Before reading Fahrenheit 451, you will look at some of the themes presented in the novel. For each of the following statements, respond with your own thoughts about the statement. You may “agree”, “disagree”, or “agree under certain circumstances”. For each, be sure to explain the reasoning behind your response. 1. Communication through email, Internet, or telephone is just as significant and real as a face-to-face conversation. 2. With the invention of technology such as cell phones and the Internet, people are becoming more self-reliant and secluded. 3. People are moving faster and faster these days, and do not have time for anyone else. 4. What is happening in the rest of the world is not important, as long as we are happy. 5. It is not important to learn in school anything other than what you will use in a job. 6. Not everyone is born free and equal, so it is up to society to make everyone alike and equal. 7. Everyone has a deep fear of being inferior. 8. If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a political question to worry him; only present him with one side of the argument. 9. Books do not have anything you can teach or believe, and contain only non-existent people and figments of imagination. 10. How things happen the way they do is not as important as why things happen the way they do. 11. Knowledge is power. 12. If you pretend you know everything, you will never be able to learn from your mistakes.

Vocabulary Part One: The Hearth and the Salamander 1. abstract 2. abyss 3. ballistics 4. bestial 5. bewilderedly 6. cacophony 7. centrifuge 8. cinders 9. condemnation 10. devotion 11. drear 12. fathoms

13. feigning 14. flue 15. gorging 16. illumination 17. incinerator 18. jargon 19. luminescent 20. marionette 21. mausoleum 22. melancholy 23. noncombustible

24. objectify 25. olfactory 26. proclivities 27. pulverized 28. seized 29. sheath 30. stratum 31. tactile 32. torrent 33. venomous 34. ventilator 35. waft

Using a three-column chart (1) identify the main claim or point made in each

section, (2) identify specific phrases, sentences, or paragraphs that develop

and refine the claim of each section and (3) identify the connections made

between the claims of each section.

Highlight words and phrases that reveals Douglass’s attitude toward his

mistress, slavery, reading, and writing.

Determine the central idea and assess whether Douglass’s evidence is

relevant and sufficiently supports his claim.

How does Douglass learn to read and write? Do you consider his actions

dangerous? Why or why not?

1. Using a three-column chart, (1) identify the main claims made

throughout the essay and the order in which they appear; (2) identify

specific phrases, sentences, or paragraphs that develop the claim of each

section; and (3) identify the connections made between the claims of

each section.

2. Highlight words and phrases that reveal Alexie’s attitude toward life on

the reservation, treatment of American Indians, and reading and writing.

Use a different color highlighter for each subject (e.g., green for

reservation life, yellow for treatment of American Indians, pink for

reading and writing).

3. Determine a central idea of “Superman and Me” and assess whether

Alexie’s evidence is relevant and sufficiently supports his claim.

4. How does Alexie learn to read? What is the significance of the text he

used to learn to read and his process?

5. What is the importance of the title and the image of “Superman”?

6. How do the language Alexie uses throughout the text, the examples he

provides, and the way he structures the text convey a central idea?

7. What does Alexie value? How do you know? Determine and explain

Alexie’s point of view based on the evaluation of his tone, claims, and

evidence. What is Alexie’s purpose in writing this text?

8. Select one of the following quotes: o “I refused to fail. I was smart. I

was arrogant. I was lucky.” o “I read with equal parts joy and

desperation.” o ”Despite all the books I read, I am still surprised I became

a writer.” o “I throw my weight against their locked doors. The doors hold.

I am smart. I am arrogant. I am lucky. I am trying to save our lives.”

Analyze how the quote develops or refines Alexie’s claims and contributes

to development of his purpose and the central idea of the text. Cite

strong and thorough textual evidence, including direct quotations.

To give you a comprehensive understanding of all aspects of the novel, answer the following questions on loose-leaf. Your answer must be a complete sentence that restates each question. These answers will be the notes from which you will study for quizzes and tests. They will also provide you with textual evidence for activities throughout the reading of the novel. Answer each question completely. The Beginning 1. What is Montag’s job? How does he feel about his job? Give specific textual evidence to support your answer. Be sure to use a direct quote with page numbers. 2. What do the numerals “451” represent? Montage meets Clarisse; this character plays a very important role in the novel. 3. Describe Clarisse. How does Montag meet her? 4. Clarisse causes Montag to recall a childhood memory in which a wish was embedded. What was the significance of the memory and the wish? (IMPORTANT: summarize this episode and Montag’s feelings). 5. What is Montag’s reaction to Clarisse’s question: “Have you ever read any of the books you burn?” 6. What two observations does Clarisse make about Montag’s conversational mannerisms? 7. What do Clarisse and Montag argue about? What does Clarisse tell Montag that firemen used to do? 8. What final question does Clarisse ask Montag on the night of their first encounter? Why is the question important to the plot? Montag enters his home; the reader witnesses his interaction with his wife Mildred and gets a glimpse of the state of their marriage 9. Describe the bedroom which Montag enters. To what is it compared? What does this comparison say about the character we meet within? 10. Why do you think Montag did not want to open the curtains or windows? 11. What does Montag find under the bed? What has happened?

12. Describe the machines. What do they do to Mildred? How do they treat their “patient”? Why is it so routine to them? 13. This event provides Montag with a new insight into the state of society. What is this insight? 14. In contrast, what does Montage next hear and long for? 15. Mildred’s earpieces have been described as “electronic bees”, “mosquito hums”, and “hidden wasps”. What are these earpieces? Why foes she always have one in her ear? Why do you think Bradbury compares these devices to insects? 16. How does Mildred react when Montag tells her what happened the night before? 17. What is Mildred’s “script” about? What part does she play? Why does she want to buy a fourth wall? 18. What test does Clarisse give Montag? What is the result, and how does Montag respond to it? 19. How is Clarisse different from the other young people in this society? Explain using text evidence. 20. Describe the Mechanical Hound. What is its purpose? How does Montag feel about the Hound? 21. What does Montag continually overhear? 22. What is the significance of the refrain repeated by the woman whose house was burned? What did it mean? What is its effect on Montag? 23. Why do you think the woman stats in her house while it is burning? 24. How does Montag change as he thinks about the old woman and all the books that he has destroyed? What does he begin to realize? 25. What does Montag take from the burning house? Why? What does he do with it afterward? 26. What is the significance of the refrain repeated by the woman whose hose was burned? What does it mean? Who explains the woman’s quote to Montag? 27. What does Montag realize about his relationship with his wife? 28. How does Mildred feel toward the characters in the parlor? Why is this disturbing to Montag? 29. What does Mildred tell Montag about Clarisse? How does she deliver this news?

30. Montag thinks something is outside; what is it? Why do you think it is there? BE PREPARED TO DISCUSS THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS IN CLASS.

Note the quotation at the beginning of Part I: “If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.” What do you think this quotation means? How does it relate to the book?

If one were to rebel against Montag’s society, what form might this rebellion take?

Based upon what you have read so far, what warnings about our own world are suggested by Ray Bradbury in the society he depicts?

This novel was first published in October, 1953. Are any of the problems of Montag’s society still problems today? Explain. 31. What does Montag learn about Beatty from his visit? 32. How did the government of this society gain control over its people? 33. How did Beatty describe the decline of civilization that led to the public’s taste for mediocrity in the media? 34. What did Beatty mean when he said that “a book is like a loaded gun”? 35. From Beatty’s speech, what does Bradbury reveal about his fears about our society? What ideas/concepts are true in our modern society? 36. Describe the schools children attend in the novel. (Give direct quote text evidence). 37. What are the people in this society allowed to read? What is the purpose of reading in this society? 38. What does Beatty mean when he says, “We’re the Happiness Boys, the Dixie Duo”? What kind of happiness does he espouse? Could Mildred be considered happy according to this definition? 39. What do the firemen do if one of their own “accidentally” steals a book? 40. Why are there no longer front porches in this society? 41. What does Montag show Millie? What is her immediate reaction?

