Monthly Archives: May 2022
Drama is usually the most popular unit in any high school grade course. And one of the most popular plays to study among freshman students is undoubtedly Romeo and Juliet (although I secretly dreaded having to read it one more time). I suggest you have students listen to a professional tape of a play as they read from their books plays during class. Allow the class to get dressed up and act a major scene in front of their peers,…..
Freshmen students should know that Shakespeare wrote his plays predominantly in a meter called iambic pentameter. A line of poetry is composed of feet or units of rhythm in verse. An iambic foot is composed of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable. Pentameter is a poetic line made up of five feet. I write examples of iambic pentameter on the board. The capitalized words are emphasized, and the slash indicates the end of each foot: My GRAVE /…..
Ultimately, the animals’ rebellion is forgotten. One tyrant has replaced the former tyrant. The commandments are subsumed into one, Orwell’s ultimate irony! The twentieth-century philosopher George Santayana has famously remarked that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” After we have discussed the novel, assign a short paragraph that applies this insight to the novel. Here is one 9th grade student’s response: These words directly relate to Animal Farm. After Napoleon has been reigning for many…..
It’s essential to circulate a sheet that lists the characters of Animal Farm and whom they represent; for example, Old Major represents Vladimir Lenin and Napoleon is Joseph Stalin. Napoleon’s name suggests that Orwell also modeled Napoleon on the despotic French military leader Napoleon Bonaparte in addition to despots in general. In order to appreciate the allegory, show the class a complete list that compares the animals to people in Rusian history. (Detailed lists are available at several websites.) Orwell…..
Orwell’s best-known novel, 1984, is inappropriate reading for most young teens, but Animal Farm is a good read for a freshman class since it raises questions that are similar to those raised in 1984 but without the nightmare vision and sordid content of the other book. Like Fahrenheit 451, both 1984 and Animal Farm are dystopian novels. That is, they depict a decidedly negative, often horrific picture of the world. They warn the reader about the horrors that face…..
When studying Fahrenheit 451, students invariably question the fate of the woman who cherishes her leather-bound books. Like the sixteenth-century martyrs to whom Beatty refers, the woman probably hopes that her rejection of the government’s oppressive system, which includes book burning, will change her world. Beatty quotes the words that Hugh Latimer spoke to Nicholas Ridley as both men were burned at the stake for heresy in 1555. These men wanted to spread the Protestant religion throughout England during the…..
In addition to its theme, an initial element in Fahrenheit 451 to discuss is the main characters. At the start of the novel, Guy Montag enjoys destroying mankind’s history. The class needs to feel outraged by his mindlessly burning the literature of the ages. However, his satisfaction with his work is a façade he’s adopted all his life. He meets a seventeen-year-old who makes him realize that he is, in fact, deeply unhappy. Clarisse McClellan represents what teachers dream about—a…..
Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 during the Cold War era and published it in 1953. Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian novel, which means that instead of describing an ideal or utopian world like Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, the book depicts a world that is the stuff of nightmares. It describes a futuristic totalitarian state set in an unnamed American city in which televisions in every home instruct the citizens of the state in all they are allowed to know. Utopia, the…..
