Waiting for a Hero?

John & Sydney's class came on a library field trip this morning to explore The Hero's Journey. They had talked some about Joseph Campbell's archetype in relation to their lit book, Jim the Boy, and how Jim's coming of age might fit the Hero's Journey pattern.

We gathered in the video room to watch the clips below, and talk about what they knew about the Hero's Journey. It's kind of like junior high, really -- the call (finishing 6th grade), crossing the threshhold of no-return, a series of trials and tests (mostly tests, one student insisted), and the return (finishing 8th grade) as a changed person, who brings benefit to the community. We also talked about favorite books & movies that illustrate this pattern (The Hunger Games, The Lightning Thief, Spiderman) -- it's fun to realize that a book you know and love fits into "real" literature discussions.

The first 1:40 of the clip below is a very funny, very quick introduction to all 12 of Campbell's steps in the journey. We didn't watch the rest, but it's worthwhile if you have time.





After the videos and discussion, I talked a bunch of novels from the collection that I think fit the Hero's Journey archetype in significant ways. Not every story has all 12 elements, and not every element is literally applied (some journeys are mental or emotional, some epic battles are against oneself, not a physical enemy). Oh, and not every hero is male, or straight, or human!

Students were encouraged to check out one or more of these books for spring break reading, and challenged to think about which elements of the Hero's Journey they could identify in the novel, and why I might have chosen it for this theme.

Links go to the novel's page in the Paideia Library catalog.

Set in a Different World (or a far, far away time)

• Fire Bringer by David Clement-Davies
• Eragon by Christopher Paolini
• Stardust by Neil Gaiman
• Hero by Perry Moore
• The Maze Runner by James Dashner
• Beast by Donna Jo Napoli
  
• Un Lun Dun by China Mieville
• The Last Unicorn by Peter Beagle
• The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkein
• Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier
• The Seer and the Sword by Victoria Hanley
• Graceling by Kristin Cashore
• Sabriel by Garth Nix
• The Dark Portal by Robin Jarvis
  
  • Beowulf
• The Odyssey
• East by Edith Pattou
• Heroes of the Valley by Jonathan Stroud
• The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
  

Set in Our World (more or less)

• i am the messenger by Markus Zusak
• Prom Dates from Hell by Rosemary Clement-Moore
  
• The Storm in the Barn by Matt Phelan
  
• The Baboon King by Anton Quintana
  
• Rules of the Road by Joan Bauer
  
• The Sacrifice by Diane Matcheck
  
• Riding Invisible by Sandra Alonzo
  
• ZigZag by Ellen Wittlinger
  
• Whirligig by Paul Fleishman
  
• A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray
  
• Ice by Sarah Beth Durst
  

Lastly, here's a 7 minute movie created by high school students that also illustrates (with humor) Joseph Campbell's heroic journey. Beware the watchdog!!





Oh, and how could I leave out the sourcebook? Joseph Campbell's groundbreaking study of world mythology, The Hero with A Thousand Faces.

100 Years Ago Today

Today at around 4 pm marks 100 years since a murderous fire broke out on the 8th floor at the Triangle Waist Factory near Washington Square in Greenwich Village. If you don't have time or opportunity to watch the new HBO documentary, spend 8 minutes watching the CBS feature below. Pause a moment to consider Women's History, Immigrant history and the history of the Labor Movement and the New Deal. All owe much to a disaster that took 146 lives that sunny Saturday afternoon.




ADDED 4/11/2011 - an article from the New York Times about Ruth Sergel, an artist who initiated an annual project to chalk the names of Triangle fire victims on sidewalks in front of where they had lived.

Wednesday Website:Forget the Film, Watch the Titles!

Are you a person who bolts from the cinema at the close of the last scene, or one who watches a movie from first to last frame, including what I used to explain to my children was the "business," the opening and closing credits? I always stay in my seat until the very last credit rolls by, sometimes to see some small bit of information like music performers or location credits, and sometimes because those closing credits are great film in and of themselves.

From the fabulous Open Culture , I found this nifty film, art and design website called Forget the Film, Watch the Titles - "showcasing the very best in title design." As of this week, Watch the Titles has clips, background information and interviews with title designers for 155 different movies. I'll introduce you to the site with a couple of book-related titles. Watch the sequences embedded here, but be sure to go to the site to read more about the creation and design of each.

