, have students write 3 questions to pose to the class during discussion. 2. Discuss the text as a class. Establish the purpose of discussion as preparation for the upcoming writing prompt. Explain to students that when they verbally defend their own thoughts, that acts as preparation for the upcoming written work. Asking questions will also help clear up confusion and offer a variety of interpretations before being asked to write to the prompt. Consider creating a timeline on the board that students can add events to first. Next, have students begin reporting out the quotes they identified as important. When awkward silences occur, prompt students to present some of their questions for discussion. 3. In preparation for the Writing Prompt, have students write a paragraph to these criteria: Use a topic sentence that communicates a message Bradbury may be trying to communicate. (Use the author’s name, the title of the book, and what the author is trying to express) Write 1-2 sentences that anticipate a counter-claim that could be argued against the message. (This probably starts with a transitional word/phrase that allows for looking at another side. For example, students may start with although, even though, despite, aside from, beside, except, excluding, or other than to introduce why and how others may look at the message differently. Ultimately this sentence’s purpose is to nullify an argument against the original claim or message.) Write a concrete detail sentence or use a quote to exemplify one reason for the message being valid. Use 1-2 commentary sentences to explain the power or significance of the quote. Use a transition of addition (comparatively, coupled with, correspondingly, likewise, similarly, moreover) to introduce another concrete detail or quote to illustrate another reason for the message being valid. Use 1-2 commentary sentences to explain the power or significance of the quote. Write a concluding sentence which uses confident language (surely, obviously, certainly, as a result, consequently, for these reasons, therefore) to reiterate why or how the message is significant or important. (It may be valuable to write a paragraph together as a class to one message, and then assign students the task of completing their own paragraph on their own time or with the remaining minutes in class.) Lesson 8: Writing to the TextPreparation Make copies of Writing Prompt – Truman Burbank vs. Guy Montag Gather enough colored markers/pencils to have students use them for the 2nd task. Procedure 1. Give students writing prompt. Allow students to use their books and posters around the room that have quotes already written on them. 2. Have students underline their papers according to these characteristics: Thesis statement – Red Topic sentences – Red Claims, commentary – Blue Evidence, quotes, facts – Green Transitional language – yellow If students are pleased with their papers, allow them to turn them in as is. Often the color-coding of an essay helps reveal that some feature of the essay is missing. If they struggle identifying what to color-code, this should reveal some re-teaching should be done regarding different aspects of the essay. 3. Create a flow chart of the words Burning Bright. Fill out the hand-out Burning Bright. Writing Prompt – Truman Burbank vs. Guy MontagAfter viewing The Truman Show and reading a majority of Fahrenheit 451, many parallels can be drawn between the characters of Truman Burbank and Guy Montag. Taking note of their similarities, compare and contrast the impact these similarities ultimately have on each character’s quality of life. Consider these questions to help your focus: How do their similar struggles influence their decision-making and eventually actions? How do their struggles impact the person on the inside? Maintain the following expectations of good written essays: Clear and convincing thesis statement Engaging introduction Well-developed body paragraphs o 7-10 sentences o Direct topic sentences o Apparent transitions o Claims and commentary o Supporting evidence Fulfilling and satisfying conclusion _____________________________________________________________________________________CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.1 Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.1a Introduce precise claim(s), distinguish the claim(s) from alternate or opposing claims, and create an organization that establishes clear relationships among claim(s), counterclaims, reasons, and evidence. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.1d Establish and maintain a formal style and objective tone while attending to the norms and conventions of the discipline in which they are writing. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.1e Provide a concluding statement or section that follows from and supports the argument presented. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.2b Develop the topic with well-chosen, relevant, and sufficient facts, extended definitions, concrete details, quotations, or other information and examples appropriate to the audience’s knowledge of the topic. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.2c Use appropriate and varied transitions to link the major sections of the text, create cohesion, and clarify the relationships among complex ideas and concepts. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.2d Use precise language and domain-specific vocabulary to manage the complexity of the topic.right00Lesson 9: Allusions to Other Literature3209925478218500-473075471451800-4298761389380002943226129540000Allusions to Other Literature: Bradbury typed this book on a typewriter in the bottom of library. Throughout his work, he cites the biblical books of Ecclesiastes and Revelation (Montag’s memorized parts of these, and they are each cited in the last page), “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold, and a famous piece of history regarding a man named Nicholas Ridley. Spend some time on the internet researching how these works connect to circumstances, character experiences and themes in Fahrenheit 451. In each bubble, record the significant quote, make a connection, and report the historical signi ficance of the text to which Bradbury alludes. Fill the circles completely. right114142900left208738300right113959000Lesson 10: Culminating Writing Task (Choice A)Final Writing Prompt – Bradbury is suggesting that books do more than just teach. In fact, throughout the text, he implies that the absence of books is responsible for every negative feature of the society. According to Bradbury, books do more than just teach facts. Books promote intelligence and prevent ignorance. Write a persuasive essay that takes a position agreeing or disagreeing with Bradbury’s 1953 forecast for the future. Support your position with details from every chapter. Essential questions to consider in the