Scribe for Monday, April 28

Monday, April 28, 2008

We had a sub today, Mrs. Ritzdorf. We also turned in our ticket for the fishbowl of chapters 7-12 and the summary response paper to the movie clips that we originally watched on Friday.

Brooks was the lucky duck who was put in charge of the seminar!

Important points of the Fishbowl
What is the significance of Shakespeare’s quotes in the novel?
-Passion of society leads it down a path of bad thoughts
-Quotes are used as a reference
-Thought of love and death
-From the Tempest (the title) separates the people into specific groups
-Shows its timelessness
-John is the tragic hero who is Huxley’s Romeo
-Bernard is Juliet’s cousin (shows the jealous trait)
-John and Humholdz friendship to Shakespeare’s
Significance of Religion
-Idea of being alone
-p.136 “He discovered Time, Death and God.”
-People don’t have time to reflect or be alone
-Why is time capitalized?
Eternity?
-p. 137 He wanted to know what it was like to be crucified
-Is Huxley using religion as an escape? More everlasting than soma
-Time to yourself
-Bernard and John- notice the need to be alone and see by doing so
They realize what society has become
What is socially acceptable?
-conformity
What do the colors mean?
-Sense of emotion and individuality

p. 148 Hemholdz- follows thoughts to be different
-Bernard is a catalyst for John’s approval of man kind
-Threat makes him change his mind
-Instill Fear
-ASTRAY
-Greater talents
-able to lead people
-creates a new norm
-lead others in a particular way
-one person with talent should be punished so that they
don’t influence others
-Follow Leaders
-A leader becomes a target of those who are threatened
-poses a threat to society
-step up to position with a leader
-Harrison Berger (Ray Bradbury)
-Short story
-Restrain Talents
-Equality
-Prevent a talented person to excel
-A leader doesn’t get rid of all the problems
-Political- Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein
-Better to have one suffer than to have all suffer
Why bring the savage back?
-Selfish
-Bernard is using John to go back into society
-Is John using Bernard to gain a follower?

1939-How many predictions have come true?
1. Cloning (genetic Engineering)
2. Sex (PDA) (sex sells)
3. Drugs
4. Technology (taking over society)

What prevents (if anything) the kind of negative consequence that Huxley foretells?
The Individual


HOMEWORK:
Semester Project!

See you all on Wednesday!

Scribe for Monday, April 28

Monday, April 28, 2008

We had a sub today, Mrs. Ritzdorf. We also turned in our ticket for the fishbowl of chapters 7-12 and the summary response paper to the movie clips that we originally watched on Friday.

Brooks was the lucky duck who was put in charge of the seminar!

Important points of the Fishbowl
What is the significance of Shakespeare’s quotes in the novel?
-Passion of society leads it down a path of bad thoughts
-Quotes are used as a reference
-Thought of love and death
-From the Tempest (the title) separates the people into specific groups
-Shows its timelessness
-John is the tragic hero who is Huxley’s Romeo
-Bernard is Juliet’s cousin (shows the jealous trait)
-John and Humholdz friendship to Shakespeare’s
Significance of Religion
-Idea of being alone
-p.136 “He discovered Time, Death and God.”
-People don’t have time to reflect or be alone
-Why is time capitalized?
Eternity?
-p. 137 He wanted to know what it was like to be crucified
-Is Huxley using religion as an escape? More everlasting than soma
-Time to yourself
-Bernard and John- notice the need to be alone and see by doing so
They realize what society has become
What is socially acceptable?
-conformity
What do the colors mean?
-Sense of emotion and individuality

p. 148 Hemholdz- follows thoughts to be different
-Bernard is a catalyst for John’s approval of man kind
-Threat makes him change his mind
-Instill Fear
-ASTRAY
-Greater talents
-able to lead people
-creates a new norm
-lead others in a particular way
-one person with talent should be punished so that they
don’t influence others
-Follow Leaders
-A leader becomes a target of those who are threatened
-poses a threat to society
-step up to position with a leader
-Harrison Berger (Ray Bradbury)
-Short story
-Restrain Talents
-Equality
-Prevent a talented person to excel
-A leader doesn’t get rid of all the problems
-Political- Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein
-Better to have one suffer than to have all suffer
Why bring the savage back?
-Selfish
-Bernard is using John to go back into society
-Is John using Bernard to gain a follower?