Literary devices Part I Ray Bradbury is an author whose prose reflects the imagery of a poet. Examine the literary devices he employs to thoroughly appreciate his style as a writer. I. Symbolism- a symbol in literature is the use of an object or an idea to represent an entire set of ideas. In this novel the central symbol is that of fire. What does it represent in Part I of the novel? What do light and dark represent? Skim back over Part I of the novel and list the many allusions to brightness and shadow, and those characters who seem to possess these qualities. Add to this chart as you continue the book.

Light Dark

II. Irony: A situation is ironic when it becomes the exact opposite of what is intended. What is ironic about the job of the firemen in Montag’s society? What other examples of irony can be found

in the novel?

III. Simile: A simile is a comparison of two unlike objects using the words “like” or “as”. For example: “He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run across the lawn with the mask.”

What is being compared here?

What does this reveal about the individual?

IV. Metaphor: A metaphor is an implied comparison between two seemingly unlike objects. For example: “Her face, turned to him now, was fragile milk crystal with a soft and constant light in it.

What is being compared?

What is the effect of the comparison?

V. Alliteration: Alliteration is the repetition of the same consonant sound at the beginning of words in order to produce a desired effect. For example: “[the train] slid soundlessly down its

lubricated flue in the earth.”

What sound is repeated?

What effect does this produce?

Writing: Imagine you are Guy Montag. You have spent your entire life fearing books and then burning them. Now you are questioning your society. Write a journal entry describing your inner

turmoil.

Setting, Tone, and Mood

In Part One, Bradbury creates a mood of tension and unrest from the very first sentences of the novel. “It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things

blackened and changed.” By equating the idea of “pleasure” with burning and fire, we immediately feel uneasy. Our conscience tells us that something on fire is generally a bad thing.

Directions: For each of the quotes from the text, underline or highlight the words that reveal the setting, including clues about time, place, and atmosphere, then explain on loose-leaf how these particular words indicate specifics about setting. Next, explain the tone Bradbury uses to create mood. Include comments on the use of figurative language, imagery, etc. if apparent. Finally, describe the mood of the excerpt using as many details and appropriate adjectives as possible. An example has been done for you.

Example: “The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves

carry her forward.” Setting: It is autumn, after dark. It is windy and leaves are thrown into the air as the girl walks along. Tone: distant, detached, ominous, threatening, eerie; the tone makes us

feel as if there is no one else around, and the girl appears with the gust of wind, almost with a ghostly quality. Mood: lonely, uneasy, skeptical, suspicious

1. “It was like coming into the cold marbled room of a mausoleum after the moon has set. Complete darkness, not a hint of the silver world outside, the windows tightly shut, the chamber

a tomb world where no sound from the great city could penetrate. The room was not empty.”

2. “Without turning on the light he imagined how this room would look. His wife stretched on the bed, uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of a tomb, her eyes fixed to the

ceiling by invisible threads of steel, immovable… The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on the great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward

morning.”

3. “As he stood there the sky over the house screamed. There was a tremendous ripping sound as if two giant hands had torn ten thousand miles of black lines down the seam… The jet

bombers going over, going over, one two, one two, six of them, nine of them, twelve of them, and one and one and one and another and another and another, did all the screaming for

him.”

4. “Laughter blew across the moon-colored lawn from the house of Clarisse and her father and mother and uncle who smiled so quietly and earnestly. Above all, their laughter was relaxed and

hearty and not forced in any way, coming from the house that was so brightly lit this late at night while all the other houses were kept to themselves in darkness. Montag heard the

voices talking, talking, talking, giving, talking, weaving, reweaving their hypnotic web.”

5. “Montag stayed upstairs most nights when this went on. There had been a time two years ago when he had bet with the best of them, and lost a week’s salary and faced Mildred’s insane

anger, which showed itself in veins and blotches. But now nights he lay in his bunk, face turned toward the wall, listening to the whoops of laughter below and the piano-string scurry

of rat feet, the violin squeaking of mice, and the great shadowing, motioned silence of the Hound leaping out like a moth in the raw light, finding, holding its victim, inserting the

needle, and going back to its kennel to die as if a switch had been turned.”

Characterization and Character Motivation What is this character’s strongest desire? Characters’ decisions are important to the plot, and in many cases, their decisions will affect will affect the

story’s outcome. You learn about characters by the things they say and do. Just as some of the decisions we make in our lives are minor and trivial, and others change our lives forever, a skilled

writer develops characters that also make both seemingly unimportant and life-altering choices. For each of the characters below, complete the chart with text evidence of indirect characterization

from Part I of the novel. Find TWO quotes. One in which another character describes something about that character, and then find a quote in which the character describes himself/herself. Be sure

to include the page number. Then in your own words, fill in what you think the character’s main motivation is as evident so far in the story.

Character Guy Montag Page #

Another Character’s Description

Description of Himself

Motivation

Character Mildred Montag Page #

Another Character’s Description

Description of Herself

Motivation

Character Beatty Page #

Another Character’s Description

Description of Himself

Motivation

Character The Mechanical Hound Page #

Another Character’s Description

Motivation

Character Clarisse McClellan Page #

Another Character’s Description

Description of Herself

Motivation

“Barter” By Sara Teasdale Life has loveliness to sell,

All beautiful and splendid things, Blue waves whitened on a cliff,

Soaring fire that sways and sings, And children’s faces looking up Holding wonder like a cup Life has loveliness to sell,

Music like a curve of gold, Scent of pine trees in the rain,

Eyes that love you, arms that hold, And for your spirit’s still delight, Holy thoughts that start the night. Spend all you have for loveliness,

But it and never count the cost; For one white singing hour of peace

Count many a year of strife well lost, And for a breath of ecstasy Give all you have been, or could be. How does Teasdale use words and phrases with figurative and connotative meanings to develop meaning and convey a theme of “Barter”? Title Paraphrase Connotation Attitude/Tone Shifts Title Again

“The Great Imagination Heist” by Reynolds Price

The statistics are famous and unnerving. Most high-school graduates have spent more time watching television than they’ve spent in school. That blight has been overtaking us for fifty years, but it’s only in the past two decades that I’ve begun to notice its greatest damage to us–the death of personal imagination. In all the millennia before humans began to read, our imaginations were formed from first-hand experiences of the wide external world and especially from the endless flow of stories passed down in cultures founded on face-to-face narrative conversation. Most of those cultures were succeeded by widespread literacy; and the ensuing torrent of printed information, recordings, and films grew large in making our individual imaginations.

Among the blessings of my past, I’m especially grateful for that fact that I was twenty years old before my parents brought television into our home. Till then, I’d only glimpsed it in store windows and had never missed its brand of time-killing. Like millions in my generation, I was hardly unique in having spent hundreds of childhood hours reading a mountain of books and seeing one or two movies in a public theatre each week. Like our ancient ancestors, too, I had the big gift of a family who were steady sources of gripping and delightful stories told at every encounter.

I, and my lucky contemporaries then, had our imaginations fed by an external world, yet a world of nuance and suggestion that was intimately related to our early backgrounds of family and friends. That feeding left us free to remake those stories in accordance with our growing secret needs and natures. Only the movies offered us images and plots that tried to hypnotize us–to channel our fantasies in one direction only–but two to four hours of movies per week were hardly tyrannical.

To say that is not to claim that people who matured before the triumph of TV possessed imaginations that were inevitably free, rich, and healthy. It is to claim that an alarming number of younger Americans have had the early shoots of a personal fantasy life blighted by a dictatorial daylong TV exposure. And not merely blighted–many young Americans have had their native fantasy life removed and replaced by the imaginations of the producers of American television and video games.

My gauge for measuring this massive imagination heist has been my experience with college students in the composition classes I’ve taught through four decades. When I remove the lenses of nostalgia, I won’t claim that the quality of most undergraduate narrative prose in the 1950s was brilliant, but I’m convinced that the imaginations of my present students have suffered badly. When you asked a student of the fifties to write a story, he or she was likely to give you an account that involved personal feeling–a scene from Grandmother’s funeral, the death of a pet, the rupture of a marriage, and often family happiness.