essay: To what extent is technology today fostering intelligence or ignorance?If a society is literally falling apart morally, politically, and/or economically, is there hope that the society can recover?Topics to explore:Do you agree with Bradbury’s prophesy based on what you see in current society and recent history? How does our society parallel that of Montag? Maintain the following expectations of well-written essays: Clear and convincing thesis statement Engaging introduction Well-developed body paragraphs o 7-10 sentences o Direct topic sentences o Apparent transitions o Claims and commentary o Supporting evidence Fulfilling and satisfying conclusion _____________________________________________________________________________________CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.1 Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.1a Introduce precise claim(s), distinguish the claim(s) from alternate or opposing claims, and create an organization that establishes clear relationships among claim(s), counterclaims, reasons, and evidence. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.1d Establish and maintain a formal style and objective tone while attending to the norms and conventions of the discipline in which they are writing. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.1e Provide a concluding statement or section that follows from and supports the argument presented. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.2b Develop the topic with well-chosen, relevant, and sufficient facts, extended definitions, concrete details, quotations, or other information and examples appropriate to the audience’s knowledge of the topic. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.2c Use appropriate and varied transitions to link the major sections of the text, create cohesion, and clarify the relationships among complex ideas and concepts. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.2d Use precise language and domain-specific vocabulary to manage the complexity of the topic.0-2038350000right000Lesson 11: Culminating Writing Task (Choice B)Design a School: Bradbury’s work presents a society in which the government censors all ability to think through the reading of books. He admits through the character of Beatty that sometimes what can be found in books or in thinking or in individualism is painful, and therefore, should not exist. Many features of current society flirt with this assertion, whether in schools or through government influence as a response to parent action or inaction. Take a look at Clarisse’s school… her description contains hidden messages about school which are strikingly similar to our schools today: “Being with people is nice. But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That's not social to me at all. It's a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball.” As a team of students, you are fed up with this notion. In school, you actually desire to learn. You want to be challenged, but you also want to be engaged. You have no interest in busy work for the sake of busy work. You have no interest in technology for the sake of technology, but for the sake of making life easier, more efficient, more organized, and more intuitive. As a group, your task will be to answer this researchable question: WHAT WILL MAKE SCHOOLS BETTER?Consider many of the following features of school life: Class time / seat time Motivational strategies Teacher training Student achievement / improvement Teacher-student ratios Classroom structure and lay-out Use of technology Organizational structure of schools (like principals, teachers, classes) School environment Vision and Mission Statement Your team will come up with an entire plan to create a new school. The school board is awaiting your professional presentation as grant money is available to fund a desperately needed school that engages and challenges students. The discussion of your arguments should be persuasive in nature, as you are competing with others who have ideas regarding how to spend the provided money. The expectations for your team will be as follows: Your plan for a school must be based on 5 scholarly articles. You must cite your findings in MLA format. You must verbally present your findings to the class in a 10 minute presentation. You must have a visual presentation that involves the use of several visual aids which incorporate technology. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.7 Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects to answer a question (including a self-generated question) or solve a problem; narrow or broaden the inquiry when appropriate; synthesize multiple sources on the subject, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.8 Gather relevant information from multiple authoritative print and digital sources, using advanced searches effectively; assess the usefulness of each source in answering the research question; integrate information into the text selectively to maintain the flow of ideas, avoiding plagiarism and following a standard format for citation. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.9 Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.1 Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.1a Introduce precise claim(s), distinguish the claim(s) from alternate or opposing claims, and create an organization that establishes clear relationships among claim(s), counterclaims, reasons, and evidence. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.1b Develop claim(s) and counterclaims fairly, supplying evidence for each while pointing out the strengths and limitations of both in a manner that anticipates the audience’s knowledge level and concerns. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.9-10.4 Present information, findings, and supporting evidence clearly, concisely, and logically such that listeners can follow the line of reasoning and the organization, development, substance, and style are appropriate to purpose, audience, and task. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.9-10.5 Make strategic use of digital media (e.g., textual, graphical, audio, visual, and interactive elements) in presentations to enhance understanding of findings, reasoning, and evidence and to add interest. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.9-10.6 Adapt speech to a variety of contexts and tasks, demonstrating command of formal English when indicated or appropriate.PRESENTATION RUBRIC FOR:SuperiorAdequateEmergingVisual Appearance Students appear in business professional attire and are well-groomed. Graphics and visual aids are easily legible and enhance the content offered with professionalism and neatness. Students appear in business casual attire and are somewhat well-groomed. Graphics and visual aids are somewhat legible and somewhat enhance the content offered. Students appear dressed and are somewhat well-groomed. Graphics and visual aids are provided, yet fail to demonstrate much. Verbal Delivery Students spoke with poise and confidence. Students transitioned effectively between speakers and relied little on their note-cards. References to the presentation were apt and specific. Students spoke with some control. Students transitioned between speakers and relied on their note-cards. References to the presentation were comfortable and relevant. Students struggled to speak with some control. Students relied too heavily on their note-cards. References to the presentation were uncomfortable or non-existent. Content Students discussed suggestions, evidence, counter-arguments, and anticipated results with thorough detail and insight and creativity. Students discussed suggestions, evidence, counter-arguments, and anticipated results with some detail and insight and creativity. Students discussed suggestions, evidence, counter-arguments, and anticipated results without detail and insight and creativity. Argumentation Use of rhetorical strategies, logic, and reason come through with conviction and authority. Students appear to strongly believe in and support their ideas. Use of rhetorical strategies, logic, and reason appear to have been attempted. Students appear to somewhat believe in and support their ideas. Use of rhetorical strategies, logic, and reason fail to fully come through with any confidence. Students lack belief in and support of their ideas. MLA FormattingStudents correctly applied APA formatting rules in the title page, abstract, body, and references page. Errors total between 0-4. Students somewhat correctly applied APA formatting rules in the title page, abstract, body, and references page. Errors total between 5-10. Students struggled to apply APA formatting rules in the title page, abstract, body, and references page. Errors total more than 10. Writer’s CraftWriting voice is clearly persuasive and academic convincing the audience through the use of strong diction and sophisticated sentence structures. Writing voice is somewhat persuasive and academic convincing the audience through the use of some good diction and sophisticated sentence structures. Writing voice is somewhat persuasive and academic convincing the audience through the use of some good diction and sophisticated sentence structures. ContentStudents discussed suggestions, evidence, counter-arguments, and anticipated results with thorough detail and insight and creativity. Ideas are organized with logic. Students discussed suggestions, evidence, counter-arguments, and anticipated results with some detail and insight and creativity. Ideas are organized. Students discussed suggestions, evidence, counter-arguments, and anticipated results without detail and insight and creativity. Ideas lack organization. CoherenceGrammar, language usage, punctuation and spelling all prove of the highest quality possible. Sentence variety and fluency demonstrate ideas that make sense. Grammar, language usage, punctuation and spelling all prove to have minor errors. Sentence variety and fluency do not necessarily help the flow of the paper. Grammar, language usage, punctuation and spelling errors complicate the ability of the paper to be understood. Sentence variety and fluency hinder the paper’s effectiveness. Appendix:Supplemental TextsRelated Texts Literary “Burning a Book” by William Stafford “Barter” by Sara TeasdaleRelated Texts Informational “Learning to Read and Write” by Frederick Douglass “Superman and Me” by Sherman Alexie “The Great Imagination Heist” by Reynolds Price “You Have Insulted Me: A Letter” by Kurt Vonnegut “Reading Books is Fundamental” from The New York Times, Charles M. Blow “The Country that Stopped Reading” from The New York Times, David Toscana “The Science of Storytelling: Why Telling a Story Is the Most Powerful Way to Activate Our Brains by Leo Widrich “Video Games and the Future of Storytelling from Big Think, Salman RushdieRelated Non-Print TextsOriginal Cover Art from Fahrenheit 451 by Joseph Mugnaini"Burning a Book," by William StaffordProtecting each other, right in the centera few pages glow a long time.The cover goes first, then outer leavescurling away, then spine and a scattering.Truth, brittle and faint, burns easily,its fire as hot as the fire lies make---flame doesn't care. You can usually finda few charred words in the ashes.And some books ought to burn, tryingfor characterbut just faking it. More disturbingthan book ashes are whole libraries thatno onegot around to writing----desolatetowns, miles of unthought in cities,and the terrorized countryside wherewild dogsown anything that moves. If a bookisn't written, no one needs to burn it----ignorance can dance in the absence of fire.So I've burned books. And there are manyI haven't even written, and nobody has.(1987)BarterBy Sara Teasdale Life has loveliness to sell, All beautiful and splendid things, Blue waves whitened on a cliff,Soaring fire that sways and sings, And children's faces looking up Holding wonder like a cup. Life has loveliness to sell, Music like a curve of gold, Scent of pine trees in the rain, Eyes that love you, arms that hold, And for your spirit's still delight, Holy thoughts that star the night. Spend all you have for loveliness, Buy it and never count the cost; For one white singing hour of peace Count many a year of strife well lost, And for a breath of ecstasy Give all you have been, or could be.right60774600left3701680left-1492200Superman and MeApril 19, 1998|SHERMAN ALEXIE | Sherman Alexie is the author, most recently, of "Indian Killer."Editor's Note: The following essays by Sherman Alexie, J.D. McClatchy, Robert Pinsky, Mona Simpson and Ted Kooser are included in a recent anthology published by Milkweed Editions, entitled "The Most Wonderful Books: writers on Discovering the Pleasures of Reading." They are reprinted here with the kind permission of the publisher and the authors.I learned to read with a Superman comic book. Simple enough, I suppose. I cannot recall which particular Superman comic book I read, nor can I remember which villain he fought in that issue. I cannot remember the plot, nor the means by which I obtained the comic book. What I can remember is this: I was 3 years old, a Spokane Indian boy living with his family on the Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington state. We were poor by most standards, but one of my parents usually managed to find some minimum-wage job or another, which made us middle-class by reservation standards. I had a brother and three sisters. We lived on a combination of irregular paychecks, hope, fear and government surplus food.My father, who is one of the few Indians who went to Catholic school on purpose, was an avid reader of westerns, spy thrillers, murder mysteries, gangster epics, basketball player biographies and anything else