The pilot film for a 13-part series (shown in the US on HBO) is based on Alexander McCall Smith's The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. Set in Botswana, the book series features Mma Precious Ramotswe and a colorful cast of characters, thoughtfully and unhurriedly investigating the foibles of human nature in contemporary southern Africa.

No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency – titles from Airside on Vimeo.

Another book-related feature on Watch the Titles comes from the 2004 film of Lemony Snicket's dismal and darkly humorous A Series of Unfortunate Events, in which the 3 plucky Baudelaire orphans are sent to live with their uncle, evil Count Olaf, who continuously plots to kill them to inherit the family fortune. Dear reader, if you sighed with relief at the children's near escape, you sighed too soon . . .

Read more at Forget the Film, Watch the Titles.

Do you stay to the very end to watch the closing titles?

Blogging Dayze

Since the beginning of Long Term 2 I have been in a Blogger state-of-mind. I've collaborated on 4 blogging projects, set up 12 different blogs for junior high and high school classes, and taught sessions on the projects, goals & expectations, and how to get started on the blogs. I love it.



The "C-word" - Collaboration -- is the heart and soul of the librarian's purpose in school. In working with teachers to co-plan the design, structure and execution of an information-based project, I support Paideia's educational goals, I support the teachers in their teaching, and I work with students on developing the skills and thought processes needed in finding and using information.

The junior high language class project is an expansion of a project from last year. It's a term-long research project, in which students in Olivia, Mark, Lisanne, & Eddy's language classes research three different topics of choice from three different Spanish- or French-speaking countries. Each topic period lasts 3 weeks. The students' research is self-directed -- they can find out and report on anything they want that's related to the topic, and there's no immediate "end product" required. Later on, they'll pick one of the country/topic pairs to do a more focused and in-depth project for the ¡Fiesta! celebration in May, but for now it's all for the fun of finding out, and learning something more about a culture and words related to their language studies.



The students have run with this assignment and are following their interests, from soccer in Argentina and Cameroon, to Oscar de la Renta (did you know he was from the Dominican Republic??!!) to HIV/AIDS in the Democratic Republic of Congo.




Carl's 9th grade World Civilizations and 10th grade American History classes are doing a different kind of project, that also works well on a blogging platform. His classes have a weekly assignment to read a current events article related to one of several specified topics, and write a reaction piece to it. Several of the students are finding their articles through subscriptions in their Google Reader accounts (did I ever mention I love my Google reader??), that they all set up earlier this school year. Some basic skills are involved in the assignment: identify author, title and source of the article (with hyperlinked URL), give a brief overview of the content, and give a thoughtful response/reaction to the article's focus.

The blogging platform works really well for these class activities. We use Blogger.com for several reasons: we can keep the blogs private but allow selected readers to see what students have written; it's easy and attractive; and, not least, a large majority of the students already have Google accounts (because of Gmail, Google Docs, other blogs they've worked with, or Google Reader) so they're ready to get started right away.

We've chosen to use one blog for a group of students (all the American History students, or all students in 6th period Spanish, for instance) rather than individual student blogs. Each student can post and edit her/his own articles, but not anyone else's, and multiple students can write and post to the blog at the same time (great for working in class). Publishing for an audience of peers is more authentic than a teacher audience-of-one, and both teacher and classmates can comment on a student's work.

One of the nicest things that the blogging platform offers is automatic indexing using "labels." A major part of the posting protocol is three labels (often called "tags" on other sites such as Facebook or Delicious.com) for each article: in JH language they are Name, Topic and Country (eg. Alex, Algeria, Music). Blogger then creates an index of every post with each label, so students and teachers can click on the label (say, Algeria), and get a page of all the posts about Algeria. Someone interested in music could click on the Music label and get a page of every music post, regardless of the country. It's also very easy for student to see where they stand in terms of number of posts and also see all their posts collated on one page. World Civ students should have read and responded to 10 different Current Events articles this semester. The index shows the number of posts per label, so when Bob sees (8) next to his name, he knows he has two more to go. It's satisfying how smoothly this works.

In the near future, John & Sydney's class will be blogging and playing with poetry, and a short term Human Sexuality class will use Blogger as an interactive website for information and projects.

