So, I went and did it. I wrote a reading quiz and made you take it. While no one asked why you had to (and you promised you would), the reasoning I gave in class was this:

1. Some of you are motivated by grades, points, etc. While I do my best to dissuade you from this, hoping that you’ll instead enjoy the book, many of you remain steadfast. That’s cool; we have quizzes.
2. It gets us all thinking about the same scenes from the novel while maintaining our own opinions of them. In years past, I would open with “So what happened?” and someone would give a synopsis. This worked fairly well, but colored everyone’s interpretation. I want to know how each of you read it, not come to a consensus.
3. Some of you are smarter on paper, or unwilling to speak up in class. I’ve always been in the former group, so I feel your pain. Writing out your thoughts gives you a chance to organize them. For the quiet ones, you get your opinions to me, though the rest of the class misses out. I may read some of your responses in class. If you are worried about this, just let me know.

Bookmark the previous post (the reading schedule) so you don’t have to go searching every night. Some students copy it into their reading journals or on a bookmark so they always have it. Do whatever you feel is best.

“How I Came to Be a Teacher”

Fifth hour (and anyone in third hour who is interested): I’m really excited that you decided to write your own story similar to mine. It will be due Friday in lieu of an essay over the book. Remember that it does not have to be about you as a student. Here are some ideas:

• How I came to believe…
• How I decided to change my life/outlook/attitude.
• How I came to the realization that…
• How I came to be friends with…
• Post below if you come up with more.

The only parameters are that it should be about something you have achieved, or something you are doing/living now. While “How I decided to become a _____ when I grow up” would be an interesting story, focus on something that has changed in your recent past.

As always, email me with questions.

If you haven’t picked up About a Boy yet, do so. We’ll be discussing the first two chapters in class Monday. For your reference, here’s the reading schedule Read the rest of this entry »

We will begin discussing Nick Hornby’s About a Boy on Monday, Aug. 24th. There are plenty of copies under my name at Barnes & Noble on 41st:

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Read through chapter 4 and come to class prepared to discuss.

1. Pull your devices from the list below (I’ll give you the handout tomorrow).
2. Find an example “in the wild” (song lyrics are okay, but see if you can’t find an example outside of literature)
3. Think about your explanation. The objective here is to figure out why something is the way it is, rather than just pointing it out. If your explanation is “This picture of a car wash sign has a bubble that is popping, and it says, ‘Pop!’ That’s onomatopoeia!” you might want to re-think your example.
4. You don’t need to write your explanation down at this point, but you should be ready to defend and explain your choice in class.
5. Bring it to class tomorrow. If it is online, you can post a link below. If it is in your camera/phone, email it to me.

Example explanation from class:

Stewie’s sarcastic retort to the girl’s insult highlights (and draws out) the fact that it is an old reference (allusion!). By re-stating what she said in a sarcastic tone, he turns her own words against her.

• Allegory—(usually) simple story that portrays some moral through the actions of characters.
• Alliteration—repeating consonant (letters that aren’t vowels) sounds at the beginning of words. (See  consonance)
• Allusion—reference to something outside the work being read
• Analogy—comparison between two things using “like” or “as,” often used to make a logical point
• Climax—the point of highest action or development of the plot; the succession of increasingly important words, phrases, or clauses.
• One equal temper of heroic hearts,/Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses
• Conflict—opposition of forces in a work
• [Who is the main character? Who opposes him or her? Are there other forces working against the characters? Types of Conflict: person vs. person, person vs. nature, person vs. fate, person vs. self, person vs. society]
• Connotation—the meaning of a word within the context of a written work
• Consonance—repetition of consonant sounds in the middle or at the end of words. (See alliteration)
• Couplet—a pair of lines in a poem; if they rhyme, it’s a rhyming couplet
• Ex: I beg to dream and differ from the hollow lies/This is the dawning of the rest of our lives (Green Day, American Idiot, “Holiday”)
• Denotation—the literal, dictionary definition of a word
• Diction—the author’s word choice
• Ex: The sentence “Adam walked quickly across the yard” seems okay, but if the author changed walked quickly to lurched, hurried, or quick-stepped, it would be a much more precise sentence.
• Flashback—device utilizing a shift in time during a narrative. Usually in order to expose the back story of a character in a way that sheds light on a current situation. We are doing a similar thing in Brit Lit—by “folding” the chronology of or books in half, we can compare current works with older ones.
• Ex: J.D. in Scrubs has a flashback almost every episode. Family Guy also contains many flashbacks, but almost always for absurd comedic effect.
• Foreshadowing—Symbol or reference in a narrative that hints at a future event. Authors use this in a way similar to flashbacks, but it is often less obvious.
• Hyperbole—dramatic overstatement. Allows us to add emotional weight to a statement.
• Ex: Chris knew the whole school laughed at him when he tripped on the first day.
• Imagery—verbal representation of sensory information; can be visual (sight), auditory (sound), tactile (touch), olfactory (smell), or gustatory (taste)
• Irony—usually humorous device in which a character says the opposite of what is intended, or an event’s outcome is the opposite of what is expected. We use irony to highlight the difference between things as they are and the things that could be.
• Metaphor—using one kind of thing to represent another without express indication of the representation
• Meter—poetic rhythm pattern; can be iambic (unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable), trochaic (stressed then unstressed), dactylic (stressed then two unstressed), or anapestic (two unstressed then stressed). As poetry was originally performed for an audience, rhythm allowed the speaker to involve the listeners—think about clapping or dancing at a concert.
• Personification—a figure of speech in which non-human things are given human characteristics.
• Ex: The television stared into the empty living room searching for attention.
• Simile—comparison of two things using “like” or “as”
• Symbol—something concrete that stands for something abstract outside the work, or recalls something else inside the work; something that means more than what it is physically used for.