he could find. He bought his books by the pound at Dutch's Pawn Shop, Goodwill, Salvation Army and Value Village. When he had extra money, he bought new novels at supermarkets, convenience stores and hospital gift shops. Our house was filled with books. They were stacked in crazy piles in the bathroom, bedrooms and living room. In a fit of unemployment-inspired creative energy, my father built a set of bookshelves and soon filled them with a random assortment of books about the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, the Vietnam War and the entire 23-book series of the Apache westerns. My father loved books, and since I loved my father with an aching devotion, I decided to love books as well.I can remember picking up my father's books before I could read. The words themselves were mostly foreign, but I still remember the exact moment when I first understood, with a sudden clarity, the purpose of a paragraph. I didn't have the vocabulary to say "paragraph," but I realized that a paragraph was a fence that held words. The words inside a paragraph worked together for a common purpose. They had some specific reason for being inside the same fence. This knowledge delighted me. I began to think of everything in terms of paragraphs. Our reservation was a small paragraph within the United States. My family's house was a paragraph, distinct from the other paragraphs of the LeBrets to the north, the Fords to our south and the Tribal School to the west. Inside our house, each family member existed as a separate paragraph but still had genetics and common experiences to link us. Now, using this logic, I can see my changed family as an essay of seven paragraphs: mother, father, older brother, the deceased sister, my younger twin sisters and our adopted little brother.At the same time I was seeing the world in paragraphs, I also picked up that Superman comic book. Each panel, complete with picture, dialogue and narrative was a three-dimensional paragraph. In one panel, Superman breaks through a door. His suit is red, blue and yellow. The brown door shatters into many pieces. I look at the narrative above the picture. I cannot read the words, but I assume it tells me that "Superman is breaking down the door." Aloud, I pretend to read the words and say, "Superman is breaking down the door." Words, dialogue, also float out of Superman's mouth. Because he is breaking down the door, I assume he says, "I am breaking down the door." Once again, I pretend to read the words and say aloud, "I am breaking down the door" In this way, I learned to read.This might be an interesting story all by itself. A little Indian boy teaches himself to read at an early age and advances quickly. He reads "Grapes of Wrath" in kindergarten when other children are struggling through "Dick and Jane." If he'd been anything but an Indian boy living on the reservation, he might have been called a prodigy. But he is an Indian boy living on the reservation and is simply an oddity. He grows into a man who often speaks of his childhood in the third-person, as if it will somehow dull the pain and make him sound more modest about his talents.A smart Indian is a dangerous person, widely feared and ridiculed by Indians and non-Indians alike. I fought with my classmates on a daily basis. They wanted me to stay quiet when the non-Indian teacher asked for answers, for volunteers, for help. We were Indian children who were expected to be stupid. Most lived up to those expectations inside the classroom but subverted them on the outside. They struggled with basic reading in school but could remember how to sing a few dozen powwow songs. They were monosyllabic in front of their non-Indian teachers but could tell complicated stories and jokes at the dinner table. They submissively ducked their heads when confronted by a non-Indian adult but would slug it out with the Indian bully who was 10 years older. As Indian children, we were expected to fail in the non-Indian world. Those who failed were ceremonially accepted by other Indians and appropriately pitied by non-Indians.The Great Imagination Heist by Reynolds Price?1999 by Reynolds PriceThe statistics are famous and unnerving. Most high-school graduates have spent more time watching television than they’ve spent in school. That blight has been overtaking us for fifty years, but it’s only in the past two decades that I’ve begun to notice its greatest damage to us–the death of personal imagination.In all the millennia before humans began to read, our imaginations were formed from first-hand experiences of the wide external world and especially from the endless flow of stories passed down in cultures founded on face-to-face narrative conversation. Most of those cultures were succeeded by widespread literacy; and the ensuing torrent of printed information, recordings, and films grew large in making our individual imaginations.Among the blessings of my past, I’m especially grateful for that fact that I was twenty years old before my parents brought television into our home. Till then, I’d only glimpsed it in store windows and had never missed its brand of time-killing. Like millions in my generation, I was hardly unique in having spent hundreds of childhood hours reading a mountain of books and seeing one or two movies in a public theatre each week. Like our ancient ancestors, too, I had the big gift of a family who were steady sources of gripping and delightful stories told at every encounter.I, and my lucky contemporaries then, had our imaginations fed by an external world, yet a world of nuance and suggestion that was intimately related to our early backgrounds of family and friends. That feeding left us free to remake those stories in accordance with our growing secret needs and natures. Only the movies offered us images and plots that tried to hypnotize us–to channel our fantasies in one direction only–but two to four hours of movies per week were hardly tyrannical.To say that is not to claim that people who matured before the triumph of TV possessed imaginations that were inevitably free, rich, and healthy. It is to claim that an alarming number of younger Americans have had the early shoots of a personal fantasy life blighted by a dictatorial daylong TV exposure. And not merely blighted–many young Americans have had their native fantasy life removed and replaced by the imaginations of the producers of American television and video games.My gauge for measuring this massive imagination heist has been my experience with college students in the composition classes I’ve taught through four decades. When I remove the lenses of nostalgia, I won’t claim that the quality of most undergraduate narrative prose in the 1950s was brilliant, but I’m convinced that the imaginations of my present students have suffered badly. When you asked a student of the fifties to write a story, he or she was likely to