Ask the same of students now, and you’re likely to get a story that amounts to an airless synopsis of a made-for-TV movie–a stereotypical situation of violence or outlandish adventure that races superficially along, then resolves in emotionless triumph for the student’s favorite character. Instead of a human narration, you get a commercially controlled and commercially intended product. Sit still; buy this. How bad is that? Awful–for our public and private safety as well as for most of the arts.

What can we do about it? Short of destroying all television sets, computer screens and video games, I’d suggest at least one countervailing therapy: good reading, vast quantities of active or passive reading–and reading which is, in part, guided by a child’s caretakers. No other available resource has such a record of benign influence on maturation. Give every child you cherish good books–human stories–at every conceivable opportunity. If they fail to read them, offer bribes–or whatever other legal means–to help them grow their own imaginations in the slow solitude and silence that makes for general sanity.

Determine the tone of “The Great Imagination Heist” and Beatty’s speech to Montag. How does Price develop his central idea and connections between claims,

examples, sentences, and paragraphs.

To give you a comprehensive understanding of all aspects of the novel, answer the following questions on loose-leaf. Your answer must be a complete sentence that restates each question. These answers will be the notes from which you will study for quizzes and tests. They will also provide you with textual evidence for activities throughout the reading of the novel. Answer each question completely. 1. In the beginning of Part Two, Montag remembers Clarisse. Why do the two books remind him of Clarisse? 2. What is waiting outside Montag’s door? Why? 3. Describe the flashback of Montag meeting the old man. Why does he remember this incident? Why do you think he save the old man’s name for so long? 4. Explain Montag’s memory of the sand dune. Why do you think the title of this part of the novel is named “The Sieve and the Sand”? 5. What is the significance of Montag’s trip on the underground train? What commercial interrupts his thoughts? Why does it appear as if he argues with the commercial? What aspect of society is he arguing against? 6. Why does Montag tell Faber that his wife is “dying”? 7. How is Christ portrayed in society? Why? 8. Faber lists three things that are missing from society. What are they? 9. According to Faber, why are books hated and feared? 10. What is Montag and Faber’s “plan”? 11. Why does Montag say “Can you help me in any way tonight, with the Fire Captain? I need an umbrella to keep off the rain. I’m so damned afraid I’ll drown if he gets me again.”? What do you think he means? 12. What did Faber invent? Why? 13. Who are Mrs. Phelps and Mrs. Bowles? How do the women react after Montag reads the poem?

14. How does this society feel about children and motherhood? 15. Montag reads a poem called “Dover Beach”. How do the women react after Montag reads the poem? 16. Why do you think Montag feels that he has to wash his hands twice while the firemen play poker? 17. Why do you think Beatty means when he says “the sheep returns to the fold”? 18. What do you think Beatty keeps quoting texts from which he has read? 19. Where do the firemen go at the end of this section? 20. Why do you think the firemen are suddenly called?

Vocabulary Part Two: The Sieve and the Sand 1. Agony 2. Beatific 3. Cadenced 4. Chaff 5. Consoling 6. Contemptable 7. Cowardice 8. Discourse 9. Dispersing 10. Diverted 11. Dune 12. Dwindled 13. Enameled

14. ferrets 15. filigree 16. gibbering 17. gnat 18. honed 19. hysterical 20. incense 21. insidious 22. intuitively 23. invigorated 24. latrine 25. mediocre

26. moor 27. parried 28. perfunctorily 29. phosphorescent 30. probing 31. profusion 32. rebut 33. strewn 34. suffused 35. teem

Figurative Language- Part II

Directions: Read each quote from Part II. Look at the underlined figure of speech in the sentence, then decide what type of figure of speech is being used. Finally analyze the comparison being made, the object being personified, or the image being created by explaining the meaning of the figure of speech.

1. “‘Each page becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh? Light the third page from the second and so on, chain smoking, chapter by chapter’ … There sat Beatty,

perspiring gently, the floor littered with swarms of black moths that had died in a single storm.”

2. “She was beginning to shriek now, sitting there like a wax doll melting in its own heat.”

3. “There were people on the suction train but he held the book in his hands and the silly thought came to him, if you read fast and read all, maybe some of the sand

will stay in the sieve.”

4. “The train radio vomited upon Montag, in retaliation, a great tonload of music made of tin, copper, silver, chromium, and brass.”

5. “The night I kicked the pill bottle in the dark, like kicking a buried man.”

6. “[Christ is] a regular peppermint stick now, all sugar-crystal and saccharine when he isn’t making veiled references to certain commercial products that every

worshipper absolutely needs.”

7. “And faster he poured [the sand], the faster it sifted through with a hot whispering.”

8. “‘Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing

you were headed for shore.’”

9. “The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe into one garment for us.”

10. “Denham’s Denham’s Denham’s, ‘the train hissed like a snake.” 11. “Montag, go home. Go to bed. Why waste your final hours racing about your cage denying you’re a squirrel?”

“Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

1 The sea is calm tonight, 2 The tide is full, the moon lies fair 3 Upon the straits; on the French coast the light 4 Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, 5 Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. 6 Come to the window, sweet is the night air! 7 Only, from the long line of spray 8 Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, 9 Listen! you hear the grating roar 10 Of pebbles which the waves drew back, and fling, 11 At their return, up the high strand, 12 Begin, and cease, and then again begin, 13 With tremulous cadence slow, and bring 14 The eternal note of sadness in. 15 Sophocles long ago 16 Heard it on the Agean, and it brought 17 Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow 18 Of human misery; we 19 Find also in the sound a thought, 20 Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

Arnold’s poem explores the emptiness of the self-indulgent Victorian Era in England: a time when machines and industry took the place of manual labor, Darwinism and science questioned religious views, and epidemics of cholera and typhus killed thousands. The fact that Montag reads this particular poem to the women in Fahrenheit 451 is no accident. Bradbury parallels the problems of the Victorian Era to those of the society of Fahrenheit 451; that the women don’t understand the poem at all even further exemplifies the poem’s significance. 1. Line by line paraphrase and analyze the poem on loose-leaf. 2. Circle the words in which alliteration is used. 3. Which of the following BEST describes the author’s tone in this poem? A. sympathetic B. disenchanted C. apathetic D. optimistic

21 The Sea of Faith 22 Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore 23 Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. 24 But now I only hear 25 Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar 26 Retreating, to the breath 27 Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear 28 And naked shingles of the world

29 Ah, love, let us be true 30 To one another! for the world, which seems 31 To lie before us like a land of dreams, 32 So various, so beautiful, so new, 33 Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, 34 Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; 35 And we are here as on a darkling plain 36 Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, 37 Where ignorant armies clash by night.

4. Which of the following lines contains a simile? A. 2 B. 9 C. 23 D. 33 5. To what is Arnold MOST likely referring with the phrase “Sea of Faith”? A. art B. poetry C. science D. religion 6. Which of the following best describes the poem’s theme? A. Man is far more powerful than nature B. Nature’s power can be felt in our souls C. Faith is disappearing, like the retreat of the waves on a beach D. Like a wave covering the sand, time disappears forever 7. I asked you why Montag reads this poem. I’m really asking why Bradbury chose this poem of all the poems in all the world. What can we learn about Montag and his situation by reading “Dover Beach”? Reference specific lines from the poem and the text in your response. 8. Who is the speaker of the poem “Dover Beach”? (Hint: What perspective is it written in?) To whom is the poet speaking? 9. How does Montag compare the speaker of the poem? CHARACTER MOTIVATION 10. Compare the imagery in the poem to the imagery in the above quote. What does this suggest about both oceans? (Hint: metaphor) 11. How does the tone of the poem create the scene in the novel? Give specific examples from the poem and connect them to the characters and plot in Fahrenheit 451. 12. What message does the poet try to convey to the reader about the theme? 13. How does this theme relate to Bradbury’s warnings about the possible future in the novel?

