Amir's 9th and 10th Grade Humanites Homework

Date assigned 

•    Tuesday November 18th—list of 5-7 events/historical figures/movements.  Label these events with a theme (one of mine or your own) and a brief explanation (two to three sentences) of how each of the events is connected.  Also write down what your final product will be.  (Comic book, video, historical fiction, or other). 
•    Wednesday November 19th—locate and take at least one page of notes on one source about one of your events.  Turn in notes.  If handwritten, photocopy, if on a computer give me a hardcopy.  Turn in a hard copy of all notes on subsequent days too.  A hard copy of your notes are you homework.
•    Thursday November 20th—locate a source and take at least one page of notes on another one of your events. 
•    Friday November 21st –locate a source, and take one page of notes on a third event on your list. 

Thanksgiving Break

•    Monday December 1st—At least one page of notes due on all of the events on your list. 
•    Tuesday December 2nd—A two page story board or outline of your final product.  (in MLA form)
•    Tuesday December 9th—Complete rough draft of your creative narrative piece is due. 
•    Monday December 15th—creative narrative piece due.  Comics must be at least 3 full pages.  Films must be between five and ten minutes long.  Historical fiction must be at least 5 pages in length.  No matter the format, you must submit a hard copy of a works cited in MLA form. 
•    Thursday December 18th—In class short answer test based on your own work and that of your classmates.

Introduction following my template/example or come up with your own template and run it by me. 

Second paragraph/section On historical overview analysis.

1.    A typed answerable relevant question.

2.    A copy of your notes (that you hand in) on at least six high quality sources in the following categories:
Two articles that offer an historical perspective on your topic
Two articles that offer arguments and analysis from policy experts/stakeholders
Two articles about solutions being used in other countries and or current proposals by congress people to address your issue

For each article please write the name of the article, the author and the publication on the notes.  Please also label in which category the article falls from the categories above.
 
3.    An MLA style Works Cited page on which you document all of your sources. 

4.    Please place sources in alphabetical order and have the Works Cited properly formatted.
 
5.    A one to two page typed reflection in MLA form (with an MLA heading) about how the solutions to your issue you have encountered (historical solutions, current proposals, and solutions in other countries,) weight the ideal of individual freedom and choice versus community responsibility.  Be prepared to talk about what you have written.

If you have any questions, please email me at amir@compass-school.org

Today we talked about the energy crisis and several solutions to the crisis; various government mandates, and various ways that government could offer incentives and disincentives to encourage people to conserve energy.  We also talked about how each of these solutions might impinge on individual freedom and/or have community responsibility in mind, and how these two aims might sometimes be in conflict.  Here are the solutions we talked about and more:

a.    The government should mandate energy efficiency improvements across the board including raising fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks, banning incandescent light bulbs, and requiring all appliances to meet high-energy efficiency standards.
b.    Nationalize all (or most) energy production, like in France—thus removing profit from the system.
c.    Invest massively in the development of alternative energy sources like wind and solar.  Control and own these investments.  Employ millions in this effort. 
d.    Give tax breaks and subsidies to private companies that invest and develop alternative energy sources.
e.    Impose high taxes on those who drive, especially fuel inefficient cars, and who drive over a certain distance to work, and rewarding, through tax breaks, those who bike, walk, or take public transit to work. 
f.    Allow private companies  to drill offshore and in places like ANWR to find new oil. 
g.     Do Nothing—let the free market work it out

Your assignment: 

1. Come up with five solutions to the healthcare problem--how might mandates, incentives, disinsentives, and other methods be used to solve the health care problem.

2. For each solution discuss how community responsibility and individual freedom might be at odds.  Can community responsibility be met while preserving individual freedom? 

Here is the nature of the healthcare crisis as I see it:

There are 47 million uninsured people in the United States of America and many more millions who are uninsured.

Close reading of chapters 12 and 13.   Reread chapter 12 and 13.    As you read identify, discuss and relate to two passages relating to one or more of the following themes:

1.    Pride/Shame and its offshoots of conceit, boasting, ambition, jealousy, envy, and intolerance.   When are characters afflicted by these, why, and how does it affect their thoughts and behavior?  Remember the idea of the comparing mind (the cloud of competition that is hanging behind our eyes).  Remember the deep tap root of self-esteem. 
2.    The absence of pride/shame.  Focus on actions or non-actions that demonstrate this.  You may also focus on what I called “good pride” altruisms, or right effort in class.
3.    Curiosity.  Remember this theme as it relates to the Radley house.  Is it still around?
4.    Conscience.  When does it show up, when does it not show up?
5.    Any other pertinent theme you can think of

You may also identify a certain passage as containing more than one theme. 