1939-How many predictions have come true?
1. Cloning (genetic Engineering)
2. Sex (PDA) (sex sells)
3. Drugs
4. Technology (taking over society)

What prevents (if anything) the kind of negative consequence that Huxley foretells?
The Individual


HOMEWORK:
Semester Project!

See you all on Wednesday!

Scribe April 25, 2008

Hello class,

H.W. Response paper Ch. 7-12 due monday
Response paper over film due monday

• The response paper is suppose to be an entire page

Structure

• Topic sentence
• Include movies
• Connection to Brave New World
• Motifs
• Explanation
• Conclusion

Mrs. Smith wont be here Monday (doesn't mean we don't have to turn in our response papers, they are still due Monday)

• Socratic seminar Monday
• Feel free to ask questions
  
• 
  

Today we watch V for Vendetta directed by James Mcteigue

• We watched the beginning and end of the movie
  

Summary
In the near future, Britain is ruled by a totalitarian regime, led by the Norsefire party. Evey Hammond, a young woman, is rescued from harassment by state police by a masked vigilante who introduces himself as "V". V then takes Evey to a rooftop location to witness his spectacular destruction of the Old Bailey, . The regime explains the incident to the public as a planned demolition, but this is shown to be a lie when V takes over the state-run British Television Network (BTN) the same day. He broadcasts a message urging the people of Britain to rise up against the oppressive government on November 5 ; one year from that day, when V says he will destroy the House of Parliament.

the next scene we watched
As November the fifth nears, V's various schemes cause chaos in Britain and the population grows more and more intolerant and subversive towards government authority. On the eve of November 5, Evey again visits V, who shows her a subway train that he has filled with explosives in order to destroy Parliament through an explosion in the abandoned London Underground. He delegates the destruction of Parliament to Evey, believing that the ultimate decision was not his to make, but hers. He then leaves to meet Party leader Creedy, who, as part of an earlier agreement, has agreed to bring V the Chancellor in exchange for V's surrender. Creedy kills the Chancellor in front of V, but V does not surrender. He takes a barrage of bullets from a dozen men, and remains standing thanks to a hidden armour plate he is wearing. He then proceeds to kill Creedy's men before they can reload, then strangles Creedy himself despite being shot six more times - just as he promised. V, mortally wounded in the fight, returns to Evey. He confesses his love to her, thanks her, and then dies. Evey then places his body upon the train with the explosives.

Have a good weekend

SCRIBE April 23, 2008

Hello Class,

Today we only had 23 minutes of class time because of the ACT Testing, so we worked on our Slogan activity right away. We cut off words and pictures from magazines and glued them on the poster that Ms. Smith gave us.


Then we eat some delicious donuts, but most of our class time was spent cutting words and pictures to glue on the poster to make connections and relate it to BNW.


Whats due today:
Movie Clip: Kyle- typed reaction, connections to BNW.


Homework:
Chapter 9-10 due, and there's no reaction paper due on friday for some of you who are confuse about that.

Thanks,
Milenda

Scribe Wed 4/16

Hey Everybody!

Today was of course a Wednesday and therefore a doughnut day and Ms. Smith was very excited to get her sugar high which led into our Socratic Seminar quite nicely as we put great focus on the value of mind altering substances in Brave New World during the first 6 chapters.

Notes from the discussion
Drugs
Soma ensures that people don’t have thoughts that could be destructive to society
Soma makes you numb to your surroundings much like alcohol or marijuana do in today’s
society
In modern society we medicate for everything
The prevalence of drugs in BNW is similar to that the film Equilibrium
Sex
Huxley’s ideas of the promiscuity of sex were beyond his time
Current society’s focus on sexual suggestion reflects that of BNW
Did the removal of the family system bring about the sexual promiscuity of BNW?
Religion
All people follow a single religion praising Ford, but is that nothing more than praising
technology, consumerism and efficiency?
The Solidarity Service is comparable to modern church
My biggest question
How big of a role did the “9 years war” play in reshaping the world psyche as there is no longer
hostility between races, sexes or original nationalities?

Our Homework was to finish our Montages by Friday.

SCRIBE April 14, 2008

Hello Class.

Today we started off discussing any confusion over our montage assignments or any other work from last Friday from Mrs. Smith's absence.

The rest of the class period was used for group time to work on our Montage assingnments.