Vocabulary Part Three: Burning Bright 1. Bombardments 2. Convolutions 3. Desolation 4. Doused 5. Erected 6. Fragmentary 7. Gingerly 8. Gout 9. Grotesque 10. Incessantly 11. Incomprehensible 12. Incriminate 13. Insomnia

14. juggernaut 15. liquefaction 16. luminous 17. moat 18. pedants 19. penance 20. phantom 21. plume 22. prattled 23. procaine 24. processions 25. pyre

26. ricocheted 27. scythe

28. séance 29. sloth 30. squanders

“You Have Insulted Me: A Letter” By Kurt Vonnegut In October of 1973, Bruce Severy — a 26-year-old English teacher at Drake High School, North Dakota — decided to use Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, as a teaching aid in his classroom. The next month, on November 7th, the head of the school board, Charles McCarthy, demanded that all 32 copies be burned in the school's furnace as a result of its "obscene language." Other books soon met with the same fate. On the 16th of November, Kurt Vonnegut sent McCarthy the following letter. He didn't receive a reply. ---------------------------------------- November 16, 1973 Dear Mr. McCarthy:

I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school.

Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am.

I want you to know, too, that my publisher and I have done absolutely nothing to exploit the disgusting news from Drake. We are not clapping each other on the back, crowing about all the books we will sell because of the news. We have declined to go on television, have written no fiery letters to editorial pages, have granted no lengthy interviews. We are angered and sickened and saddened. And no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the only copy in your hands. It is a strictly private letter from me to the people of Drake, who have done so much to damage my reputation in the eyes of their children and then in the eyes of the world. Do you have the courage and ordinary decency to show this letter to the people, or will it, too, be consigned to the fires of your furnace?

I gather from what I read in the papers and hear on television that you imagine me, and some other writers, too, as being sort of ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people. I am in fact a large, strong person, fifty-one years old, who did a lot of farm work as a boy, who is good with tools. I have raised six children, three my own and three adopted. They have all turned out well. Two of them are farmers. I am a combat infantry veteran from World War II, and hold a Purple Heart. I have earned whatever I own by hard work. I have never been arrested or sued for anything. I am so much trusted with young people and by young people that I have served on the faculties of the University of Iowa, Harvard, and the City College of New York. Every year I receive at least a dozen invitations to be commencement speaker at colleges and high schools. My books are probably more widely used in schools than those of any other living American fiction writer.

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.

After I have said all this, I am sure you are still ready to respond, in effect, “Yes, yes–but it still remains our right and our responsibility to decide what books our children are going to be made to read in our community.” This is surely so. But it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call you that.

I read in the newspaper that your community is mystified by the outcry from all over the country about what you have done. Well, you have discovered that Drake is a part of American civilization, and your fellow Americans can’t stand it that you have behaved in such an uncivilized way. Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.

If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the education of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books–books you hadn’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive.

Again: you have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real. Kurt Vonnegut

"Burning a Book," by William Stafford Protecting each other, right in the center a few pages glow a long time. The cover goes first, then outer leaves curling away, then spine and a scattering. Truth, brittle and faint, burns easily, its fire as hot as the fire lies make--- flame doesn't care. You can usually find a few charred words in the ashes. And some books ought to burn, trying for character but just faking it. More disturbing than book ashes are whole libraries that no one got around to writing----desolate towns, miles of unthought in cities, and the terrorized countryside where wild dogs own anything that moves. If a book isn't written, no one needs to burn it---- ignorance can dance in the absence of fire. So I've burned books. And there are many I haven't even written, and nobody h

To give you a comprehensive understanding of all aspects of the novel, answer the following questions on loose-leaf. Your answer must be a complete sentence that restates each question. These answers will be the notes from which you will study for quizzes and tests. They will also provide you with textual evidence for activities throughout the reading of the novel. Answer each question completely. 1. Who called the fire alarm about Montag? 2. Explain Beatty’s feelings about the purpose of fire. Do you agree? Why or why not? 3. What objects does Montag burn first? Why do you think he chooses to begin with these particular items? 4. How does Beatty discover Montag’s green bullet? 5. What happens to Beatty? How? What does Montag realize when running from the scene? Do you think Montag is right? Why or why not? 6. What keeps holding Montag back as he tries to run from the scene of the fire? 7. To where is Montag instinctively running? Why? 8. What does Montag hear coming from the Seashell radio? 9. Who tries to run Montag over? What does this reveal about this society? 10. Why does Montag hide the books in Mrs. Black’s house? 11. To where does Faber tell Montag to go? Why? Where do Faber and Montag agree to meet again? 12. Why does Montag want Faber to turn on the air conditioning and sprinklers? 13. What does Bradbury mean when he says, “Twenty million Montags running, soon, if the cameras caught him”? 14. What community effort do the Parlor Walls incite? 15. Why does Montag douse himself with liquor? 16. What does Bradbury mean by the following “… going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for dinner”?

17. What does Montag believe is a sign that the world welcomes him now? 18. How does Montag view fire differently now? 19. Why does the search for Montag veer inland, away from the river? 20. How do the police finally catch “Montag”? 21. What does Granger mean by “Welcome back from the dead”? 22. According to Granger, why do they still burn books? 23. What is the most important rule everyone must remember, according to Granger? 24. What do Granger and the others hope will happen after the war? 25. Why does Granger tell Montag about his grandfather? What point is Granger trying to make about Millie? 26. What does the quote “I hate the Roman named Status Quo” mean? 27. Describe Millie’s last moments of life, as Montag imagines them. 28. Granger compares society to the Phoenix. Why does he make this comparison? According to Granger and his analogy, what is the only way society will ever change? 29. Where are the people headed at the end of the book? Why do you think they are going there?

“Reading Books Is Fundamental” JAN. 22,

2014 Charles M. Blow The first thing I can remember buying for

myself, aside from candy, of course, was not a toy. It

was a book.

It was a religious picture book about Job

from the Bible, bought at Kmart.

It was on one of the rare occasions when my

mother had enough money to give my brothers and

me each a few dollars so that we could buy whatever

we wanted.

We all made a beeline for the toy aisle, but

that path led through the section of greeting cards and

books. As I raced past the children’s books, they

stopped me. Books to me were things most special.

Magical. Ideas eternalized.

Books were the things my brothers brought

home from school before I was old enough to attend,

the things that engrossed them late into the night as

they did their homework. They were the things my

mother brought home from her evening classes,

which she attended after work, to earn her degree and

teaching certificate.

Books, to me, were powerful and

transformational.

I read about girls who were brave, girls who

sleuthed, Girls of the Limberlost… horses that raced

like the wind, Jane and Michael Banks, Little Women

and Little Princes and Swiss Families, red ferns and

yellow dogs, Borrowers, Hobbits and Cheshire cats.

So there, in the greeting card section of the

store, I flipped through children’s books until I found

the one that I wanted, the one about Job. I thought the

book fascinating in part because it was a tale of

hardship, to which I could closely relate, and in part

because it contained the first drawing I’d even seen

of God, who in those pages was a white man with a

white beard and a long robe that looked like one of

my mother’s nightgowns.

I picked up the book, held it close to my

chest and walked proudly to the checkout. I never

made it to the toy aisle.

That was the beginning of a lifelong journey

in which books would shape and change me, making

me who I was to become.

We couldn’t afford many books. We had a

small collection. They were kept on a homemade,

rough-hewn bookcase about three feet tall with three

shelves. One shelf held the encyclopedia, a gift from

our uncle, books that provided my brothers and me a

chance to see the world without leaving home.

The other shelves held a hodgepodge of

books, most of which were giveaways my mother

picked when school librarians thinned their

collections at the end of the year. I read what we had

and cherished the days that our class at school was

allowed to go to the library — a space I approached

the way most people approach religious buildings —

and the days when the bookmobile came to our

school from the regional library.

It is no exaggeration to say that those books

saved me: from a life of poverty, stress, depression

and isolation.

James Baldwin, one of the authors who most

spoke to my spirit, once put it this way:

“You think your pain and your heartbreak

are unprecedented in the history of the world, but

then you read. It was books that taught me that the

things that tormented me the most were the very

things that connected me with all the people who

were alive, who had ever been alive.”

Hello, Thank you for sharing your personal

experience! As a reading specialist and a woman who

loves to read, I deeply appreciate that you...

What a lovely article. Going to the library

was a favorite childhood activity. To this day I enjoy

going to our library to collect books,...

When I was little, we got most of our books

at the library. My own children got most of their

books at the library. The Phoenix public...