Your entries should follow this format:
1. Pg. # Theme (or themes) 
2. “The passage in quotation marks.”
3. An explanation of the context in which the passage appears. (Who said it to who, or what is generally happening in the chapter).
4. Your discussion of the general meaning of the theme and of how the passage relates to or illustrates the theme.   It can be very helpful to support your discussion by looking up the meaning and etymology of your theme in the dictionary. 
5. A personal reflection on how this theme has manifested in your own experience. 

Here is an example of what an entry might look like:
1. Pg. 105  Conscience/Lack of Pride Shame
2. “‘They’re certainly entitled to think that, and they’re entitled to full respect for their opinions,’ said Atticus, ‘but before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself.  The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.’”
3. Atticus says this to Scout after Jem has terrorized Mrs. Dubose’s flowers and Atticus has sent him over to Mrs. Dubose’s house to apologize and work out a way to make it up to her.  Atticus is explaining to Scout that she and Jem will have to deal with a lot more hostility in the summer because he is defending Tom Robinson, and that he must defend Tom because if he didn’t he wouldn’t be able to live with himself.  Scout tells him that he might not be right because most folks think he’s wrong and then he responds with the above quotation. 
4.  There are two related themes in this passage—conscience and the absence of pride/shame.  Conscience is defined as, “an inner feeling or voice viewed as acting as a guide to the rightness or wrongness of one's behavior.”  Etymologically, conscience means roughly, “to be with knowledge” or more simply put, to know.    To know means to be aware of through direct observation.  Notice that “conscience” has the word “science” in it.  Why?  Because science uses direct observation to collect knowledge about the world—for instance using powerful telescopes to observe stars, or fMRI machines to observe brain activity. From these observations, scientist construct a clear picture of what is happening, and then a theory to as accurately as possible explain, for example, how old a star is, or what it is made of.  Conscience is training one’s powers of observation inward in order to know what the right way to act in a certain situation is.  Just as with scientific data, “conscientific data” must be based on reliable accurate observations in order to get reliable accurate results.  If you use a telescope that makes things look blurry and distorted to look at the stars, your observations aren’t going to be very helpful in trying to determine how old they are, what gasses are inside, and so forth.  The same is true about what kind of observations we make about moral challenges.  If we are looking with broken “instruments,” that is with a broken conscience, then we won’t accurately see what the wrong and right courses of actions are in a given situation.  We might be totally convinced that we are making the right choice simply because we are looking at the situation through a “cloudy telescope.”  The root source of the cloudiness is self-esteem, leading to pride or shame.

    In Atticus’s case, precisely because his view of himself and the world is not clouded by pride or shame, he sees clearly when as he says, “the chips are down.”  Feeling no sense of apartness between himself and Robinson, and between himself and people like Mrs. Dubose who deride him, he can see through the fact that his choice is unpopular, even though he and his family are the objects of derision and scorn and potentially even physical attack because he is earnestly defending Robinson. Having used his conscience like a finely tuned scientific instrument, he knows without a shred of doubt in his heart that the right thing to do is to defend Robinson.  Conceit does not way him down, he takes no special delight in his skills as a lawyer.  He doesn’t go around boasting that he is defending Robinson—he’s not out to be a saint.  He doesn’t do it for ambition—he’s not trying to be a hero to anyone.  It is clear that intolerance of any form has been fully (or mostly, for he does speak of the Ewells and people like them as “trash,” uprooted from his heart.  He is equally tolerant of Tom, a black man who has been demonized because of his race, and of Mrs. Dubose, who verbally trashes Atticus on a daily basis.  Atticus defends Tom only because, having looked closely at the situation he has no choice but to act.

    The book isn’t just about Atticus as a saint and paragon of conscience, but also about how through example, he passes on a clear moral vision to his children. Why does he make Jem go read to Mrs. Dubose?  On the surface as Scout says, it seems that Atticus is sending Jem into a den of danger and that he “doesn’t care what happens to him.”  But quite to the contrary, Atticus sends Jem to Mrs. Dubose so that Jem can both learn to be equanimous  in the face of viscous attacks, and so that he can observe courage in the face of great challenge.

