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1984

By Mr. Eure AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019)

A still from the film version of 1984. Click for more information.

Choosing 1984

In “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading,” John Holt offers a litmus test for reading:

I would like you to read a lot of books this year, but I want you to read them only for pleasure. I am not going to ask you questions to find out whether you understand the books or not. If you understand enough of a book to enjoy it and want to go on reading it, that’s enough for me…

I don’t want you to feel that just because you start a book, you have to finish it. Give an author thirty or forty pages or so to get his story going. Then if you don’t like the characters and don’t care what happens to them, close the book, put it away, and get another. I don’t care whether the books are easy or hard, short or long, as long as you enjoy them.

The bolded sentences give us our approach to novels like 1984. You’ve had Orwell’s book for a while now, and the important question is this: Have you given the story 30-40 pages? If not, that’s your assignment. You need to read far enough into 1984 to determine if you are going to keep reading or not.

We need to tweak Holt’s language a bit to make it more meaningful, of course. Waiting for an author “to get his story going” isn’t precise enough to be useful, and there are other reasons to continue a book beyond “lik[ing] the characters.” What matters is that you should be getting something out of 1984, and if you aren’t, you have the right to stop reading.

This is part of our reading process, which you should review as necessary:

The Reading Process

To make any decision about what you need, you need to invest in the attempt. You can’t begin a book expecting to hate it, nor should you bring your previous reading experiences to that particular table. Start clean. Recognize that many folks, including your teacher, think highly of the book you’ve been given. Then give Orwell a chance to hook you.

If you invest in the attempt, you can make a respectable decision to stop. Either way, you need to account for your decision, which brings us to what you do after giving Orwell at least 30-40 pages:

Write reflectively and metacognitively about your decision to continue 1984 or your decision to stop 1984. Explain your reasons as a result of earnest attempt to invest in the book’s world and characters. Justify the time you dedicated to reading the rest of the novel, or justify the choice to put it aside and look for other texts.

This will be a formal assignment at some point, and you will be encouraged to choose a “replacement” from a list of other dystopian novels (e.g., A Handmaid’s Tale, Brave New World), if you stop reading 1984.

As always, the thinking that surrounds any decision is more important than the decision itself. Some of you have are deep into 1984, and a few have already finished the novel. Some read it previously. A few will have forgotten that it was assigned. All of you, to a person, can answer the prompt above by reflecting on the decision to keep reading.

I also invite you to share your experience with your peers in class and interstitially. Would you recommend the book? What general reasons for reading it (or not) would you give? Here is a student answering those questions eloquently back in 2016:

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Reading 1984 Online

Through the following site, you have the option of reading some or all of 1984 online:

http://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/

We have enough hard copies of the book for all students to have a copy during any period of silent, sustained reading¹, or for any close reading exercises. We have enough for a handful of you to borrow copies to read on your own. This online version is another way to read, though, and it presents a few unique opportunities.

One compelling reason to use this online version is that we can then use Snap&Read to translate the text, Co:Writer to take notes, and an open browser tab to look up character and plot summaries. We’ll review how those two plugins work as necessary, so that your Chromebook (or other device) can become a powerful tool for navigating a difficult text. Using other resources, from John Green’s Crash Course to old teacher banes like eNotes, is a way to borrow insight from others.

Another compelling reason to work online is what happens if we search “1984” — just those four numbers — in Google. The first page of results contains no fewer than three articles about how the novel relates to contemporary America. Keep looking, and you will find dozens more articles from just the past few years.

This isn’t about the politics of any of those articles, by the way, nor should you read too much into the political perspective shared by many of them; our lesson here is about the way this country talks to itself, and about itself, and how this novel now factors into that discourse. As a makerspace, we are concerned with literary resonance, not political beliefs.

Here is one of the articles in those search results, from The New York Times:

Another is from The Atlantic:

And here is a third, from The New Yorker:

One way to deepen our experience of a novel is to look for how real folks in a non-academic world talk about it. For instance, I might encourage you to scroll back up in this instructional post to the following paragraph:

This will be a formal assignment at some point, and you will be encouraged to choose a “replacement” from a list of other dystopian novels (e.g., A Handmaid’s Tale, Brave New World), if you stop reading 1984.