That is the inimitable power of literature, to

give context and meaning to the trials and triumphs

of living. That is why it was particularly distressing

that The Atlantic’s Jordan Weissmann pointed out

Tuesday that:

“The Pew Research Center reported last

week that nearly a quarter of American adults had not

read a single book in the past year. As in, they hadn’t

cracked a paperback, fired up a Kindle, or even hit

play on an audio book while in the car. The number

of non-book-readers has nearly tripled since 1978.”

The details of the Pew report are quite

interesting and somewhat counterintuitive. Among

American adults, women were more likely to have

read at least one book in the last 12 months than men.

Blacks were more likely to have read a book than

whites or Hispanics. People aged 18-29 were more

likely to have read a book than those in any other age

group. And there was little difference in readership

among urban, suburban and rural population.

I understand that we are now inundated with

information, and people’s reading habits have

become fragmented to some degree by bite-size

nuggets of text messages and social media, and that

takes up much of the time that could otherwise be

devoted to long-form reading. I get it. And I don’t

take a troglodytic view of social media. I participate

and enjoy it.

But reading texts is not the same as reading

a text.

There is no intellectual equivalent to

allowing oneself the time and space to get lost in

another person’s mind, because in so doing we find

ourselves.

Take it from me, the little boy walking to the

Kmart checkout with the picture book pressed to his

chest.

“The Country That Stopped Reading” By DAVID TOSCANA EARLIER this week, I spotted, among the job listings in the newspaper Reforma, an ad from a restaurant in Mexico City looking to hire dishwashers. The requirement: a secondary school

diploma. Years ago, school was not for everyone. Classrooms were places for discipline, study. Teachers were respected figures. Parents actually gave them permission to punish their children by

slapping them or tugging their ears. But at least in those days, schools aimed to offer a more dignified life. Nowadays more children attend school than ever before, but they learn much less. They learn almost nothing. The proportion of the Mexican population that is literate is going up, but in

absolute numbers, there are more illiterate people in Mexico now than there were 12 years ago. Even if baseline literacy, the ability to read a street sign or news bulletin, is rising, the practice of reading an actual book is not. Once a reasonably well-educated country, Mexico took the penultimate spot, out of 108 countries, in a Unesco assessment of reading habits a few years ago.

One cannot help but ask the Mexican educational system, “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?”

Despite recent gains in industrial development and increasing numbers of engineering graduates, Mexico is floundering socially, politically and economically because so many of its citizens do not read. Upon taking office in December, our new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, immediately announced a program to improve education. This is typical. All presidents do this upon taking office.

The first step in his plan to improve education? Put the leader of the teachers’ union, Elba Esther Gordillo, in jail — which he did last week. Ms. Gordillo, who has led the 1.5 million-member union for 23 years, is suspected of embezzling about $200 million.

She ought to be behind bars, but education reform with a focus on teachers instead of students is nothing new. For many years now, the job of the education secretary has been not to educate Mexicans but to deal with the teachers and their labor issues. Nobody in Mexico organizes as many strikes as the teachers’ union. And, sadly, many teachers, who often buy or inherit their jobs, are lacking in education themselves.

During a strike in 2008 in Oaxaca, I remember walking through the temporary campground in search of a teacher reading a book. Among tens of thousands, I found not one. I did find people listening to disco-decibel music, watching television, playing cards or dominoes, vegetating. I saw some gossip magazines, too.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised by the response when I spoke at a recent event for promoting reading for an audience of 300 or so 14- and 15-year-olds. “Who likes to read?” I asked. Only one hand went up in the auditorium. I picked out five of the ignorant majority and asked them to tell me why they didn’t like reading. The result was predictable: they stuttered, grumbled, grew impatient. None was able to articulate a sentence, express an idea.

Frustrated, I told the audience to just leave the auditorium and go look for a book to read. One of their teachers walked up to me, very concerned. “We still have 40 minutes left,” he said. He asked the kids to sit down again, and began to tell them a fable about a plant that couldn’t decide if it wanted to be a flower or a head of cabbage.

“Sir,” I whispered, “that story is for kindergartners.” In 2002, President Vicente Fox began a national reading plan; he chose as a spokesman Jorge Campos, a popular soccer player, ordered millions of books printed and built an immense

library. Unfortunately, teachers were not properly trained and children were not given time for reading in school. The plan focused on the book instead of the reader. I have seen warehouses filled with hundreds of thousands of forgotten books, intended for schools and libraries, simply waiting for the dust and humidity to render them garbage.

A few years back, I spoke with the education secretary of my home state, Nuevo León, about reading in schools. He looked at me, not understanding what I wanted. “In school, children are taught to read,” he said. “Yes,” I replied, “but they don’t read.” I explained the difference between knowing how to read and actually reading, between deciphering street signs and accessing the literary canon. He wondered what the point of the students’ reading “Don Quixote” was. He said we needed to teach them to read the newspaper.

When my daughter was 15, her literature teacher banished all fiction from her classroom. “We’re going to read history and biology textbooks,” she said, “because that way you’ll read and learn at the same time.” In our schools, children are being taught what is easy to teach rather than what they need to learn. It is for this reason that in Mexico — and many other countries — the humanities have been pushed aside.

We have turned schools into factories that churn out employees. With no intellectual challenges, students can advance from one level to the next as long as they attend class and surrender to their teachers. In this light it is natural that in secondary school we are training chauffeurs, waiters and dishwashers.

This is not just about better funding. Mexico spends more than 5 percent of its gross domestic product on education — about the same percentage as the United States. And it’s not about pedagogical theories and new techniques that look for shortcuts. The educational machine does not need fine-tuning; it needs a complete change of direction. It needs to make students read, read and read.

But perhaps the Mexican government is not ready for its people to be truly educated. We know that books give people ambitions, expectations, a sense of dignity. If tomorrow we were to wake up as educated as the Finnish people, the streets would be filled with indignant citizens and our frightened government would be asking itself where these people got more than a dishwasher’s training.

David Toscana is the author of the novel “The Last Reader.” This essay was translated by Kristina Cordero from the Spanish.

“The Science of Storytelling: Why Telling Story is the Most Powerful Way to Activate Our Brains” By Leo Widrich A good story can make or break a presentation, article, or conversation. But why is that? When Buffer co-founder Leo Widrich started to market his

product through stories instead of benefits and bullet points, sign-ups went through the roof. Here he shares the science of why storytelling is so uniquely powerful.

In 1748, the British politician and aristocrat John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, spent a lot of his free time playing cards. He greatly enjoyed eating a snack while still keeping one hand free for the cards. So he came up with the idea to eat beef between slices of toast, which would allow him to finally eat and play cards at the same time. Eating his newly invented "sandwich," the name for two slices of bread with meat in between, became one of the most popular meal inventions in the western world.

What's interesting about this is that you are very likely to never forget the story of who invented the sandwich ever again. Or at least, much less likely to do so, if it would have been presented to us in bullet points or other purely information-based form.

For over 27,000 years, since the first cave paintings were discovered, telling stories has been one of our most fundamental communication methods. Recently a good friend of mine gave me an introduction to the power of storytelling, and I wanted to learn more. Here is the science around storytelling and how we can use it to make better decisions every day: Our brain on stories: How our brains become more active when we tell stories We all enjoy a good story, whether it's a novel, a movie, or simply something one of our friends is explaining to us. But why do we feel so much more

engaged when we hear a narrative about events? It's in fact quite simple. If we listen to a PowerPoint presentation with boring bullet points, a certain part in the brain gets activated. Scientists call this

Broca's area and Wernicke's area. Overall, it hits our language processing parts in the brain, where we decode words into meaning. And that's it, nothing else happens.

When we are being told a story, things change dramatically. Not only are the language processing parts in our brain activated, but any other area in our brain that we would use when experiencing the events of the story are too.

If someone tells us about how delicious certain foods were, our sensory cortex lights up. If it's about motion, our motor cortex gets active: "Metaphors like "The singer had a velvet voice" and "He had leathery hands" roused the sensory cortex. […] Then, the brains of participants were scanned as they read sentences like "John grasped the object" and "Pablo kicked the ball." The scans revealed activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body's movements."

A story can put your whole brain to work. And yet, it gets better: When we tell stories to others that have really helped us shape our thinking and way of life, we can have the same effect on them too. The brains of the

person telling a story and listening to it can synchronize, says Uri Hasson from Princeton: "When the woman spoke English, the volunteers understood her story, and their brains synchronized. When she had activity in her insula, an emotional

brain region, the listeners did too. When her frontal cortex lit up, so did theirs. By simply telling a story, the woman could plant ideas, thoughts and emotions into the listeners' brains."

Anything you've experienced, you can get others to experience the same. Or at least, get their brain areas that you've activated that way, active too:

Evolution has wired our brains for storytelling—how to make use of it Now all this is interesting. We know that we can activate our brains better if we listen to stories. The still unanswered question is: Why is that? Why does

the format of a story, where events unfold one after the other, have such a profound impact on our learning? The simple answer is this: We are wired that way. A story, if broken down into the simplest form, is a connection of cause and effect. And that is

exactly how we think. We think in narratives all day long, no matter if it is about buying groceries, whether we think about work or our spouse at home. We make up (short) stories in our heads for every action and conversation. In fact, Jeremy Hsu found [that] "personal stories and gossip make up 65% of our conversations."

Now, whenever we hear a story, we want to relate it to one of our existing experiences. That's why metaphors work so well with us. While we are busy searching for a similar experience in our brains, we activate a part called insula, which helps us relate to that same experience of pain, joy, or disgust.

The following graphic probably describes it best:

In a great experiment, John Bargh at Yale found the following:

"Volunteers would meet one of the experimenters, believing that they would be starting the experiment shortly. In reality, the experiment began when the experimenter, seemingly struggling with an armful of folders, asks the volunteer to briefly hold their coffee. As the key experimental manipulation, the coffee was either hot or iced. Subjects then read a description of some individual, and those who had held the warmer cup tended to rate the individual as having a warmer personality, with no change in ratings of other attributes." We link up metaphors and literal happenings automatically. Everything in our brain is looking for the cause and effect relationship of something we've previously experienced.

Let's dig into some hands on tips to make use of it: Exchange giving suggestions for telling stories Do you know the feeling when a good friend tells you a story and then two weeks later, you mention the same story to him, as if it was your idea? This is

totally normal and at the same time, one of the most powerful ways to get people on board with your ideas and thoughts. According to Uri Hasson from Princeton, a story is the only way to activate parts in the brain so that a listener turns the story into their own idea and experience. The next time you struggle with getting people on board with your projects and ideas, simply tell them a story, where the outcome is that doing what you had in mind is the best thing to do. According to Princeton researcher Hasson, storytelling is the only way to plant ideas into other people's minds.

Write more persuasively—bring in stories from yourself or an expert This is something that took me a long time to understand. If you start out writing, it's only natural to think "I don't have a lot of experience with this, how

can I make my post believable if I use personal stories?" The best way to get around this is by simply exchanging stories with those of experts. When this blog used to be a social media blog, I would ask for quotes from the top folks in the industry or simply find great passages they had written online. It's a great way to add credibility and at the same time, tell a story.

The simple story is more successful than the complicated one When we think of stories, it is often easy to convince ourselves that they have to be complex and detailed to be interesting. The truth is however, that

the simpler a story, the more likely it will stick. Using simple language as well as low complexity is the best way to activate the brain regions that make us truly relate to the happenings of a story. This is a similar reason why multitasking is so hard for us. Try for example to reduce the number of adjectives or complicated nouns in a presentation or article and exchange them with more simple, yet heartfelt language.

Quick last fact: Our brain learns to ignore certain overused words and phrases that used to make stories awesome. Scientists, in the midst of researching the topic of storytelling have also discovered, that certain words and phrases have lost all storytelling power:

"Some scientists have contended that figures of speech like "a rough day" are so familiar that they are treated simply as words and no more." This means, that the frontal cortex—the area of your brain responsible to experience emotions—can't be activated with these phrases. It's something

that might be worth remembering when crafting your next story. Leo Widrich is the co-founder of Buffer, a smarter way to share on Twitter and Facebook. Leo writes more posts on efficiency and customer happiness over on the Buffer blog. Hit him up on Twitter @LeoWid anytime; he is a super nice guy. “Video Games and the Future of Storytelling” By Salman Rushdie (Big Think) Recorded November 12, 2010 Interviewed by Max Miller Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler

Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay in 1947, just months before the Partition of British India. His father Ahmed was a businessman and his mother Negin was a teacher. He grew up loving the escape literature and film offered, and he wrote his first story when he was ten years old. He encountered some of his earliest influences at a young age, including The Wizard of Oz, Superman comics, and Bollywood movies.

He left India at the age of fourteen to attend Rugby School in England, while his family left India for Pakistan. Of his time at Rugby, he says: “I had three things wrong, I was foreign, I was clever and I was bad at games, and it seemed to me that I could have made any two of those mistakes and I’d have been alright. . . . If I’d been any two of those things I’d have got away with it — three was unforgivable.” He then studied history at King’s College, Cambridge, and after graduation, he earned a living working in advertising while writing his first novel Grimus.

The positive reception his second novel, Midnight’s Children, received allowed Rushdie to become a full-time writer, crafting vivid novels about life in and out of modern India and Pakistan. The success of Midnight’s Children made Rushdie the voice of Indians writing in England, promoting fellow writers and editing the volume Indian Writing in English.

With the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988, Rushdie became the target of a fatwa, or a religious edict, supported by Iran’s religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini. Since the fatwa called for his death, Rushdie went into hiding in February 1989. Many bookstores in the U.K. and the United States received threats regarding his book. The Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses was stabbed to death, and both the Italian translator and the Norwegian publisher were attacked but survived. Protected by the Special Branch, Rushdie moved from one secure house to another, communicating this his friends and family via secure telephone line and fax. In 1999, the fatwa was finally lifted, and Rushdie was able to appear in public again.

In 2005, Salman Rushdie joined the faculty of Emory University as Distinguished Writer in Residence. He also placed his archive at Emory’s Woodruff Library, which opened to the public in Spring 2010. His memoir Joseph Anton: A Memoir came out in 2012. ------------------------------------------------------------ Question: How are video games influencing linear forms of storytelling? Salman Rushdie: That's a very interesting question and I think the answer is we don’t yet know. But I do think that I mean for instance the game that my 13 year-old boy Milan and his friends all seem to be playing right now is this wild west game called "Red Dead Redemption" and one of the things looking over… I mean I don’t even pretend to understand what is going on really, but one of the things that is interesting about it to me is the much looser structure of the game and the much greater agency that the player has to choose how he will explore and inhabit the world that is provided for you. He doesn’t... in fact, doesn’t really have to follow the main narrative line of the game at all for long periods of time. There is all kinds of excursions and digressions that you can choose to go on and find many stories to participate in instead of the big story, the macro story. I think that really interests me as a storyteller because I've always thought that one of the things that the Internet and the gaming world permits as a narrative technique is to not tell the story from beginning to end—to tell stories sideways, to give alternative possibilities that the reader can, in a way, choose between. I've always thought of the Borges story, “The Garden of Forking Paths” as kind of model of this, that... “The Garden of Forking Paths” is a story, is a book whose author has gone mad because what he has tried to do is to offer every possible variation of every moment. So, boy meets girl. They fall in love/they don’t fall in love. That is the first fork and he wants to tell both those stories and then every variation of every moment down both those lines and of course it’s like nuclear fission. The possibilities explode into millions and billions of possibilities and it’s impossible to write that book. But it seems to me that in some ways the Internet is the garden of forking paths where you can have myriad variant possibilities offered and at the same level of authority, if you like. So I mean I think that's one of the ways in which storytelling could move. And these games, these more free-form games in which the player can make choices about what the game is going to be, become a kind of gaming equivalent of that narrative possibility. Question: Do you worry that video games are eroding people’s ability to read novels? Salman Rushdie: I think there are legitimate concerns there and I worry also that there is a dumbing down factor. These games... I mean they sometimes require lateral thinking. They sometimes require quite skilled hand-eye coordination and so on. But they’re not in any sense intelligent in the way that you want your children to develop intelligence to make the mind not just supple, but actually informed. And of course if people spend too much time on this stuff then it militates against that. One of the things about "Luka and the Fire of Life," which is basically pro... Rashid Luka’s father is basically fond of the video game and defends video games to Luka’s mother, who is much more skeptical of their value. But there is a bit of the book which also suggests that the problem may be that this way of inhabiting the imagination may do something harmful to our relationship to story, to the way in which human beings have always needed and responded to the art of the story and that is something to be worried about, because I think that there is something about storytelling that is very intrinsic to who we are as human beings. So one of the characters in the book refers to man as the storytelling animal—and so we are. We are the only creatures on the earth who do this, so and we may even I think be hard-wired to do it in the way that we have a language instinct. We may actually have a story instinct and so there is a legitimate concern about a new form which may erode our attachment to the story. What will that do to us as human beings?