Homework:

1. Bring a one page reaction paper over chapters 1-6 for Wednesday's Socratic Seminar as this will be your ticket for participation.
For the reaction paper: Find one focus, motif or idea from ch. 1-6 and react. NO PLOT SUMMARY

2. Our Montage assignment is due on Friday. In class we went over how to use the Audacity program to record our voices. If you have any questions, just ask the all knowing Kyle Bobkowski.

Thanks.
-Michael

Scribe Friday 4.11.08

Homework: continue reading BNW, and work on montage project due April 18th.

In Class:
~We had a sub, Ms. Ridesky
~We should have been through chapter 4 in BNW
~Weems showed the class the example of a montage the English office created on BNW
~The rest of the hour we had time to work in groups and create a script for our own montage, which we will later pod cast
~It is due April 18th

Montage- the technique of combining in a single composition pictorial elements from various sources, as parts of different photographs or fragments of printing, either to give the illusion that the elements belonged together originally or to allow each element to retain its separate identity as a means of adding interest or meaning to the composition. (www.dictionary.com)

happy weekend!

Wednesday April 9, 2008 Sribe

Jackie and Emily started the class off right by bring Lamars donuts! I may be speaking for the class but I think those are the class favorite.
After everyone had their donuts, Ms. Smith wanted to answer some last minute comprehenison questions to make sure that we understood the basic gist of what we were assingened to read. We found that A.F. in the novel stood for After Ford, the current time period. Also, the reasons why the babies were shocked when they approached the books and flowesrs was a part of conditioning. Each social class had a seperate way of conditioning the new "members" of the class. The higher classes used things like hypnopaedia to educate the young while they sleep, as opposed the the previously mention techniques used by the lower classes.

After the brief discussion we immeadiately began work on a project involving understanding the London hatchery and the process of standardization in the "New World."

Below is an image of the intructions sheet we used for the project. The bottom of the first page has two questions to answer, and the second page is the back side which has the rest fo the questions. All questions are due Friday, but only one sheet is needed per group. Also, the picture of the selected room or process is due with these questions

Brave New World- HELP!

I dont know about you- but for the first three chapters I had a really hard time understanding it all. I did some research, and was able to de-code what some of the meaning of these confusing chapters were.

Characters:
Thomas "Tomakin", Alpha, Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning (D.H.C.) for London,
who is later revealed to be the father of John Savage
Henry Foster, Alpha, Administrator at the Hatchery and Lenina's current partner
Lenina Crowne, Beta Plus, Vaccination-worker at the Hatchery; loved by John the Savage (From Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader during the Russian Revolution)
Mustapha Mond, Alpha-Plus, World Controller for Western Europe, Asistant Director for Predestination (from Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Turkish Republic after World War One, who pulled his country in to modernisation and official secularism; and Alfred Mond, charismatic British businessman and politician, the founder of the Imperial Chemical Industries corporation)
Benard Marx, Alpha-Plus, psychologist (From George Bernard Shaw, Playwright, and Karl Marx, a German Philosopher and Author)
Fanny Crowne, Beta, embryo worker; a friend of Lenina (from Fanny Kaplan, famous for unsuccessful attempt to assasinate Lenin)
Benito Hoover, Alpha, friend of Lenina; disliked by Bernard (From Benito Mussolini, dictator of Italy; and Herbert Hoover, then President of the USA)
Helmholtz Watson, Alpha-Plus, lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering (Department of Writing), friend and confidant or Bernard Marx and John the Savage (from the German Physician and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz)
Morgana Rothschild (from the Rothschild family, famous for its European Banking Operations) Herbert Bakunin(from Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian Philosopher and anarchist), Fifi Bradlaugh (from the British political activist and the atheist Charles Bradlaugh) Jim Bokanovsky, Clara Deterding (from Henri Deterding, one of the founders of the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company) Joanna Diesel (from Rudolf Diesel, the German engineer who invented the diesel engine) Sarojini Engels (from Friedrich Engles, co-author of The Communist Manifesto along with Karl Marx; and Sarojini Naidu, Indian Politician) and "The Great Lout" Tom Kawaguci (from the Japanese Buddhist monk Ekai Kawaguchi, the first recorded Japanese traveler to Tibet and Nepal)
Miss Keate, headmistress of the high-tech glass and concrete Eton College, (the Eton headmistress, from ninteenth-centuary headmaster John Keate)
Arch-Community songster, a quasi-religious figure based in Canterbury(a parody of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Anglican Church's decision in August 1930 to approve limited use of contraception)
Primo Mellon, a reporter for the upper-caste news-sheet Hourly Radio, who attempts to interview John the Savage and gets assulted for his troubles (From Miguel Primo de Rivera, a prime minister and dictator of Spain (1923-1930) and Thomas Mellon, Banker)
Darwin Bonaparte, a paparazoo who brings worldwide attention to John's hermitagee (From Napoleon Bonaparte, the leader of the First French Empire, and Charles Darwin the author of the Origin of Species)
John The Savage (Mr. Savage), son of Linda and Thomas (Tomakin/the Director) an outcast in both primitive and modern society
Linda, a Beta-Minus, John the Savage's mother, and Thomas's (Tomakin/the Director) long lost lover, She is from England and was pregnant with John when she got lost from Thomas in a trip to New Mexico. She is disliked both by savaged people because of her "civilized" behavior, and by civilized people because she is fat and looks old
Pope a native of Malpais. Although he reinforces the behavior that causes hatred for Linda in Malpais by sleeping with her and bringing her alcohol, he still holds the traditional beliefs of his tribe (from the Native American Rebel who was responsible for the conflict now known as Pope's rebellion)
Henry Ford has become a messianic figure to the World State- "Our Ford" is used in place of "Our Lord" as a credit to his invention of the assembly line
Sigmund Freud "Our Freud" is sometimes said in place of "Our Ford" due to the link between Freud's psychoanalysis and the conditioning of humans, and Freud's popularisation of the idea that sexual activity is essential to human happiness and need not to be open to procreation. It is also strongly implied that citizens of the World State believe Freud and Ford to be the same person
H.G. Wells "Dr. Wells", British writer and utopian socialist, whose book Men Like Gods was an incentive for Brave New World
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov Whose conditioning techniques are used to train infants
William Shakespeare Whose banned works are quoted throughout the novel
Thomas Malthus Whose name is used to describe the contraceptive techniques (Malthusian belt) practiced by women of the World State
Reuben Rabinovitch The character in whom the effects of sleep learning hypnopaedia