give you an account that involved personal feeling–a scene from Grandmother’s funeral, the death of a pet, the rupture of a marriage, and often family happiness.Ask the same of students now, and you’re likely to get a story that amounts to an airless synopsis of a made-for-TV movie–a stereotypical situation of violence or outlandish adventure that races superficially along, then resolves in emotionless triumph for the student’s favorite character. Instead of a human narration, you get a commercially controlled and commercially intended product. Sit still; buy this . How bad is that? Awful–for our public and private safety as well as for most of the arts.What can we do about it? Short of destroying all television sets, computer screens and video games, I’d suggest at least one counter-vailing therapy: good reading, vast quantities of active or passive reading–and reading which is, in part, guided by a child’s caretakers. No other available resource has such a record of benign influence on maturation. Give every child you cherish good books–human stories–at every conceivable opportunity. If they fail to read them, offer bribes–or whatever other legal means–to help them grow their own imaginations in the slow solitude and silence that makes for general sanity. You Have Insulted Me: A LetterBy: Kurt VonnegutIn October of 1973, Bruce Severy — a 26-year-old English teacher at Drake High School, North Dakota — decided to use Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, as a teaching aid in his classroom. The next month, on November 7th, the head of the school board, Charles McCarthy, demanded that all 32 copies be burned in the school's furnace as a result of its "obscene language." Other books soon met with the same fate.On the 16th of November, Kurt Vonnegut sent McCarthy the following letter. He didn't receive a reply.November 16, 1973Dear Mr. McCarthy:I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school.Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am.I want you to know, too, that my publisher and I have done absolutely nothing to exploit the disgusting news from Drake. We are not clapping each other on the back, crowing about all the books we will sell because of the news. We have declined to go on television, have written no fiery letters to editorial pages, have granted no lengthy interviews. We are angered and sickened and saddened. And no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the only copy in your hands. It is a strictly private letter from me to the people of Drake, who have done so much to damage my reputation in the eyes of their children and then in the eyes of the world. Do you have the courage and ordinary decency to show this letter to the people, or will it, too, be consigned to the fires of your furnace?I gather from what I read in the papers and hear on television that you imagine me, and some other writers, too, as being sort of ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people. I am in fact a large, strong person, fifty-one years old, who did a lot of farm work as a boy, who is good with tools. I have raised six children, three my own and three adopted. They have all turned out well. Two of them are farmers. I am a combat infantry veteran from World War II, and hold a Purple Heart. I have earned whatever I own by hard work. I have never been arrested or sued for anything. I am so much trusted with young people and by young people that I have served on the faculties of the University of Iowa, Harvard, and the City College of New York. Every year I receive at least a dozen invitations to be commencement speaker at colleges and high schools. My books are probably more widely used in schools than those of any other living American fiction writer.If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.After I have said all this, I am sure you are still ready to respond, in effect, “Yes, yes–but it still remains our right and our responsibility to decide what books our children are going to be made to read in our community.” This is surely so. But it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call you that.I read in the newspaper that your community is mystified by the outcry from all over the country about what you have done. Well, you have discovered that Drake is a part of American civilization, and your fellow Americans can’t stand it that you have behaved in such an uncivilized way. Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the eduction of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books–books you hadn’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive.Again: you have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real.Kurt VonnegutReading Books Is FundamentalBy: Charles M. BlowThe first thing I can remember buying for myself, aside from candy, of course, was not a toy. It was a book.It was a religious picture book about Job from the Bible, bought at Kmart.It was on one of the rare occasions when my mother had enough money to give my brothers and me each a few dollars so that we could buy whatever we wanted.We all made a beeline for the toy aisle, but that path led through the section of greeting cards and books. As I raced past the children’s books, they stopped me. Books to me were things most special. Magical. Ideas eternalized.Books were the things my brothers brought home from school before I was old enough to attend, the things that engrossed them late into the night as they did their homework. They were the things my mother brought home from her evening classes, which she attended after work, to earn her degree and teaching certificate.Books, to me, were powerful and transformational.I read about girls who were brave, girls who sleuthed, Girls of the Limberlost… horses that raced like the wind, Jane and Michael Banks, Little Women and Little Princes and Swiss Families, red ferns and yellow dogs, Borrowers, Hobbits and Cheshire cats.So there, in the greeting card section of the store, I flipped through children’s books until I found the one that I wanted, the one about Job. I thought the book fascinating in part because it was a tale of hardship, to which I could closely relate, and in part because it contained the first drawing I’d even seen of God, who in those pages was a white man with a white beard and a long robe that looked like one of my mother’s nightgowns.I picked up the book, held it close to my chest and walked proudly to the checkout. I never made it to the toy aisle.That was the beginning of a lifelong journey in which books would shape and change me, making me who I was to become.We couldn’t afford many books. We had a small collection. They were kept on a homemade, rough-hewn bookcase about three feet tall with three shelves. One shelf held the encyclopedia, a gift from our uncle, books that provided my brothers and me a chance to see the world without leaving home.The other