Post questions or links below.

Yesterday I called poetry a “misunderstood creature.” This stemmed from the fact that few people read poetry, and even fewer consume it.¹ The question that arises, then, is “why do we need to learn about it?”

Here was my answer:²

Poetry : absurd thinking : : Math equations : logic. To put it a different way, poetry helps us define our associative muscles, helps us better make metaphorical connections within our world. I’ve been saying for years that we think and communicate in metaphor. In order to explain something to someone else, we usually compare the unknown to something known. The example I gave in class is that a plantain is like a banana, but brown or green, less sweet, and more starchy. I relied on your understanding of what a banana looks like, then modified it to help you imagine an unknown fruit.

Poetry works the same way. When Wilfred Owen³ tosses image after image at his readers in “Dulce et Decorum Est,” he is setting a scene that contrasts greatly with the common understanding of war. By comparing soldiers to “hags,” he undermines his audience’s image of the great and proud British soldier, and delivers the final blow by following a painfully descriptive account of the death of a soldier with “the old lie” that “it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”

There is a psychological term for our image of “war” and “bananas”; it is called a schema. While mathematical thinking helps us to better think on the literal, logical level by manipulating variables and such, poetry and literature allow us to improve our metaphorical thinking. We are building schemata by vicariously experiencing new events and ideas, then breaking them down and rebuilding them as we analyze.

So what’s the point? I recently read Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, and they gave a solid explanation of what they call “generative analogies”:

Some analogies are so useful that they don’t merely shed light on a concept, they actually become platforms for novel thinking. For example, the metaphor of the brain as a computer has been central to the insights generated by cognitive psychologists during the past fifty years. It’s easier to define how a computer works than to define how the brain works. For this reason it can be fruitful for psychologists to use various, well-understood aspects of a computer—such as memory, buffers, or processors —as inspiration to locate similar functions in the brain.

Good metaphors are "generative." The psychologist Donald Schon introduced this term to describe metaphors that generate "new perceptions, explanations, and inventions."⁴

Thinking metaphorically, even absurdly, allows us to come up with novel ideas, with new ways of thinking.⁵ Mathematical equations allow us to better comprehend the world as we know it within the boundaries of logic. Poetry and literature help us better understand ideas an concepts that aren’t logical—emotions, relationships, inventions “that just shouldn’t work” (think DaVinci or Escher, as much artists as they were mathematicians), innovative ways of looking at the world—that, my friends, is why we read poetry.

The Assignment

Find two words with nearly identical definitions in two separate contexts (or write two different contexts around similar words) that emphasize two different connotations.

For example:

Today I told the story of Joe from Johnny Got His Gun, which presented a terrifying vision of what it means to be isolated. The connotation comes from the main character’s terror, helplessness, and inability to communicate.

In Pablo Neruda “Unity,” however, gives us a very different view of what it means to be isolated:

I work quietly, wheeling over myself,
a crow over death, a crow in mourning.
I mediate, isolated in the spread of seasons,
centric, encircled by a silent geometry:
a partial temperature drifts down from the sky,
a distant empire of confused unities
reunites encircling me.⁶

Better example

From Shelby:

She chose the color blue. Colors are not something I considered for this project, but would work very well. If you are having trouble finding a word that works for this project, try a color, an emotion, an element (earth, fire, water, wind).

I found “Goodbye Blue Sky” from Pink Floyd and I think it works. When it refers to "blue sky," I think it means goodbye to peace and normality not necessarily a pretty blue sky.

Did you see the frightened ones
Did you hear the falling bombs
Did you ever wonder
Why we had to run for shelter
When the promise of a brave new world
Unfurled beneath a clear blue sky
Oooooooo ooo ooooo oooh
Did you see the frightened ones
Did you hear the falling bombs
The flames are all long gone
But the pain lingers on
Goodbye blue sky
Goodbye blue sky
Goodbye
Goodbye

Alright, my second one is Elvis’ “Blue Christmas.” In this case the word blue is used as a synonym for sad or down. Elvis does an interesting thing in this song, when he uses the colors red, green and white he means the actual color but when blue is used it could be removed and replaced with sad or depressing.

Ill have a blue Christmas without you
Ill be so blue just thinking about you
Decorations of red on a green Christmas tree
Wont be the same dear, if youre not here with me
And when those blue snowflakes start falling
Thats when those blue memories start calling
Youll be doin all right, with your Christmas of white
But Ill have a blue, blue blue blue Christmas
Youll be doin all right, with your Christmas of white,
But Ill have a blue, blue Christmas.

Post your examples below. If you have any questions, post them below as well or email me.

1. This is based on a completely un-scientific sampling of people I’ve known. In fact, I can count on one hand the number of people I know who read poetry on a regular basis. [↩]
2. I know that there have been hundreds of defenses of poetry written—a colleague recently recommended Edmond Spenser’s “the pleasure of poetry . . . inculcates forms of profitable pleasure,” which, I just Googlearned, comes from Horace. [↩]
3. Who, I just learned, was killed in battle one week before the end of the war… [↩]
4. Heath, Chip. Made to Stick. New York: Random House, 2007. 60. Print. [↩]
5. See John von Neumann’s The Computer and the Brain [↩]
6. Neruda, Pablo. “Unity.” Poets.org. 2005. Web. [↩]