Spiderman! Spiderman!

If I were 20 years younger, I might feel differently about Spiderman, but here goes: I'm ambivalent.

My hat's off to the creative genius who pulled the story of Arachne, the hurbristic weaver, out of Greek mythology to give her a grand role on Broadway as Spiderman's ancestor, mentor, and muse.

On one hand, I reveled in the special effects, the flash, and the panache, just like nearly everyone else in the audience. Never before have I seen human beings "fly" (the aerial flight fight between Spiderman and the Green Goblin will always be with me), nor have I seen live theater that so artfully blends a comic book medium with actual theater. The chameleon-like sets had a magical life of their own, blending light and digital art like nobody's business. I could wax on and on about the splendiferous costumes and the impeccable dancing. The way that the director spliced two human dancers together to create an eight-legged arachnid, and the other scene in which dancers used four life-sized puppet legs, all wearing stolen shoes, captivated me. Truly, this was more than a play; it was an experience.

Alas, this is an experience that I will perhaps see once in my life; I do not have a hankering for a second experience, and perhaps I can blame it on my age, although I'm not yet a crusty old man, and my sense of what a Broadway show should be.

When I leave a show, I expect to hear the songs echoing in my head. This is the hallmark of a great score, and I didn't get this from Spiderman, which is disappointing because I went in with a bias; I was a hardcore U2 fan back in 1983, and I have most of their albums. U2 created the show's soundtrack, and Julie Taymore planted an electrified band bristling with high octane guitars practically on center stage. They seemed out of place to me, and this made me wonder about the ego of The Edge, allowing him to vicariously and visibly share the action with Spidey, Peter, and MJ.

If only we had more cohesive story-line and a credible, despicable villain on the order of Scar from The Lion King. If only the music weren't so loud and if only I weren't blinded a few times by lights that should have been on a baseball field for a night game. This is where I sound like the old man I don't want to become.

I wish this show only the best. I hope that it pulls hundreds of thousands of young people into its spellbinding net, people who otherwise wouldn't invest the money or time to see a Broadway show. Hopefully, if they get jazzed about Spiderman, they will be open to experiencing the classics like Sunset Boulevard, Camelot, and Ragtime - shows that have a story and a score.

MY MLK Day

I put the gauntlet down last week by requiring my students to avoid floating through MLK day brain dead. I encouraged them to educate themselves and learn something about Dr. King's life and/or the Civil Rights Movement.

I chose to head straight to a magnificent primary source: this morning I read King's 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail." It took me about a half hour to process the essay, and I really thought about his message to various ministers in the Birmingham community. So many of them resented that he, an outsider from Atlanta, had the chutzpah to demonstrate in Birmingham.

I was most impressed with King's measured tone, punctuating his lucid arguments to resist unjust laws, quoting from the Bible, Socrates, Aquinas, St. Augustine, Jefferson, Lincoln, and a plethora of other greats. Honestly, one could design a course of intensive study to last months just based on this historic letter.

I have always cherished the quote, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," but I had little idea that it was from "The Letter."

Read it for yourself, and don't wait until the next MLK day to do it!

http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

Bearing Witness

My freshman English class is reading 1984 by George Orwell, and one of its major themes has to do with totalitarian regimes needing to scrub the memories of its citizens in order to stay in control. Big Brother's government demands a population of non-thinkers, people who know nothing of past unpleasantness or inconvenient truths about the world around them.

Leonard Pitts Jr., one of my favorite editorial writers, bemoans how in the African-American community there is a pervasive feeling of needing to forget the hell inflicted upon blacks during the Jim Crow South, and he mentions that in his own community there remains a "marked tendency to avoid the grit, gristle, and grime of our own history." He begins his article by admiring how Jews obsess about remembering the details of the Holocaust, deftly institutionalizing it, and educating others so that such a thing cannot happen again to them.

Millions of Americans today suffered terribly under Jim Crow, and untold thousands felt the heat of having neighbors and family members lynched. Pitts' article certainly serves as a wake-up call; we need to fight deliberate and accidental amnesia by being educated, critical thinkers. Could forgetting and failing to educate ourselves usher in a time when Americans again live in fear of being lynched or "vaporized?" Are Jim Crow and Big Brother relatives?

Read Pitts' article for yourself.

Using Voicethread to Teach Inferno

Did I Waste Time Over Break?

I truly value these long breaks because I finally have a chance to disregard time and schedules. I rarely check my watch (yes, I still own one), and I relish being able to read to my heart's delight. I knocked out the following books:

Little Bee, by Chris Cleave
I downloaded this from The South Jersey Regional Library Cooperative -http://sjrlc.lib.overdrive.com/70C7C4D1-9D2E-4185-922F-C40BD83D317E/10/420/en/Default.htm
This is a book that I found more poignant and gripping than even The Kite Runner. Read the review; it won't ruin the novel for you:
http://www.hclibrary.org/highlyrecommended/?p=3579



The Glass Castle, by Jeanette Walls
My mom had recommended this autobiography a few years ago. Jeanette Walls recounts the grinding poverty she coped with as a child, a poverty brought on by the nomadic lifestyle of her parents, loving but utterly irresponsible people, dreamers who bounced from town to town, raising their children with no structure. Several scenes turned my stomache.

On Thursday, I took my son and his friend to The Penn Museum http://www.penn.museum/, an awe-inspiring place packed with artifacts from around the world -- Rome, Africa, Greece, Mesopotamia, Canaan, Asia --- many of which were over 4000 years old. I cherry-picked loads of ideas for when I roll out the Greek Mythology Unit for my freshmen.

When Friday rolled around, I thought it was high time to take my daughter to the Philadelpia Museum of Art to see the the Michaelanglo Pist0letto exhibit. Check out the link and be sure to scroll down to see this amazing artist's work.
http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/412.html?page=2

Big Brother in the Classroom?

I've been thinking a lot lately about The New York Times article that I retitled "Big Brother in the Classroom." Honestly, could we teachers one day have video recordings of our lessons as a means of evaluation? If this happens, what's next? Could this morph into something terrible, like having permanent cameras in the room that would allow principals, administrators, and other teachers to constantly observe and critique? I invite anybody to come into my classroom at any time, even vulpine observers, but I have to draw the line at my classroom door when it comes to using cameras to record what I do without my approval. This comes dangerously close to the stuff of 1984.

Archiving Interesting Articles

It's funny how other people's habits can influence us. Long ago, back in my navy days and well before the ubiquitous Internet that now pervades our lives, I had a room mate named Ken who was a voracious and eclectic reader. I remember how he used to keep folders of newspaper clippings of stuff that caught his eye, and he would often make copies of the text so that it would neatly fit into file folders which he would then archive in plastic crates.

I admired the way he preserved and catalogued the articles in case he ever wanted to refer to them again, and after trying to emulate this idiosyncrasy of his, I gave up; I just wasn't organized enough and in my hands file cabinets and storage bins quickly become a big, messy nests of papers.

Enter the blog and its convenient way of maintaining a running list of links to our favorite articles! Look near the top of the blog to read an article that I read recently.

Give it a try! Look at the first article that I archived, the one about cameras entering the classroom to help evaluate teachers. Is this " Big Brotherish" and intrusive, or could this benefit the teaching profession?