What We Know / Hard at Work

English 11 - For the block days, we spent a majority of our time looking at the limits of knowledge we have as people locked inside mortal, temporal bodies.  In other words, we spent time thinking about how our understanding of the world is limited by our position in time and space.  This conversation and work served as a transition point between Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil" and Edgar Allan Poe's "Pit & the Pendulum".  Both of these short stories function by playing with the horror of the unknown.  To start class off, we listened to a podcast from Radiolab that discussed how our knowledge of the world is dependent upon waves (sound, light, etc.) hitting our bodies and giving us information.  In particular, the episode focused on the delay between the event happening and the wave hitting us.  The podcast can be found below:
Also, here is a video for my students that are interested in watching the slinky in action:

We then went outside and wrote for a while about the things we don't know.  We found out that we don't know a lot.  In fact, there's probably more that we don't know than that that we do know.  Even scarier is that fact that there's a lot that we don't know we don't know.  The exercise helped us better get at Poe and Hawthorne, but it also provided students with a writing process for attacking difficult assignments.  A key strategy for writing an essay about something you know little about is making lists of what you don't know so that you can search out that information or at least make a plan for how you will go about finding it.  We concluded by starting Poe's "Pit & the Pendulum" and having a long discussion about the nature of sleep, dreams, and reality.  A link to a This American Life podcast on the subject can be found below:

AP - On Wednesday, we set to work.  The students took a quiz and completed an in-class writing assignment that asked them to rhetorically analyze a segment of Bill Clinton's speech at the Democratic National Convention.  These activities helped me get a better sense of how students are progressing in terms of mastery of key concepts and development of writing skills.  Over the two days, I have been pounding through their notebooks and getting a good sense of where we are going to need to go and the types of work we are going to need to do over the next few weeks.  A video clip of Bill Clinton's speech can be found below: