Literature and Social Change

Literature and Social Change Literature written during the period between 1650 and the mid 1800s encourages us to think for ourselves rather than blindly accept the status quo. Tolstoy, in The Death of Ivan Ilyich reminds us to be mindful of the folly of keeping up with the Jones. Molieres Tartuffe warns against the unquestioning acceptance of religious authority. Swift and Douglass condemn the unthinkable acceptance of human degradation. Whether describing the indiscriminate acceptance of authority or social norms these stories inspire us to use critical thinking as a means of restoring moral principles. Tolstoys depiction of the struggle between the physical and spiritual world reminds us that a life of integrity is a life of meaningful choices. Choices that require careful consideration about what is truly important in life, namely the people in our lives. Ivan Ilyichs acceptance of the challenge to keep up with the status quo led him to a place of painful isolation. Each thoughtless choice cost him personal integrity until he is compelled by impending death to take a judicious look at his life. A Modest Proposal. Historical and cultural biases and stereotypes prevent both oppressors and oppressed from seeing not only the need but the ability to change. Acceptance of poverty as a regrettable condition or an acceptable lifestyle for those people without questioning the validity of such ideas degrades all humanity. Swifts work provoked critical thinking and discussion among the people changing expectations, reforming abuses and reaffirming the value of humanity. Douglass work asserts the worth of all mankind. The practice of enslaving human beings chained not only the slave but the owner as well. Each choice to ignore was a choice to endorse slavery as a reasonable practice. Only when reason was applied, prejudices examined and stereotypes dismantled did ideas about slavery begin to change. The abolition of slavery required rethinking the value of human freedom by slave holders and slaves alike as well as society as a whole. What began as individual revelation grew into a revolution renewing integrity of individuals and a nation. Each story draws the reader into an abusive world created and affirmed by ignorance then offers the means for change, independent thinking. Unquestioned our biases and assumptions unjustifiably impact our thought processes. Restoration of integrity comes about when we are mindful of circumstance and apply critical thinking skills to our situation. As each author illustrates, our power to reason is a powerful tool for change. Question 3 Relevance Still Searching for Significance The stories we read from 1650 through the mid 1800s all address issues that are relevant today. Religious hypocrisy, poverty and slavery still exist with long lasting and detrimental effects. I believe Leo Tolstoys Death of Ivan Ilyich holds the most relevance for todays audience because it speaks to what we have the most control over, our day to day choices. We all have the potential to live meaningful lives and affect our world in a positive way. Tolstoys Death of Ivan Ilyich addresses me, my family, and my community. Our priorities are easily confused when trying to keep up with appearances. Tolstoy contrasts the way we usually live our life, keeping up with appearances and the way we should live our life, with kindness and gratitude. One hundred years after the authors death people still search for fulfillment in materialism. Years ago He who Dies with the Most Toys Wins was a popular bumper sticker. I rarely see it anymore. Consumed by debt we struggle to survive. He who Dies with the Most Debt doesnt have quite the same laugh in the face of death attitude. Its not just toys, we invest heavily in cars and homes, jobs and after school activities believing we are what we appear to be. Appearances are artificial. The substance of who we are, the way we treat people is deeper than appearance. As a nation September 11th especially reminded us of the importance of the people in our lives. Listening to phone calls made to loved ones by nine-eleven victims we wondered, Who would we call first if our plane or building was going to consume us? Who would miss us if in the rescue of another human being we were to loose our life? Certainly the sacrifice of life would be evidence of a life well-lived, an authentic life. But even Ivan Ilyich in a sense sacrifices his life. Certainly he wanted what was best for his family yet they see him as a nuisance, they really just want him to go away. This man provided the best for his family and in return they want nothing to do with him. The material things he provided are ultimately unimportant. Gerashims compassion for Ivan sheds light on what is truly important. Both Ivan and Gershim benefit because of Gershims compassion. Ivan is cared for, his loneliness and pain are lessened. Gershim, having made a difference in someones life, is filled with a satisfaction that can not be cast off. His life has meaning. His compassion comes from his spirit, it is love in action. All the material gifts we give will disintegrate in time but compassion, love for another, has a regenerating power. Love authenticates our lives. When we show compassion for our family, friends, and neighbors our communities are better places. Places where hypocrisy, poverty and slavery have a difficult time existing. The choices we make daily can add up to a meaningful life and a better world. Question 5 Favorite A Renewed Appreciation I thoroughly enjoyed the works we read especially Frederick Douglass, Moliere, and Jonathan Swift but the work that is my favorite is Leo Tolstoys Death of Ivan Ilyich. Tolstoys story had the most effect on me. As I read the story the first time I found myself substituting my own husband for Ivan. He, like Ivan works hard to keep up appearances and works in pain. I, like Ivans wife can barely be bothered with him. The story reminded me that compassion is a two-way street. Now when I think about the story it is not someone else I see in Ivans place but myself. The story is my favorite because it has caused me to think about myself and seek change. The work that is my least favorite is Alexander Popes Rape of the Lock. It was my least favorite because the subject matter and the imagery felt so foreign to me. The piece was difficult to understand, yet I was intrigued, the verse was captivating. As I learned about the imagery and epic poetry I came to appreciate this mock epic. Reading the literature from this time period has caused me to appreciate history and the changes that can be initiated through the power of words.

Thinking, Values, And Beliefs :: essays research papers

Ideology is a way of thinking that reflect the social needs and political doctrines of an individual or group. There are many different people and different circumstances this results in a variety of different ways of thinking, values and beliefs. Our ideology grows with us from childhood. From the moment you are born the family influence begins to impact your thought process. A child is like a sponge that absorbs ideas and beliefs. Beliefs are taught to a child in subtle ways such as just listening to the parents and their opinions from everything including politics, social problems, moral issues and even opinions about how others behave. It is within the family unit that a person learns their moral values. It is from their parents that a child is taught right and wrong. Often this is through religious training. Religious beliefs or the lack of religious beliefs has a great influence on a person's beliefs and values. In the early years a child looks to their parents as the final authority on any subject. It's not uncommon to overhear a child explain something as being absolutely true because their mommy or daddy said so. As a child grow's older they see the world through outside influences such as the school system, the media, and their peers. School is often a child first opportunity to think for themselves. They experiment with ideas and values of their own. School teaches children to use a critical thought process. One way where this is done is if a child is given an opinion in a debate and they must find reasons to defend a certain viewpoint. They are exposed to a wide variety of viewpoint and opinions. Another source of influence on values and beliefs is the media. Free speech guarantees the rights of anyone to express their opinions. Children begin to form new beliefs and ideas of their own, the family influence is still there, but just not as strong. Also, peers become a major influence on a young person's thinking. To express their newfound values a child will often go through a stage of rebellion where they reject a lot of their parent's values. This doesn't mean that they have taken on a whole new belief system. It just means they are expanding the values, thinking, and belief system from the home with new ideas and thoughts. The country where you are raised is one of the major influences on a person's values and thinking process.

Backward Design Essay

Deliberate and focused instructional design requires us as teachers and curriculum writers to make an important shift in our thinking about the nature of our job. The shift involves thinking a great deal, first, about the specific learnings sought, and the evidence of such learnings, before thinking about what we, as the teacher, will do or provide in teaching and learning activities. Though considerations about what to teach and how to teach it may dominate our thinking as a matter of habit, the challenge is to focus first on the desired learnings from which appropriate teaching will logically follow. Our lessons, units, and courses should be logically inferred from the results sought, not derived from the methods, books, and activities with which we are most comfortable. Curriculum should lay out the most effective ways of achieving specific results. It is analogous to travel planning. Our frameworks should provide a set of itineraries deliberately designed to meet cultural goals rather than a purposeless tour of all the major sites in a foreign country. In short, the best designs derive backward from the learnings sought. The appropriateness of this approach becomes clearer when we consider the educational purpose that is the focus of this book: understanding. We cannot say how to teach for understanding or which material and activities to use until we are quite clear about which specific understandings we are after and what such understandings look like in practice. We can best decide, as guides, what â€Å"sites† to have our student â€Å"tourists† visit and what specific â€Å"culture† they should experience in their brief time there only if we are clear about the particular understandings about the culture we want them to take home. Only by having specified the desired results can we focus on the content, methods, and activities most likely to achieve those results. But many teachers begin with and remain focused on textbooks, favored lessons, and time-honored activities—the inputs—rather than deriving those means from what is implied in the desired resultsâ€⠀the output. To put it in an odd way, too many teachers focus on the teaching and not the learning. They spend most of their time thinking, first, about what they will do, what materials they will use, and what they will ask students to do rather than first considering what the learner will need in order to accomplish the learning goals. Consider a typical episode of what might be called content-focused design instead of results-focused design. The teacher might base a lesson on a particular topic (e.g., racial prejudice), select a resource (e.g., To Kill a Mockingbird), choose specific instructional methods based on the resource and topic (e.g., Socratic seminar to discuss the book and cooperative groups to analyze stereotypical images in films and on television), and hope thereby to cause learning (and meet a few English/language arts standards). Finally, the teacher might think up a few essay questions and quizzes for assessing student understanding of the book. This approach is so common that we may well be tempted to reply, What could be wrong with such an approach? The short answer lies in the basic questions of purpose: Why are we asking students to read this particular novel—in other words, what learnings will we seek from their having read it? Do the students grasp why and how the purpose should influence their studying? What should students be expected to understand and do upon reading the book, related to our goals beyond the book? Unless we begin our design work with a clear insight into larger purposes—whereby the book is properly thought of as a means to an educational end, not an end unto itself—it is unlikely that all students will understand the book (and their performance obligations). Without being self-conscious of the specific understandings about prejudice we seek, and how reading and discussing the book will help develop such insights, the goal is far too vague: The approach is more â€Å"by hope† than â€Å"by design.† Such an approach ends up unwittingly being one that could be described like this: Throw some content and activities against the wall and hope some of it sticks. Answering the â€Å"why?† and â€Å"so what?† questions that older students always ask (or want to), and doing so in concrete terms as the focus of curriculum planning, is thus the essence of understanding by design. What is difficult for many teachers to see (but easier for students to feel!) is that, without such explicit and transparent priorities, many students find day-to-day work confusing and frustrating. The twin sins of traditional design More generally, weak educational design involves two kinds of purposelessness, visible throughout the educational world from kindergarten through graduate school. We call these the â€Å"twin sins† of traditional design. The error of activity-oriented design might be called â€Å"hands-on without being minds-on†Ã¢â‚¬â€engaging experiences that lead only accidentally, if at all, to insight or achievement. The activities, though fun and interesting, do not lead anywhere intellectually. Such activity-oriented curricula lack an explicit focus on important ideas and appropriate evidence of learning, especially in the minds of the learners. A second form of aimlessness goes by the name of â€Å"coverage,† an approach in which students march through a textbook, page by page (or teachers through lecture notes) in a valiant attempt to traverse all the factual material within a prescribed time. Coverage is thus like a whirlwind tour of Europe, perfectly summarized by the old movie title If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, which properly suggests that no overarching goals inform the tour. As a broad generalization, the activity focus is more typical at the elementary and lower middle school levels, whereas coverage is a prevalent secondary school and college problem. No guiding intellectual purpose or clear priorities frame the learning experience. In neither case can students see and answer such questions as these: What’s the point? What’s the big idea here? What does this help us understand or be able to do? To what does this relate? Why should we learn this? Hence, the students try to engage and follow as best they can, hoping that meaning will emerge. The three stages of backward design Stage 1: Identify desired results What should students know, understand, and be able to do? What content is worthy of understanding? What enduring understandings are desired? In Stage 1 we consider our goals, examine established content standards (national, state, district), and review curriculum expectations. Because typically we have more content than we can reasonably address within the available time, we must make choices. This first stage in the design process calls for clarity about priorities. Stage 2: Determine acceptable evidence How will we know if students have achieved the desired results? What will we accept as evidence of student understanding and proficiency? The backward design orientation suggests that we think about a unit or course in terms of the collected assessment evidence needed to document and validate that the desired learning has been achieved, not simply as content to be covered or as a series of learning activities. This approach encourages teachers and curriculum planners to first â€Å"think like an assessor† before designing specific units and lessons, and thus to consider up front how they will determine if students have attained the desired understandings. Stage 3: Plan learning experiences and instruction With clearly identified results and appropriate evidence of understanding in mind, it is now the time to fully think through the most appropriate instructional activities. Several key questions must be considered at this stage of backward design: What enabling knowledge (facts, concepts, principles) and skills (processes, procedures, strategies) will students need in order to perform effectively and achieve desired results? What activities will equip students with the needed knowledge and skills? What will need to be taught and coached, and how should it best be taught, in light of performance goals? What materials and resources are best suited to accomplish these goals? Note that the specifics of instructional planning—choices about teaching methods, sequence of lessons, and resource materials—can be successfully completed only after we identify desired results and assessments and consider what they imply. Teaching is a means to an end. Having a clear goal helps to foc us our planning and guide purposeful action toward the intended results. Conclusion Backward design may be thought of, in other words, as purposeful task analysis: Given a worthy task to be accomplished, how do we best get everyone equipped? Or we might think of it as building a wise itinerary, using a map: Given a destination, what’s the most effective and efficient route? Or we might think of it as planning for coaching: What must learners master if they are to effectively perform? What will count as evidence on the field, not merely in drills, that they really get it and are ready to perform with understanding, knowledge, and skill on their own? How will the learning be designed so that learners’ capacities are developed through use and feedback? This is all quite logical when you come to understand it, but â€Å"backward† from the perspective of much habit and tradition in our field. A major change from common practice occurs as designers must begin to think about assessment before deciding what and how they will teach. Rather than creating assessments near the conclusion of a unit of study (or relying on the tests provided by textbook publishers, which may not completely or appropriately assess our standards and goals), backward design calls for us to make our goals or standards specific and concrete, in terms of assessment evidence, as we begin to plan a unit or course. The rubber meets the road with assessment. Three different teachers may all be working toward the same content standards, but if their assessments vary considerably, how are we to know which students have achieved what? Agreement on needed evidence of learning leads to greater curricular coherence and more reliable evaluation by teachers. Equally important is the long-term gain in teacher, student, and parent insight about what does and does not count as evidence of meeting complex standards.

Definition and Examples of Putative Should in English

In English grammar, putative should is the use of the word should in contexts that indicate surprise or disbelief, or that refer to the occurrence (or possible occurrence) of some situation or event. This usage differs from the should of obligation (i.e., the mandative should). As noted by Randolph Quirk et al., putative should (also called emotional should) occurs in that clauses after expressions of emotion (sorrow, joy, displeasure, surprise, wonder, etc.), and is often accompanied by intensifying expressions such as so, such, like this/that, ever, or at all (A Comprehensive Grammar, 1985). In addition, putative should  occurs in subordinate clauses as an alternative to the subjunctive after expressions of suggesting, advising, etc.: They insisted that I (should) stay the whole week (Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar, 1994). Putative should is more common in British English than in American English. Also Known  As:  emotional  should, attitudinal  should, hypothetical  should, subjunctive  should Examples Major Green gently nodded and then briefly glanced through the same porthole, behind which the Earth lay static and diminutive, no bigger than an average football. The oddest thing for me is that people should be living there at all! he exclaimed on a softly humorous note. (John OLoughlin, Millennial Projections, 1983)It is surprising that you should find this practice shocking, since you French cut off the heads of your King and Queen. (Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia, 1941)I know its a little strange, a little bit of a contradiction, that a far-seeing place should also be a basement place, but thats how it is with me. (Stephen King, Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Scribner, 2000)It seems a great shame you should have to pay for what Albert and Clara did. (Arnold Bennett, These Twain, 1915)It is sad that you should talk such nonsense, and sadder that I should have to listen.(Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller, Studies in Humanism , 1912)Peter Walsh, who had done just respectably, filled the usual posts adequately, was liked, but thought a little cranky, gave himself airs—it was odd that he should have had, especially now that his hair was grey, a contented look; a look of having reserves. (Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 1925) Adjectives With Putative Should The adjectives anxious, eager, and willing are followed by a that-clause with putative should or the subjunctive. Adjectives expressing concepts concerned with modality or volition (Quirk et al 1985: 1224) also belong to this group. Examples are appropriate, essential, important, vital. Adjectives which can be followed by a verb phrase in the that-clause with either an indicative verb phrase or one with putative should express emotions. Examples are afraid, angry, hopeful, inconceivable, odd, sad, sorry, surprised, surprising. (Ilka Mindt, Adjective Complementation: An Empirical Analysis of Adjectives Followed by That-Clauses. John Benjamins, 2011) Factual Should In most of its uses, should is to be found in contexts which are either counterfactual (as in You should be in your office at this time of day, which presupposes ...but you are not in your office) or tentative (as in You should give up smoking, which contains a presupposition approximately paraphrasable as ...but Im not sure you will give up smoking). In some cases, however, should is used in contexts which—at least apparently—contain no negative implication. These contexts, which may be called factual, seem to contradict the hypothesis that -ed always expresses a presupposition of unreality. (Most factual uses of should concern what is often called putative should—see, for instance, Quirk et al...The coincidence of the two categories, however, is only partial.) (Paul Larreya, Irrealis, Past Time Reference and Modality. Modality in Contemporary English, ed. by Roberta Facchinetti, Manfred G. Krug, and Frank Robert Palmer. Walter de Gruyter, 2003) Jespersen on Emotional Should We may use the term emotional should for the use of should in passing a judgment of an emotional character (agreeable or disagreeable surprise, indignation, joy) on some occurrence which may, or may not, be a fact. A sentence like Why was the date omitted? is a mere factual question, but Why should the date of the document be omitted? implies wonder and, possibly, some suspicion of the purity of the motives. Compare further: Where the divell should he learne our language? (Sh.). Why should they try to influence him? [I see no reason] Someone asking for you. Who should ask for me? Similarly, these examples show use in clauses: It is not good that the man should be alone (AV). It was quite natural that the Russians should hate their oppressors. Why should she have done so, I can hardly tell. It is strange that she married (or has married) such an old man merely states the fact; It is strange that she should have married such an old man lays more stress on the strangeness by using the imaginative should in the clause. (Otto Jespersen, Essentials of English Grammar. George Allan Unwin, 1933) Also See Conditional Clause  and  Conditional SentenceConfused Words:  Should  and  Would