shelves held a hodgepodge of books, most of which were giveaways my mother picked when school librarians thinned their collections at the end of the year. I read what we had and cherished the days that our class at school was allowed to go to the library — a space I approached the way most people approach religious buildings — and the days when the bookmobile came to our school from the regional library.It is no exaggeration to say that those books saved me: from a life of poverty, stress, depression and isolation.James Baldwin, one of the authors who most spoke to my spirit, once put it this way:“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”That is the inimitable power of literature, to give context and meaning to the trials and triumphs of living. That is why it was particularly distressing that The Atlantic’s Jordan Weissmann pointed out Tuesday that: “The Pew Research Center reported last week that nearly a quarter of American adults had not read a single book in the past year. As in, they hadn’t cracked a paperback, fired up a Kindle, or even hit play on an audiobook while in the car. The number of non-book-readers has nearly tripled since 1978.”The details of the Pew report are quite interesting and somewhat counterintuitive. Among American adults, women were more likely to have read at least one book in the last 12 months than men. Blacks were more likely to have read a book than whites or Hispanics. People aged 18-29 were more likely to have read a book than those in any other age group. And there was little difference in readership among urban, suburban and rural population.I understand that we are now inundated with information, and people’s reading habits have become fragmented to some degree by bite-size nuggets of text messages and social media, and that takes up much of the time that could otherwise be devoted to long-form reading. I get it. And I don’t take a troglodytic view of social media. I participate and enjoy it.But reading texts is not the same as reading a text.There is no intellectual equivalent to allowing oneself the time and space to get lost in another person’s mind, because in so doing we find ourselves.Take it from me, the little boy walking to the Kmart checkout with the picture book pressed to his chest.The Country That Stopped ReadingBy DAVID TOSCANAEARLIER this week, I spotted, among the job listings in the newspaper Reforma, an ad from a restaurant in Mexico City looking to hire dishwashers. The requirement: a secondary school diploma. Years ago, school was not for everyone. Classrooms were places for discipline, study. Teachers were respected figures. Parents actually gave them permission to punish their children by slapping them or tugging their ears. But at least in those days, schools aimed to offer a more dignified life. Nowadays more children attend school than ever before, but they learn much less. They learn almost nothing. The proportion of the Mexican population that is literate is going up, but in absolute numbers, there are more illiterate people in Mexico now than there were 12 years ago. Even if baseline literacy, the ability to read a street sign or news bulletin, is rising, the practice of reading an actual book is not. Once a reasonably well-educated country, Mexico took the penultimate spot, out of 108 countries, in a Unesco assessment of reading habits a few years ago. One cannot help but ask the Mexican educational system, “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?” Despite recent gains in industrial development and increasing numbers of engineering graduates, Mexico is floundering socially, politically and economically because so many of its citizens do not read. Upon taking office in December, our new president, Enrique Pe?a Nieto, immediately announced a program to improve education. This is typical. All presidents do this upon taking office. The first step in his plan to improve education? Put the leader of the teachers’ union, Elba Esther Gordillo, in jail — which he did last week. Ms. Gordillo, who has led the 1.5 million-member union for 23 years, is suspected of embezzling about $200 million. She ought to be behind bars, but education reform with a focus on teachers instead of students is nothing new. For many years now, the job of the education secretary has been not to educate Mexicans but to deal with the teachers and their labor issues. Nobody in Mexico organizes as many strikes as the teachers’ union. And, sadly, many teachers, who often buy or inherit their jobs, are lacking in education themselves. During a strike in 2008 in Oaxaca, I remember walking through the temporary campground in search of a teacher reading a book. Among tens of thousands, I found not one. I did find people listening to disco-decibel music, watching television, playing cards or dominoes, vegetating. I saw some gossip magazines, too. So I shouldn’t have been surprised by the response when I spoke at a recent event for promoting reading for an audience of 300 or so 14- and 15-year-olds. “Who likes to read?” I asked. Only one hand went up in the auditorium. I picked out five of the ignorant majority and asked them to tell me why they didn’t like reading. The result was predictable: they stuttered, grumbled, grew impatient. None was able to articulate a sentence, express an idea. Frustrated, I told the audience to just leave the auditorium and go look for a book to read. One of their teachers walked up to me, very concerned. “We still have 40 minutes left,” he said. He asked the kids to sit down again, and began to tell them a fable about a plant that couldn’t decide if it wanted to be a flower or a head of cabbage. “Sir,” I whispered, “that story is for kindergartners.” In 2002, President Vicente Fox began a national reading plan; he chose as a spokesman Jorge Campos, a popular soccer player, ordered millions of books printed and built an immense library. Unfortunately, teachers were not properly trained and children were not given time for reading in school. The plan focused on the book instead of the reader. I have seen warehouses filled with hundreds of thousands of forgotten books, intended for schools and libraries, simply waiting for the dust and humidity to render them garbage. A few years back, I spoke with the education secretary of my home state, Nuevo León, about reading in schools. He looked at me, not understanding what I wanted. “In school, children are taught to read,” he said. “Yes,” I replied, “but they don’t read.” I explained the difference between knowing how to read and actually reading, between deciphering street signs and accessing the literary canon. He wondered what the point of the students’ reading “Don Quixote” was. He said we needed to teach them to read the newspaper. When my daughter was 15, her literature teacher banished all fiction from her classroom. “We’re going to read history and biology textbooks,” she said, “because that way you’ll read and learn at the same time.” In our schools, children are being taught what is easy to teach rather than what they need to learn. It is for this reason that in Mexico — and many other countries — the humanities have been pushed aside. We have turned schools into factories that churn out employees. With no intellectual challenges, students can advance from one level to the next as long as they attend class and surrender to their teachers. In this light it is natural that in secondary school we are training chauffeurs, waiters and dishwashers. This is not just about better funding. Mexico spends more than 5 percent of its gross domestic product on education — about the same percentage as the United States. And it’s not about pedagogical theories and new techniques that look for shortcuts. The educational machine does not need fine-tuning; it needs a complete change of direction. It needs to make students read, read and read. But perhaps the Mexican government is not ready for its people to be truly educated. We know that books give people ambitions, expectations, a sense of dignity. If tomorrow we were to wake up as educated as the Finnish people, the streets would be filled with indignant citizens and our frightened government would be asking itself where these people got more than a dishwasher’s training. The Science of Storytelling: Why Telling a Story is the Most Powerful Way to Activate Our BrainsA good story can make or break a presentation, article, or conversation. But why is that? When Buffer co-founder Leo Widrich started to market his product through stories instead of benefits and bullet points, sign-ups went through the roof. Here he shares the science of why storytelling is so uniquely powerful. In 1748, the British politician and aristocrat John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, spent a lot of his free time playing cards. He greatly enjoyed eating a snack while still keeping one hand free for the cards. So he came up with the idea to eat beef between slices of toast, which would allow him to finally eat and play cards at the same time. Eating his newly invented "sandwich," the name for two slices of bread with meat in between, became one of the most popular meal inventions in the western world.What's interesting about this is that you are very likely to never forget the story of who invented the sandwich ever again. Or at least, much less likely to do so, if it would have been presented to us in bullet points or other purely information-based form.For over 27,000 years, since the first cave paintings were discovered, telling stories has been one of our most fundamental communication methods. Recently a good friend of mine gave me an introduction to the power of storytelling, and I wanted to learn more.Here is the science around storytelling and how we can use it to make better decisions every day:Our brain on stories: How our brains become more active when we tell storiesWe all enjoy a good story, whether it's a novel, a movie, or simply something one of our friends is explaining to us. But why do we feel so much more engaged when we hear a narrative about events?It's in fact quite simple. If we listen to a powerpoint presentation with boring bullet points, a certain part in the brain gets activated. Scientists call this Broca's area and Wernicke's area. Overall, it hits our language processing parts in the brain, where we decode words into meaning. And that's it, nothing else happens.When we are being told a story, things change dramatically. Not only are the language processing parts in our brain activated, but any other area in our brain that we would use when experiencing the events of the story are too.If someone tells us about how delicious certain foods were, our sensory cortex lights up. If it's about motion, our motor cortex gets active:"Metaphors like "The singer had a velvet voice" and "He had leathery hands" roused the sensory cortex. […] Then, the brains of participants were scanned as they read sentences like "John grasped the object" and "Pablo kicked the ball." The scans revealed activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body's movements."A story can put your whole brain to work. And yet, it gets better:When we tell stories to others that have really helped us shape our thinking and way of life, we can have the same effect on them too. The brains of the person telling a story and listening to it can synchronize, says Uri Hasson from Princeton:"When the woman spoke English, the volunteers understood her story, and their brains synchronized. When she had activity in her insula, an emotional brain region, the listeners did too. When her frontal cortex lit up, so did theirs. By simply telling a story, the woman could plant ideas, thoughts and emotions into the listeners' brains."Anything you've experienced, you can get others to experience the same. Or at least, get their brain areas that you've activated that way, active too:Evolution has wired our brains for storytelling—how to make use of itNow all this is interesting. We know that we can activate our brains better if we listen to stories. The still unanswered question is: Why is that? Why does the format of a story, where events unfold one after the other, have such a profound impact on our learning?The simple answer is this: We are wired that way. A story, if broken down into the simplest form, is a connection of cause and effect. And that is exactly how we think. We think in narratives all day long, no matter if it is about buying groceries, whether we think about work or our spouse at home. We make up (short) stories in our heads for every action and conversation. In fact, Jeremy Hsu found [that] "personal stories and gossip make up 65% of our conversations."Now, whenever we hear a story, we want to relate it to one of our existing experiences. That's why metaphors work so well with us. While we are busy searching for a similar experience in our brains, we activate a part called insula, which helps us relate to that same experience of pain, joy, or disgust.The following graphic probably describes it best:In a great experiment, John Bargh at Yale found the following:"Volunteers would meet one of the experimenters, believing that they would be starting the experiment shortly. In reality, the experiment began when the experimenter, seemingly struggling with an armful of folders, asks the volunteer to briefly hold their coffee. As the key experimental manipulation, the coffee was either hot or iced. Subjects then read a description of some individual, and those who had held the warmer cup tended to rate the individual as having a warmer personality, with no change in ratings of other attributes."We link up metaphors and literal happenings automatically. Everything in our brain is looking for the cause and effect relationship of something we've