Theme Analysis

1. Social Relationships

We should pay full attention to others when interacting with them. This will contribute to their self-growth.

In a relationship, we should try to be equals who support each other and become stronger because of it, and not try to dominate those around us.

Our relationships with others is the foundation of our self-worth. Our sense of self-worth should come from how we contribute to the lives of others, not from the things we selfishly desire.

2. Happiness People find many different ways to

escape from the fact that they are unhappy.

Happiness may in fact be ignorance. It may be better to be unhappy so that we deal with the real problems in life.

We must not confuse entertainment with happiness.

3. Technology Technology can be a convenient solution

for physical problems, but may not solve our emotional and psychological problems.

Technology can be used to help us maintain law and order, but this can also be abused.

Technology can provide entertainment to the masses, but it can also blind people to the beauty of real life.

4. Mass Media The mass media can provide absorbing

entertainment, but this entertainment can prevent people from developing healthy relationships with others.

The mass media can be used as a means of manipulating the opinion of the masses.

The mass media can be an effective means of entertainment, but it can also cause its audience to lose the ability to formulate intelligent thought.

Character Point Evidence Explanation/Commentary

Guy Montag

“It never went away, that smile, it never ever went away, as long as he remembered.”

Observes the world with great curiosity

Because ___ does not occupy her time with mass entertainment, ___ has the time to think about and observe the world around ___. ___ knows about why the billboards need to be stretched, that there’s dew on grass in the morning and that “there’s a man in the moon”. This shows that __ is more interested in the real world and the sensations it offers than the manmade forms of entertainment __ society offers.

Mildred

Montag is traumatized by the suicidal actions of the old lady whose house they were burning and cries when he gets home. Mildred knows this too, because she feels his face with her hand and “he knew that when she pulled her hand away from his face it was wet”. However, she does not try to comfort him; instead, we find her “listening to far people in far places” through her Seashell radio.

Suffers from a deep inner conflict

Despite being a captain of the firemen whose job is to burn books, Beatty has a surprisingly wide knowledge of books and is able to quote a stunning variety of phrases and sentences from them. His ability in “using the very books” Montag wants to read to “rebut” him shows that he is tremendously well-read. Even though he insists that he is disappointed with way books can be “traitors” when they seem to lead people astray, his speech is so rich in literary allusions that we suspect he too has a love of books. This contradiction between what he does for a living and the way he speaks suggests that he may be suffering from a deep inner conflict. This would not be out of the ordinary since he would be maintaining a façade just like Montag’s at the start of the novel, when the latter felt that “it was a pleasure to burn”.

Character Point Evidence Explanation/Commentary

Faber

Montag wants Faber to help him with his plot to frame firemen for possession of books, but Faber asks Montag to “Let the war turn off the 'families'” and that “Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces”. He also advises HOD to “stand back from the centrifuge."

Respects the role that others play in life

We would see “the big ridges” of a person’s thumbprint on clay or other malleable substances after he or she has shaped it by pressing his or her fingers on it. In the same way, Granger’s grandfather has left his mark on Granger’s personality. This shows that Granger sees himself as the product of his grandfather’s influence and does not attribute his ideas and personality simply to himself. He respects the role that others play in shaping and contributing to his life.

Guy Montag

“He felt his body divide itself into a hotness and a coldness, a softness and a hardness, a trembling and a not trembling, the two halves grinding one upon the other.”

Prompts Montag to search for meaning and purpose in his life

Clarisse forces Montag to see the truth he has been hiding away from: the fact that he is in fact very unhappy with his life. A mask is something you wear to hide your identity; in Montag’s case, he has been hiding his unhappiness from himself. Clarisse is the girl who has “run off” with the mask and forced him to see himself truthfully for the first time.

Directions: Cut out the boxes and glue/tape them in its appropriate spot on the chart 1.

Directions: Cut the boxes and glue/tape them in its appropriate spot on chart 2.

We would expect a wife to care about her

husband when he is crying, but Mildred here

shows no concern whatsoever. Instead of

showing concern for someone close to her, she

listens to “far people in far places”. The

repetition of the word “far” emphasizes how the

people she prefers to show interest in bear little

relation to her and highlights her lack of concern

for Montag.

Beatty

“I was doing a terrible thing in using the

very books you clung to, to rebut you on

every hand, on every point! What

traitors books can be!”

Pretends to be happy

“I rarely watch the 'parlour walls' or go

to races or Fun Parks. So I've lots of time

for crazy thoughts, I guess.”

Does not seem concerned about

Montag’s feelings

Smiles normally appear and disappear

according to whether a person is happy

or not. A smile that “never went away”

is something unnatural, and we suspect

that Montag’s smile is an artificial thing

he holds on to so as to appear happy.

Clarisse

“He wore his happiness like a mask and

the girl had run off across the lawn with

the mask and there was no way of going

to knock on her door and ask for it

back.”

Granger

We notice that ______ is fond of abrogating

personal responsibility to external forces

like “the war” and “civilization”; he wants to

think that things can get better without

himself getting involved and running the risk

of being punished. This shows that he is

afraid of becoming implicated and does not

want to take risks.

The pairs of words in this sentence are

opposites and they tell us how Montag

suffers completely contradictory emotions

and feelings. In addition, the word

“grinding” refers to harsh sound produced

when two uneven surfaces rub against each

other and tells us how painful this inner

conflict is for him.

While describing his grandfather’s effect

on his life, _____ tells Montag that “if

you lifted my skull, by God, in the

convolutions of my brain you'd find the

big ridges of his thumbprint”.

Avoids involvement and risk A man divided against himself Clarisse

Significance of Fire- Find Text Evidence Destructive,

irresponsible enjoyment Nurturing, loving Egotism Ephemerality- short

period of time Escapism Rebirth

Technology Haiku by John P. Curtin, 2002

John P. Curtin (1967-2012) was a writing professor at DePaul University. He also led bike tours in Seattle, and on one trip he crashed and broke his neck, leaving him paralyzed. He wrote the following poem using a voice-activated computer program when he was asked to show how poetry can communicate information. As you read, note the speaker’s specific examples of technology and how they compare to one another. Knowledge and tools: Chariot into auto; Stick into shovel. It is as simple As a spoon or as complex As the space shuttle. Once it was the wheel. Now it is the microchip. What will it be next? 1. The speaker describes… A. one object becoming another B. new ideas C. changes in technology D. his belongings 2. At the end of the poem, the speaker wonders… A. if he will get a microchip B. about inventions of the future C. why inventions are needed D. if technology is good or bad 3. Part A: Which of the following best identifies the theme of the poem? A. Technology is helpful and continues to develop B. New inventions do not make things better C. More advanced technology is more important than simple inventions D. We cannot predict the future 4. Part B: Which phrase from the text best supports the answer to Part A?