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World


Frameset of Brave New World
"The tradition of utopianism is one of the oldest forms of political and ideological writings. The term 'Utopia' (meaning, literally, "no-place") was invented by Thomas More in 1516, but the tradidion can be traced back to Plato's Republic, and forwards through the writings of the likes of Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rosseau, Henry Thoreau, and H.G. Wells. However, it was the Twentieth Centuary that saw the rise of the distinct genre of 'dystopian' writing. The word 'dystopia' was actually not coined until nearly twenty years after the publication of Brave New World, and there is perhaps more than just a semantic significance in this given that the novel is perhaps more anti-utopian than actually dystopian. That is to say that rather than present in a world of unrelenting fear, degradation, gloom and hopelessness as for example Orwell does in 1984, Huxley's World State is, for most of its inhabitants, a place of apparent permanent methods bywhich these ends are achivved ultimate in human, but that all utopian ideals will come at a number of costs: the restriction of human liverty, the controlling of the arts, science and religion; and ultimately access to the truth. Indeed, five years after Brave New World, Huxley wrote that "The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced."
Source: www.bibliomania.com/1/7/100/2010/frameset.html


Also- I made bookmarks with key facts about the novel and the author, and the eight sacrafices- I would be more than happy to print one for you- either respond to this post or e-mail me at kebgresh@comcast.net

Thanks Guys! Hope this Helps!

Scribe for April 07

We started off class today with a visit from Mikela and Philip. Today was the day they interviewed some of our fellow class members. Mikela thanked us for being part of this experiment!

What we did in class:
Finished satire presentations
Some of the were pretty humorous. Actually they all were, we had good laughs.
Pavlovian activity
Iain was Smith's victim to show us the directions.
Then we were off to try by ourselves.
Directions: Choose who will be the guinea pig and who will be the experimenter. (In a group of two)
Then have the guniea pig sit in a desk and take their pulse. The experimenter must then catch the g.p off guard, yell their name, and bang three to four times on something. Then g.p takes their pulse. Then this happens once more. After this the g.p must get their pulse to their first pulse rate. Then experimenter does everything before except this time the g.p has to hop on one leg for thirty seconds after. Checking pulse each time, and then do it two more times. And then go back to first thing; name, band, and pulse. We had to record all the pulse rates.

Homework:
Read chapter 1-2 for Brave New World. Due Wednesday.
Read chapter 3-4 for Brave New World. Due Friday.