previously experienced.Let's dig into some hands on tips to make use of it:Exchange giving suggestions for telling storiesDo you know the feeling when a good friend tells you a story and then two weeks later, you mention the same story to him, as if it was your idea? This is totally normal and at the same time, one of the most powerful ways to get people on board with your ideas and thoughts. According to Uri Hasson from Princeton, a story is the only way to activate parts in the brain so that a listener turns the story into their own idea and experience.The next time you struggle with getting people on board with your projects and ideas, simply tell them a story, where the outcome is that doing what you had in mind is the best thing to do. According to Princeton researcher Hasson, storytelling is the only way to plant ideas into other people's minds.Write more persuasively—bring in stories from yourself or an expertThis is something that took me a long time to understand. If you start out writing, it's only natural to think "I don't have a lot of experience with this, how can I make my post believable if I use personal stories?" The best way to get around this is by simply exchanging stories with those of experts. When this blog used to be a social media blog, I would ask for quotes from the top folks in the industry or simply find great passages they had written online. It's a great way to add credibility and at the same time, tell a story.The simple story is more successful than the complicated oneWhen we think of stories, it is often easy to convince ourselves that they have to be complex and detailed to be interesting. The truth is however, that the simpler a story, the more likely it will stick. Using simple language as well as low complexity is the best way to activate the brain regions that make us truly relate to the happenings of a story. This is a similar reason why multitasking is so hard for us. Try for example to reduce the number of adjectives or complicated nouns in a presentation or article and exchange them with more simple, yet heartfelt language.Quick last fact: Our brain learns to ignore certain overused words and phrases that used to make stories awesome. Scientists, in the midst of researching the topic of storytelling have also discovered, that certain words and phrases have lost all storytelling power:"Some scientists have contended that figures of speech like "a rough day" are so familiar that they are treated simply as words and no more."This means, that the frontal cortex—the area of your brain responsible to experience emotions—can't be activated with these phrases. It's something that might be worth remembering when crafting your next story.Video Games and the Future of StorytellingBy: Salman RushdieTranscriptQuestion: How are video games influencing linear forms of storytelling?Salman Rushdie: That's a very interesting question and I think the answer is we don’t yet know. But I do think that I mean for instance the game that my 13 year-old boy Milan and his friends all seem to be playing right now is this wild west game called "Red Dead Redemption" and one of the things looking over… I mean I don’t even pretend to understand what is going on really, but one of the things that is interesting about it to me is the much looser structure of the game and the much greater agency that the player has to choose how he will explore and inhabit the world that is provided for you. He doesn’t... in fact, doesn’t really have to follow the main narrative line of the game at all for long periods of time. There is all kinds of excursions and digressions that you can choose to go on and find many stories to participate in instead of the big story, the macro story. I think that really interests me as a storyteller because I've always thought that one of the things that the Internet and the gaming world permits as a narrative technique is to not tell the story from beginning to end—to tell stories sideways, to give alternative possibilities that the reader can, in a way, choose between. I've always thought of the Borges story, “The Garden of Forking Paths” as kind of model of this, that... “The Garden of Forking Paths” is a story, is a book whose author has gone mad because what he has tried to do is to offer every possible variation of every moment. So, boy meets girl. They fall in love/they don’t fall in love. That is the first fork and he wants to tell both those stories and then every variation of every moment down both those lines and of course it’s like nuclear fission. The possibilities explode into millions and billions of possibilities and it’s impossible to write that book. But it seems to me that in some ways the Internet is the garden of forking paths where you can have myriad variant possibilities offered and at the same level of authority, if you like. So I mean I think that's one of the ways in which storytelling could move. And these games, these more free-form games in which the player can make choices about what the game is going to be, become a kind of gaming equivalent of that narrative possibility.Question: Do you worry that video games are eroding people’s ability to read novels?Salman Rushdie: I think there are legitimate concerns there and I worry also that there is a dumbing down factor. These games... I mean they sometimes require lateral thinking. They sometimes require quite skilled hand-eye coordination and so on. But they’re not in any sense intelligent in the way that you want your children to develop intelligence to make the mind not just supple, but actually informed. And of course if people spend too much time on this stuff then it militates against that. One of the things about "Luka and the Fire of Life," which is basically pro... Rashid Luka’s father is basically fond of the video game and defends video games to Luka’s mother, who is much more skeptical of their value. But there is a bit of the book which also suggests that the problem may be that this way of inhabiting the imagination may do something harmful to our relationship to story, to the way in which human beings have always needed and responded to the art of the story and that is something to be worried about, because I think that there is something about storytelling that is very intrinsic to who we are as human beings. So one of the characters in the book refers to man as the storytelling animal—and so we are. We are the only creatures on the earth who do this, so and we may even I think be hard-wired to do it in the way that we have a language instinct. We may actually have a story instinct and so there is a legitimate concern about a new form which may erode our attachment to the story. What will that do to us as human beings?Recorded November 12, 2010Interviewed by Max MillerDirected / Produced by Jonathan Fowler ................
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