A. “knowledge and tools” B. “It is as simple/ As a spoon” C. “or as complex/ As the space shuttle” D. “Once it was the wheel/ Now it is the microchip” 5. Which of the following best describes the speaker’s perspective towards technology? A. ungrateful B. positive C. frightened D. overwhelmed 6. How does line 9 contribute to the development of the speaker’s point of view? A. It shows that the speaker is confused by new technology. B. It reveals that the speaker is worried about the future advances in technology C. It emphasizes that the speaker is curious about the future of technology D. It portrays the speaker as a genius inventor 7. How does the use of the haiku structure in the poem contribute to its meaning? 8. What are some examples of “good” technology? What are some examples of “bad” technology? What makes them “good” or “bad”? Should technology be classified as “good or bad”? 9. In the context of this poem, what should the future look like? Will new technology always be better? Cite evidence from the text, as well as other literature, history, and your life experiences in your response.

“The Curse of the Inability to Imagine” by Tania Lombrozo for NPR, 2016

Tania Lombrozo is an associate professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as an affiliate of the Department of Philosophy and a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. In this article, she explores how people often view the past as unsophisticated because they know new technology is yet to come. As you read, consider how our experience with the present impacts our understanding of the past, and how it might influence the way we imagine our future. On June 20, 1840, Samuel Morse1 received a patent for an early version of the electric telegraph. His ideas for transmitting and recording signals helped revolutionize long-distance communication. Fast forward 176 years and you’re likely to be reading this on a

smartphone, in a future Morse couldn’t possibly have imagined. Our long-

distance signals travel through air. They carry photos and videos. A sophisticated toddler can navigate an iPhone, manipulating more bits of

data than a telegraph operator encountered in a lifetime. Q1

But failures of imagination go both ways: not only to the future, but also to the past. How well can most people today imagine the world of the 1840s? Or even a version of their own lives, stripped of modern-day tools for communication? Years ago, I was struck by a statement from writer Isabel Allende in which she discussed her latest book of historical fiction. Speaking to KQED Forum’s Michael Krasny, she said: “People in other times, in earlier times, were not less sophisticated than we are. They were just as we are, with less technology.” Allende was warning against the danger of stripping people of their layers and complexity alongside their cellphones and modern medicines. This is a more subtle failure of imagination than the failure to know what the future

will bring, which is a failure we more readily acknowledge. Q2

In imagining the future, we suffer from a curse of ignorance.2 Morse couldn’t possibly have foreseen the precise course of technological innovation. But in imagining the past, we additionally face a curse of knowledge: We can’t entirely remove the future possibilities that we know are yet to come. This failure can make the experience of living in the past seem more impoverished3 than it was, because our familiar technology isn’t just absent, but missing. (I recently had to explain our rarely-used home phone to my young daughter: “It’s kind of like Skype, only without the video.”) Given the rapid pace of technological innovation, we don’t need to consider Allende’s novel of the 16th century, or Morse’s 19th century existence, to encounter this curse of knowledge — and to appreciate that the past wasn’t populated by simple people living flat lives. For today’s children, today’s adults were those people. We are those people. In a funny video of children responding to rotary phones,4 one child sympathizes with adults: “This [pointing to a rotary phone] was your only

mode of talking to people... I’m sorry.” Another video shows contemporary teenagers disparaging the cellphone technology that inaugurated5 the

century (It’s so big! And there’s no screen! And texting is so slow!). Q3

But we know that people who grew up using rotary phones didn’t experience them as defective6 cellphones. They were simply phones. And the first flip-phones were admired for their slenderness, not rejected for the additional diminution7 they had failed to achieve. This isn’t to deny the possibility of visionaries — people with the creativity and daring to imagine how things could be different. Nor is it to ignore the real advantages and pleasures modern-day technologies can provide. But recognizing our limitations in imagining the past brings an important lesson in humility and in humanity: “They were just as we are, with less technology.” And in most respects that matter, future people will be also — but with

more. Q4

1. Which of the following statements best described how things have changed over time? A. There used to be great technology, but it was hard to use B. Technology is amazing but too costly for most people C. Technology continues to improve and be more widely used D. Life has become too easy for most people 2. Which of the following best describes Allende’s argument? A. People who have today’s technology are more fortunate than people in the past, who didn’t. B. People in the past weren’t any less complex than people today, even though they had less technology. C. Technology plays a central role in shaping society. D. People in the past were far more simple-minded than any people are today. 3. Which of the following best describes the author’s argument? A. People living in the past often falsely appear to be unsophisticated. B. People living in the past often appear to have faced greater challenges. C. People living in the past were eager to learn about the technology that would improve their lives. D. People living in the past were very simplistic because they had such limited access to technology.

4. What is the author’s argument about people in the future? A. They will be unhappy with their technology. B. They will have no way to understand how our generation lives. C. They will be exactly as we are, but with additional technology. D. They will have an easier time fully imagining the past. 5. Which TWO statements best describe the central idea of the argument?

A. People are always searching for ways to improve their technology. B. It is easier to imagine the technology of the future than the

technology of the past. C. People in the past were no less sophisticated than people today. D. It is important to recognize our inability to fully imagine the past. E. No matter how quickly technology advances, it doesn’t really change anything. F. As technology advances, it will be easier to imagine the past.

6. “It’s kind of like Skype, only without the video” (Paragraph 6). How does the quoted passage contribute to the development of ideas in the text?

A. It illustrates how limited the technology of the past was. B It demonstrates how we tend to think of past technology as missing something. C. It demonstrates how hard it is for people in the past to imagine future technology. D. It explains how much more connected today’s world is.

7. PART A: Which statement best captures the author’s purpose in this article?

A. The author wants to provide relatable examples of everyday technology to illustrate how we imagine technology of the past as unsophisticated. B. The author wants to provide relatable examples of everyday technology to illustrate how much more advanced it is than the technology of the past. C. The author wants to demonstrate that people are much more content today with their technology than the people of the past were. D. The author wants to illustrate that in the future, we will still be unsatisfied with our technology.

8. Part B: Which sentence from the article best supports the answer to Part A?

A. “His ideas for transmitting and recording signals helped revolutionize long-distance communication.” (Paragraph 1) B. “Years ago, I was struck by a statement from writer Isabel Allende” (Paragraph 4) C. “But we know that people who grew up using rotary phones didn’t experience them as defective cellphones.” (Paragraph 9) D. “And in most respects that matter, future people will be also — but with more.” (Paragraph 11)

9. Outline the author’s argument over the course of the article, including her central ideas and how she supports them. Cite evidence from the text. 10. Pretend that it’s 100 years from now. Which piece of technology from our era do you think people will think we were foolish to have used? Why do you think they’ll think this? What are the costs and benefits of technology? 11. In the last line of the article, the author reminds readers that, eventually, we will be the ones whom people in the future will imagine when writing about the past. How do you think people in the future will write about your life? 12. In the context of this article, what is the goal of education? Why should we strive to understand the past, present, and future? Cite evidence from this text

“Welcome to the Future” 1. How does the author seem to feel about the future (tone)? 2. How does the author and editors make this article easy for readers to follow (text features)? 3. The author suggests that in the future, we will have “solved problems we have now” and that “new inventions will make our lives more convenient and interesting.” How do the predictions support this idea (text structure)? 4. One theme of this article is that technology makes life easier. You can argue that technology can also have negative aspects. What are some possible negative aspects of the predicted developments in technology? “What May Happen in the Next 100 Years” 1. How would you describe the author’s tone? 2. In the introduction, the author writes, “These prophecies will seem strange, almost impossible.” What evidence, if any, does he offer to make the various predictions seem possible? 3. Though they were written more than a century apart, “Welcome to the Future” and “What May Happen in the Next 100 Years” have the same objective: forecasting how our world will change. Compare and contrast the two authors’ approaches. “What is yet to be is but a guess…” 1. If an alien were to come to Earth and read these three texts, would he conclude that humans are generally pessimistic or optimistic? Why?

IB Summative Assessment

Your goal is to persuade the advantages/disadvantages of the

government having access to personal information and awareness of what you are doing every moment in your

life and how this ties into censorship.

You will be assigned either pro or con.

You need to convince the American people to agree with you.

The challenge involves dealing with opposing viewpoints on government

control (safety vs. freedom).

You will create a speech based on research into how government

involvement affects people’s lives both positively and negatively.

Your work will be judged by the American people agreeing with your

side of the debate.