I’m going to *try* to use an excerpt from Allen Ginsberg’s “America” in my American Culture and Civilization class. If you are not familiar with this poem, you can see why this might be dicey by reading it here. Still, I’m hoping it will be awesome. Other featured authors: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Claude McKay. I think it’s gonna be fun!
I found a good website for English learners that has...American folklore stories!!! This is excellent because I happen to teach a class on that very subject. My lessons on Paul Bunyan and John Henry just got a whole lot easier. Thanks, Voice of America! U.S. propaganda is good for something, after all!
For my class on American music, I’m trying to figure out how to go from Copland to Jimmy Eat world in a 80 minute class. So far, I’ve only found time to go up to Johnny Cash’s version of “Hurt” (representing country music, of course). I’m going to be rockin’ the CCR. I’m wondering how “Fortunate Son” will translate.
The most enjoyable part of prepping has been reading Lois Lowry’s The Giver again. I’m hoping to use the first half or so in my Children’s Literature class. It will be interesting to see if I can get students to read it on their own at all...students here aren’t so fond of homework. Actually, that class has at least a few students who like to read
English on their own, so I think at least some will read it. It is, after all, awesome.
For the uninitiated, The Giver is basically a modern children’s classic. The characters live in a world free from pain, but at the cost of never being allowed to make any of their own choices. The main character Jonas is a young boy who is selected by the community to “receive” all the past memories--of pain, war, and love--that other members of the community are sheltered from for their own good.
Of course, the former USSR is a very interesting place to be reading books about negative utopias. I was having an interesting conversation with my Russian tutor this week about (what else?) Stalin. We were reading Anna Akhmatova’s poem cycle “Requiem,” (English version, Russian version) which is about Ahmatova’s experiences waiting in line to visit her son who was being held in jail (probably to punish her for her poetry) during World War II. So, Stalinism was actually quite topical.
My teacher was definitely familiar with a lot of the facts that were suppressed by Soviet censors--such as the fact that Stalin’s purges of military officers severely weakened the Red Army on the eve of the war. She acknowledged that Stalin did many terrible things, but she pointed out that the line between being strict and being cruel is blurry. She thinks that a government has to be strict to maintain order. She argued that during the days of the USSR, she knew she would always have an apartment and a job and that her paycheck would arrive on time. Now, the government in Moldova is in such a mess that teachers (and professors at the university, too!) never know if they will actually be paid this month or not. If you’ve been following my blog, you know that the government can’t even be relied on to consistently provide gas, electricity, or water. It has been eighteen years since the fall of the USSR and these things are still happening!
Lowry’s book is basically about this exact trade-off. In The Giver, lifetime security and freedom from pain can only be achieved through extreme government coercion and the killing of innocents. I don’t think that Lowry intended her book to be a criticism of communism, (the characters in The Giver shun workers, so you can’t argue that they’re Marxists), but it was obviously an influence. She is basically asking the same questions as my teacher. Where’s the line? Although Lowry obviously doesn’t come down on the side of killing innocent people, part of the book’s power is how she really brings you inside the issue and enables you to empathize with all of the characters.. It’s truly a fascinating take on the subject, and I highly recommend the book.
yOUR STUDENTS ARE MOST FORTUNATE TO HAVE YOU AS THEIR TEACHER.
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