Power: Where are we Going, Where have we Been

Power: Where are we Going, Where have we Been?

Introduction

It occurs to me, as we approach the halfway point of the class, I have not adequately explained where we are going or where we have been.

Literature

My goal is to explore the theme of power. How do people keep it, use it, and get shaped by it. With that in mind, we have gone through the following four units.

Civil Rights: This introduced the ideas of power of people and of movements. It also serves to illuminate the difference between the non-violent power and the violent power.

1984: This unit refined the nature of political power by introducing the control of language, of the past, and of the physical power.

Brave New World: This unit looks at the future world controlled by biology and the pursuit of pleasure. Power is not defined as the iron fist, but as the giving hand.

Closetland: This work returns to the world of 1984, but investigates the complicity of the victim.

Handmaids Tale: This unit refines the dystopian themes from the previous three works with a careful look at the authors intent.

A Tale of Two Cities: With this unit, we break from the dystopian worlds and flash back into history. We will examine Dickenss work for the tools of power shone in the previous works.

Merchant of Venice/Julius Caesar: With this unit, we will examine Shakespeares careful use of power. Money and society conspire to work subtly on the characters.

One flew Over the Cuckoos Nest: The final work ties together the ideas of controlling power with the ideas of usurping the group and defining the individual.

Writing

At the beginning, I learned that most of the class could write a decent five-paragraph essay about literature. My goals became three fold.

Personality: I wanted the essay I read to have more self-discovery and expression in them. So, I demanded the anecdote opening and personal topics.

Style: I felt that the essay were not written as strongly as they could have been, so I instituted the five beliefs of sentences and the five beliefs of structure. In addition to these, rhetorical and figurative elements also needed to be added.

Thought: I wanted the essays to involve more than a cursory knowledge of the work, so I required that the essays include references to other works and to everyday life.

Thinking

In beginning to work with this class, I noticed that most students were content to have a simple knowledge of the text. I wanted the students to interact more with the writing, to question it, to analyze it, to apply it to other books we have read and to their own experience, and finally to evaluate the works.

Socratic Seminar: I have built up to this technique by long development in order to encourage deeper thinking about a text, as well as to develop skills for discussion and oral argument.

Essay: The essays have pushed students to examine their experiences in relation to the texts

Homework Questions: I have pushed away from the Question and Answer homework looking for more thought with the text.

Others

The class includes two elements that do not easily fit into these categories.

Poems: The class will memorize several poems over the course of the semester. The purpose is to help students feel more comfortable speaking in public, help students analyze literature, and to place a gem in their memories.

Challenges: The challenges exist to not only to support the curriculum, but to encourage the students to build one of their own. Primarily, the challenges exist to build outside reading and writing skills.