If you click on those links, you don’t get descriptions or summaries of the novels; instead, you get essays about those novels, and more specifically about how those novels are part of our national discourse. The first one is by the author of A Handmaid’s Tale herself, Margaret Atwood:

The second, from 2017, compares 1984 to Brave New World in the context of modern America:

Again, this is not about advancing a political agenda. We are a course in rhetoric and argument. We must notice, as Charles McGrath does in that second article, how important 1984 and other dystopian novels have become to our country’s discourse. This is the currency of political debate, and you should use the resources of our makerspace to make sense of that currency — and to use it yourself.

Which is to say that it matters what you believe, just like it matters what these writers believe. You need to be able to wade into this discourse effectively, having read some of the literature mentioned, and thus having earned your seat at the table. You need to know how you would respond to the rhetoric in use in the following paragraph of McGrath’s article:

“Donald Trump was inaugurated. All of a sudden, as many commentators have pointed out, there were almost daily echoes of Orwell in the news, and “1984” began shooting up the Amazon best-seller list. The most obvious connection to Orwell was the new president’s repeated insistence that even his most pointless and transparent lies were in fact true, and then his adviser Kellyanne Conway’s explanation that these statements were not really falsehoods but, rather, “alternative facts.” As any reader of “1984” knows, this is exactly Big Brother’s standard of truth: The facts are whatever the leader says they are. If you’re a rereader, thumbing through your old Penguin paperback, those endless wars in “1984,” during which the enemy keeps changing — now Eurasia, now Eastasia — no longer seem as far-fetched as they once did, and neither do the book’s organized hate rallies, in which the citizenry works itself into a frenzy against nameless foreigners. Even President Trump’s weirdly impoverished, 12-year-old’s vocabulary has an analogue in “1984,” in which Newspeak isn’t just the medium of double talk; it’s a language busily trying to shed itself of as many words (and as much complexity) as possible.

We can (and maybe should!) analyze articles like this as a class, looking for how they lean on literature to score political points or to stake a political position. This is how the real world uses literature, after all, and why we use the reading process we use. It’s also why you must choose to keep reading:

Choosing to Read [2018]

To repeat the end of that instructional post, you are always after a novel that

teaches you something about how you read;
serves as “a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness, and sanity,” using most or all of the ideas under that aegis; and
is well-written enough to teach you how to write.

1984 is one such novel. If, through your own search or with the help of your teachers and peers, you find a suitable and more interesting alternative to 1984, you should read it.

Ask questions below. Look to Google Classroom for formal assignments related to 1984.

And we will fold these in from time to time, I think, to see what it does for you. How often do you truly get to read in silence during a school day? It’s worth exploring. ↩

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The Invisible Man

By Mr. Eure English 10 Regents (2018-2019)

From the 1933 film version of The Invisible Man, which is quite different from the novel. We will watch the film, regardless of your individual reading choices.

Essential Questions

In education, the sort of question you’ll find below is often called essential. The Greeks called these discussions dialectics. In brief, they are the reason we read and think and write: to answer questions that matter. Or, at least, to start to answer them.

You have a foundation now, and you’ve been using it to read and write. You know what is expected in a learning environment like this one¹. You also have a reading process that guides us through literature and more:

The Reading Process

As you did with your first assigned, full-length novel, you are required to read enough of the next book to hit John Holt’s threshold, which will allow you to choose what to read. Before we get to the assigned book, remember that anything you read in here must

teach you something about how you read;
serve as “a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness, and sanity,” using most or all of the ideas under that aegis; and
be well-written enough to teach you how to write.

The Invisible Man, by H.G. Wells

Your assigned novel is The Invisible Man, by H.G. Wells. This is a short, strange story that uses science fiction to grapple with issues of morality and society. It also has an excellent film adaptation that uses the idea of an invisible man to tell a much different story.

You can read the novel here:

More on why reading online helps later. First, you need to answer the essential questions that go with this novel:

To what extent do you trust that what you see is what is really happening?
To what extent do you trust your memories of the past?
Would you want to be ignorant and happy, or have knowledge and be miserable? Why?
To what extent and in what ways does power corrupt?
What does it look like to be truly alone?
To what extent is human nature self-destructive?
How should we deal with individuals who threaten a community?

Define terms, seek examples, and, above all, talk to each other. Ask clarifying questions below in the comments. Use the makerspace to anchor your in-class conversations and then continue those conversations in writing. Share your observations and insights as often and widely as you can.

Note: As always, the formal assignment will be posted to Google Classroom, alongside copies of the novel and links to the other resources you need.