5.  Personally, I don’t think I have ever faced a moral challenge nearly as monumental as the one Atticus faces when his conscience compels him to defend Tom Robinson.  However, a finely tuned sense of conscience is important in much less dramatic situations.  More times than I can possibly count, my sense of conscience has been absent due to a harmful sense of pride and or shame that was present in me.

    More times than I can possibly count, in seemingly trivial, or at least minor situations, my sense of conscience has been absent due to a harmful sense of pride and or shame that drowned it out.  As a result, I have done what I thought was good, and then realized, sometimes only moments later, that it was in fact harmful.  The most common form of these “minor” moral crimes is through saying something hurtful without thinking about it.  The most recent example I can think of is last week when we were doing meditation in class—I think it was the first time that I allowed you guys to lie down on the floor.  I told you guys to get in shivasna, without explaining what that is.  Jonah then said, "what’s that?"  And in a dismissive tone I said, “What?  How can you not know that, you’re mom is a yoga teacher?”  I think that this flippant remark was ultimately motivated by a kind of backhanded boasting—something like, “I know about you, I know what your mother does.”  I was taking pride in my inside knowledge (how silly don’t you think?) and as a result, ended up deriding an innocent student.  Had my conscience been more finely tuned, I think I could have chosen not to speak in this situation and to simply answer the question.

    A similar thing sometimes happens in class when something like the following happens:  Me:  "Okay, tonight’s homework is to read chapter 3 and come back with four questions aimed at identifying and clarifying the theme in the chapter.”  Then I further explain the homework and write it on the board.  After I’m finished, a student, who was clearly zoned out says, without any apparent knowledge that homework was just assigned and explained, “What’s the homework?”  I have found that there are two ways I can react to this situation.  If my conscience is finely tuned, I can see that the student might have ADD, and has difficlty tuning in.  Maybe he or she is stressed out or preoccupied with the fact that they had a huge fight with their mom yesterday.  Who knows?  I can simply calmly explain the homework again, or tell them to see me afterward, or consult with another student in a calm even keeled manner.  Problem solved.  The other option to is to react with disbelief and exasporation.  I might sigh heavily, tighten my shoulders, and say something like, “Oh my god, you can’t be serious!”  At this point, the class laughs, I feel tense, and bad (for humiliating the student) and the student feels bad, and they aren’t any closer to knowing what the homework is.  Seems silly, but sometimes it happens.

For each word you choose, write the: 

Word, pg#, definition, etymology, your explanation of the etymology, haiku containing the word.  Your haiku may use a modified form of the word.  (A Haiku is a traditional three line Japanese poem, usually with a nature theme, that follows a 5, 7, 5 syllable structure).  Don’t worry about getting the syllable structure exact.  If you do, great, but just make sure you get close. 

For example:

1. Tempted pg. 4—entice or attempt to entice (someone) to do or acquire something that they find attractive but know to be wrong or not beneficial. From Latin “temtare” which means handle test, try.  So to tempt at its root, is to entice somebody by putting them through a test of some sort—perhaps a test of moral character.

A man on the street
Still, calm, is lying half dead
Tempted by hurry, we don’t stop 

2. Economy pg. 5—sparing or careful use of something.  From Latin, originally from Greek, oikonomia which means “household management” Which can further be broken down into oikos “house” and nemein “manage.”  So economy means to manage the affairs of a household—traditionally this would include growing food, making clothes, cooking and maintaining the home.  In our sense of the word, to do something with economy means to do it with an eye to doing these things carefully so as not to waste scarce resources.  However, you can also do other things with economy, like speak for instance.  To speak with economy means to use the fewest possible words.

With economy
She listens to my troubles
Uttering just a word. 

There are several options in response to the This American Life story we heard in class. You only need to complete one option 1. Inspired by the letter Amanda wrote to Stephanie, write a letter to somebody who you feel you need to say something very important to, but are having a hard time doing so  2.  Listen to the story again and find five specific instances of suffering.  As we did with tracking fear in The Outsiders, say what kind of suffering it is, and pose a question or comment about it.  3. Listen to the story again and summarize each of the three people's--Deborah, Stephanie, and Amanda--point of view.  What are the points in the story where they see things similarly, where are the points where they see things differently and why.  Be as specific as possible.  4. Write a story taken from your experience from the point of view of three different people, one of them being yourself.  You are telling one story, but jumping back and forth between three narrators, each of whom has a unique point of view. 

The story can be found at: 

http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=209

Read the overview for the year carefully.  Have a parent or guardian read it and sign it