I wish I could link you all to the enthusiastic work students are displaying on the blogs, but we've got them all limited to class students and teachers. You can experiment with labels and indexing features on this blog if you want -- click on Teaching With Technology at the bottom of this post to create a page of all articles with that label. The automatically generated index displays in the right sidebar. Cool, isn't it?

If you have a Junior High language student or high schooler in Carl's World Civ or American History class, ask about the blog and how it's going.

The Real Life Value of Research

Today's New York Times reports that the last six unidentified victims of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire have been named, and at the centennial commemoration on March 25, the names of all 146 who died in the fire will be read aloud for the first time.

A complete list of the 146, mostly female, victims was never created until now. The most thorough list to date was published in 2003 by David Von Drehle in his book Triangle: The Fire That Changed America, which included 140 names. At the time of the fire, 6 bodies were so badly charred that they could not be recognized; families who believed their loved ones had died in the fire could not positively claim the deceased, and those names were never included on official lists. The six "unknowns" were buried in the Cemetery of the Evergreens. As the Times writes,

"the obscurity of their names is evidence of the times, when lives were lived quietly and people were forced by economic and familial circumstances to swiftly move on from tragedies."

Good old-fashioned research is what put the remaining 6 names on the list. Historian Michael Hirsch became interested in the fire because one of the victims had live on his street. Over a period of four years, he dove into primary source research, looking in over 30 newspapers from 1911 (some which had to be translated from Yiddish and Italian) for articles about families still missing relatives who had worked at the factory. Once he had names, he was able to go to census records, marriage licenses, and union charity records (more primary sources) to verify or eliminate those names from his list. He was finally able to contact descendents of three of the six, and found that those families mourn their ancestors as victims of the fire, though their names were not included among the dead.

I first became aware of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (known at the time as the Washington Place fire, for the factory's address) a couple of years ago when a student chose it as her American History research paper topic. It's a crucial turning point in labor laws, building codes and women's history, as outrage about working conditions and the fact that firemen found all the stairwell and exit doors locked, preventing employees from leaving before quitting time (and trapping them in the fatal inferno) mobilized public opinion for change. Another student is researching the same topic this year.

Mr. Hirsch's research will be part of the HBO documentary Triangle: Remembering the Fire produced in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the tragedy (the DVD, a great secondary source, will be added to our library as soon as it's released).

A reminder that even when your research topic happened 100 years ago, new information is always possible. History often slows down, but it's never quite over.

---

Read more about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Triangle: The Fire That Changed America by Dave von Drehle

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and Sweatshop Reform in American History by Suzanne Lieurance

The Triangle Fire by Leon Stein

Threads and Flames: A Novel by Esther Freisner

Remembering the Triangle Factory Fire
(website at Cornell's Keel Center for Labor Management)

Articles from the New York Times, March 25-April 3, 1911
(via ProQuest Historical Newspapers; you will need ProQuest ID & password for off-campus access)

How to Make a Librarian Smile

Bring your lit classes into the library with laptops, to search for JSTOR articles!








Ryan's Modern American Short Story classes are reading Sherman Alexie's collection Ten Little Indians. Wednesday and Thursday mornings this week, students have been in the library, finding and analyzing scholarly criticism found on JSTOR. Yay for Ryan, yay for the students, yay for JSTOR!

To E- or Not To E- (Read, That Is)

Hamlet must be busy this week -- after I titled this post, I got this update in my trusty Google Reader ("To E(book) or not to E(book)" from the DeKalb Public Library). Seems like lots of libraries are wrestling with the eReader question, and the Paideia Library has just joined in.

Natalie wrote that at least one of our elementary students was getting a Kindle for Hanukkah, and an article in last Friday's NY Times discussed the jump in children's and Young Adult e-books sales right after the holidays. After a recent presentation on pilot eReader programs in a couple of Atlanta-area private schools, I was convinced to order the Library's first Kindle, and have been playing with learning about it since it arrived a few days ago.

What are the potential plusses for having eReaders in the library?

• Storage space! It's kind of awesome to be able to offer 10, 50 or 100 "print" titles in the shelf space of a single best-selling novel.

• Instant availability If a student needs a non-fiction book on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, I can get it in minutes and check it out on the Kindle.