We will also add to these questions as we continue, shifting the language and focus as necessary. As you read and write, new questions will occur to you. This is Piet Hein’s idea: “Art is solving problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved. The shaping of the question is part of the answer.”

Throughout all of this, work in writing as often as possible. Sketch out ideas, take notes, write metacognitive responses — whatever it takes to generate understanding and GAP evidence, since those are one and the same in this course. Look to Google Classroom for formal assignments, as always, and advocate for yourself when you feel lost.

Choosing to Read

Again, we are using John Holt’s litmus test for reading to choose what to read:

I would like you to read a lot of books this year, but I want you to read them only for pleasure. I am not going to ask you questions to find out whether you understand the books or not. If you understand enough of a book to enjoy it and want to go on reading it, that’s enough for me…

I don’t want you to feel that just because you start a book, you have to finish it. Give an author thirty or forty pages or so to get his story going. Then if you don’t like the characters and don’t care what happens to them, close the book, put it away, and get another. I don’t care whether the books are easy or hard, short or long, as long as you enjoy them.

This time, you will use the protocol for choosing a work of literary merit after about nine chapters of The Invisible Man. At that point, if you want to start a different novel, you will be encouraged to choose one of the following:

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

These are shorter novels chosen as much for their length as the quality of the stories. They are also the same sort of science-fiction novel as The Invisible Man. If you want to choose a new novel other than these two, we’ll look first at Victorian science-fiction literature. Then we’ll look at more modern novels that cover the same concepts. So you’ll have choice within a predetermined framework.

We have a few copies of The Invisible Man on our bookshelf, almost a full class set of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but no hard copies of The Time Machine. That’s okay: You should attempt to read these novels online when possible.

Reading Online

Here again is The Invisible Man:

The most compelling reason to use this online version is that we can also use Snap&Read to translate the text, Co:Writer to take notes, and an open browser tab to look up character and plot summaries. Your Chromebook (or other device) becomes a powerful tool for navigating an interesting but difficult text.

We will review Snap&Read and Co:Writer as we start this novel. If you have questions, ask them below.

Which is an atelier model, by the way — a specific kind of makerspace that centralizes creativity and expertise through the ripple effect of teaching others. That’s worth mentioning in a footnote. ↩

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A Long Way Gone: The First Five Chapters

By Mr. Eure English 10 Regents (2018-2019)

In his essay, “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading,” John Holt explains his approach to reading as follows:

I don’t want you to feel that just because you start a book, you have to finish it. Give an author thirty or forty pages or so to get his story going. Then if you don’t like the characters and don’t care what happens to them, close the book, put it away, and get another. I don’t care whether the books are easy or hard, short or long, as long as you enjoy them.

Your teachers agree with Holt — to a certain extent, at least — and we want to help you discuss the first 30-40 pages of each novel we read with that quotation in mind. That discussion can be insightful and actionable. It cannot be a simple dismissal of the idea of reading — you have to try — but you will also not be forced past a reasonable point.

In Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, the first five chapters make up the 30-40 pages suggested by Holt. You must read those first five chapters. We will listen to at least one of those chapters together, letting Beah read his story to us. You will read the rest on your own.

Assignment: Guided Responses

Your assignment is to respond to the first five chapters by answering seven questions. First, answer these two-part questions, being specific about the plot and characters of the novel:

What does it mean “to get [a] story going,” and how has that happened here?
What does it mean to care about what happens to a character, and which character(s) do you care about so far?
What does it mean to enjoy a story, and to what extent are you enjoying this one?

Second, answer the following questions, which are taken from our guide to the reading process:

What “range of emotions and events that would take countless lifetimes to encounter” are you experiencing through this reading?
How is what you’re reading developing your empathy through “the chance to see things from someone else’s point of view”?
How is it helping you reflect on who you are — and the idea that “everyone is a strange and interesting person”?
To what extent is it helping you to “see that failure is a part of life”?

In the end, you should have the answer to seven questions. Type those answers in a new document, and then attach a copy of them to the assignment in Google Classroom. Then copy your answers into this Google Form.

This class set of answers will be used to inform discussion and drive our next steps. We aren’t just looking at Ishmael Beah’s story; we are figuring out how you read, what that means for your learning, and where the threshold lies between forcing and inviting you to read.

Ask questions about this process in the comment section below. Treat these comments as a chance to engage your teachers in direct instruction, clarification, redirection, etc., while you look for chances to help your peers, too.