• Multiple copies from one purchased eBook. Amazon and Barnes & Noble both allow a purchased eBook to be downloaded onto several devices. Right now I am experimenting with this feature by reading a book on the new Kindle, on my iPod Touch (using the Kindle app) and on my MacBook (also using the Kindle app). It works like a dream, very handy.

• Coolness. I mean really, don't you think it's kind of cool to be able to check out an eReader from your local library?

OK, but what might be some obstacles & drawbacks?

• Multiple book titles tied up in one device. Great to have 100 books stored in a small device, but when it's out, it's like 100 books are out at one time. Unless all the devices have the same titles (not impossible) it doesn't really increase availability to the community.

• Expense. A wi-fi Kindle is $139 these days, a 3G model is $189. The Nook is similar, while a NookColor is nearly $250. And then you buy all the books to go on it (not counting free public domain books like Huck Finn or Shakespeare's plays). Our Technology department loans Flip video cameras, MacBook laptops and iPods, so this is not an insurmountable issue, but one worth considering how best to manage.

• Vendor exclusivity. You buy a Kindle, you buy from Amazon.com. Get a Nook, buy from B&N. Or buy one of the other models out there with more flexibility but fewer options & features.

• Limited lendability. You can't "borrow" & return eBooks from a library on a Kindle, and it's not super easy for the others, though it can be done (audiobooks are easier to 'borrow' from a library, unless you've got a Mac and/or iPod. Sigh.) So to loan the book, you have to loan the device with it.

• "Ephemeral" ownership. This one is weird, but because eBooks are transferred through wireless always-on connections, they can be erased from a device as easily as installed. It's happened to Kindles at least once -- certain George Orwell books suddenly vanished from Kindles around the world. And though it's nifty, it's also kind of creepy that Amazon.com's service knows how far I've read and can sync that page to another device automatically.

My Kindle experience so far (or why I prefer the iPod)

The Kindle is kind of cool, but as yet I'm not quite in love. The e-Ink technology make the reading easy on the eye, and they say it is far superior when trying to read in sunlight, but I haven't gotten over the blinking screen when changing pages. Getting a book in seconds is extra nice. There are a few 'experimental' extras on the Kindle that could develop into really useful features, like playing mp3 files for background music audiobooks, and reading PDF files, but they're very rudimentary now.

I've been spoiled by my iPod Touch. When I started reading on the Kindle, I wanted to poke the screen to make it do things, and it seems to me that Amazon.com had better jump on the touchscreen bandwagon or be left behind. Even though the screen is smaller, I much prefer reading the Kindle book with the Kindle app on my iTouch. Color pictures are in color (the Kindle is b&w only) and can be enlarged and moved around, I can "turn" the pages with a finger swipe, and no annoying blink from one page to the next. Hyperlinks (I'm reading non-fiction, with footnotes and references to illustrations) can be accessed with a touch, where on the Kindle you have to navigate around with the "5-way controller" to get to the link. All the Kindle functions (make the type bigger, bookmarking, searching) work on the Kindle app too. I assume the same is true for the Kindle iPad app, with a larger screen.

Personally, as a reader and dedicated library user, "paying for a book is a verrrrrry hard idea to get my head around," (quoting the DeKalb Library blog writer), and there's not much way around that for eReader owners. That's ok with a lot of folks, but it limits the accessibility of books to all and the ability of libraries (a major American institution) to provide that access. Discussion of rights of first purchase and fair use, and rights of creators, and the new digital media would be another long post in itself.

If it were something that most folks have to buy anyway (Social Studies textbooks, for instance) -- wow, awesome, yippee!!! Early textbook experiments in college didn't work out so well, but I think if the publishing companies and the touchscreen reader developers could get together, there could be market viability and real utility in electronic textbooks. The current eReaders aren't quite there yet.

For now, I'm sticking with my iPod (which also holds my beloved podcasts for easy listening) and the Kindle app. Unless you're headed to a tropical island to do a lot of beach reading, I'd recommend you try it out that way too.


But what about the Paideia Library's Kindle?????

Still working on it, trying to figure it out. I've had a few days to try it, and next it goes to an English teacher who's eager to try it out. After that, a student guinea pig. And then I may get a couple more for a bigger tryout. I'll let you know when a "rollout" happens.


Do you have a Kindle or a Nook or other eReader? Have you tried the Kindle app for phones, computers or iPad? What do you love and/or hate about it?