24.2 The Story of Christ in Literature

Before I start, as I always do with this kind of thing, I need to point out a couple things.

1. If I am going to teach about allusion, I am going to have to discuss the Jewish Bible (The Old Testament) and the Christian Bible (The New Testament). They are easily the two most alluded to works in human history.

2. By discussing these stories, I make no claim about them as religious stories; I am speaking only as their status as important stories in human history, the most important set of stories in human history. I have no interest in altering your personal beliefs about any religion in the slightest.


That said, I think this is interesting.

If you want to allude to a different story in your own story, it makes sense to favor a certain kind of story. You want the story to which you refer to be pretty well known, otherwise too many people won't recognize you for making an allusion. You can allude to anything that you want of course, but if you pick things that people haven't heard of, you run the risk of excluding them (and their money). You would also prefer to refer to a story that people think is good or important. An allusion lets the reader make a comparison between two stories - it most often says that the two stories are similar in theme. If you pick a bad or unimportant story to allude to, you are risking saying that your own story is bad or unimportant. As an analogy, if you want to compliment somebody's appearance by comparing them to somebody else, you should pick a famous, celebrated, good-looking person.

So, hopefully, we can understand that the stories most alluded to in Western culture are going to be the most famous, important, and popular stories. I personally cannot think of a better place to start than the life of Jesus. Many, many people in Western culture believe that hearing the story of Christ's life actually saves their souls. It's as well-known, as important, and as interesting as any story ever told.

Where can you see allusions to the life of Christ, once you understand where to look for them? Let's start by reviewing the The Giver. A boy, Jonas (five letters, J---S) is different from his peers. He sees the world in a truer, deeper way. An angelic little boy named Gabriel arrives and announces that big things are about to happen. Jones mets an old guy with a long white beard who tells him that, first, he's different and special from everybody else, and, second, that he's going to have to undergo great pain and suffering in order to save everybody else from that pain and suffering. Jonas gradually comes to understand that love is the key to saving his community, and that he must sacrifice himself in order so that the rest of the community might live.

Do This: Read the short story linked here, "Christmas Day in the Morning" by Pearl Buck. First, write a Five Finger summary of it. Then, make a list of the allusions that you can find. Remember that an illusion is any hinted reference to another story, usually a famous one with the same theme.

23.2. Colonel Shaw's Drummer Doy RL5. (Comparing Structure)

Objective: A good reader understands how the author will structure or arrange a text in order to try and accomplish different purposes. The form a story takes should follow its intended function.

Instruction: Five things it will really help to know:

1. Any thing is well-made if every part of that art helps the designer do what they want to do.
2. You should generally make the most important things the things that you write about most. The kind-of important things get less writing. The unimportant things should be removed.
3. A nonfiction narrative is just a fancy way of saying "true story." Like an article, it is true, but like a story, it is arranged chronologically in time order.
4. It's easier to compare two things are talk about the way that they are different that it is to just analyze one thing.
5. The structure (the size of the parts, the number of parts, and the order of the parts) should help the writer accomplish their purpose.

Independent Practice/Materials: Here is a nonfiction narrative on the same topic as "The Drummer Boy of Shiloh."

Even though the two stories, "The Drummer Boy of Shiloh" and "Colonel Shaw's Drummer Boy" are both about Civil War drummer boys, the two writers choose to begin and end their stories at very different points, creating two different structures. The short story takes place over the course of an hour, but the nonfiction narrative covers decades of a man's life.

Assessment: Write a logical SEE paragraph that answers, explains, and proves the following question: The two stories are different in structure because they have to be; they cover different amounts of time. Why did one writer choose to tell a story that takes under an hour and one tell a story that runs over forty years?
Hint: An author is going to choose a structure that suits his or her purpose, so if you ask yourself the authors' differing purposes, it might help you understand why they choose to write more or less about the same length of time.

23.1. Finding Sources for Research W8.

This week, we're conducting researching for our "How does a book become a movie?" blog post.
So, how do you find information on your topic?

When most Americans want information quickly on a topic, they head off to Wikipedia and look up the entry. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that is written, edited, and evaluated by its own users. This has made it the biggest encyclopedia in human history very quickly, but has also made some people in schools very nervous. Many teachers do not let you cite Wikipedia in your papers. When asked why, they say that Wikipedia is unreliable because you don't know who wrote it, or its changeable from day to day. They reasons are wrong -- after all, you don't know who wrote the Encyclopedia Britannica or the calorie counts on the McDonald's menu anymore than you know who wrote a Wikipedia entry.

However, you still shouldn't cite Wikipedia. Why? You shouldn't cite any encyclopedias at all in real research. Encyclopedias are tertiary sources, meaning that they take secondary sources and digest them and put them in an easy location. Encyclopedias are meant to get you the very basics on a subject. Encyclopedia make many mistakes because they attempt to write about everything. This isn't me stating my opinion, either, it's me stating Wikipedia's opinion.

For research, only primary and secondary sources are considered to be good enough to use.

To find information on your topic, here are Five Things to know:
1. You should use wikipedia first to start your research. Go to the entry or entries that have to do with your topic and scan through them. At the bottom, if the entry is good, there will be a great many links that you can use to do your research. These links will be to valid secondary sources. Use them. That's what Wikipedia is for.

2. Don't mistake Google for research. While Google, of course, is a great tool for finding information, it is not considered to be a site where research happens. Think of Google as the elevator in the library, you wouldn't say that you used the elevator in the library as research, you used it to get to your research.

3. Once you get to a site that has information that you might want to use, run it through a checklist to make a judgment about how reliable the site is. Here are the questions I would ask:

• Is the author identified?
• Is there a date on it?
• Is the website to a publication that exists outside the internet? (To check this, find the name of the site itself, and make a new search to see if you can subscribe to it. If you can, that's good.)
• Are there citations at the bottom to other websites or books?

4. Lastly, consider the domain (the letters after the site in the URL, like ".com" or ".gov"). If a site is .com, then the goal of the site is to make money. For a magazine, that's fine, but you are going to learn good information about astrology at astrology.com? You're not -- they are going to want to sell you products related to astrology, so they won't mention that most humans think that astrology is nonsense. Consider the organization that is bringing you this information. I don't mean political bias or anything bad -- it's fine for a company to try and sell their products -- that's what a company should do.

5. Remember, not all information exists where you can find it, either. If you look for something and can't find it, it might mean it's not there. You may have to change your topic somewhat or totally. Another reason that research is the hardest thing to do well in school is that you have to work for a while without producing anything for your final paper. It can be frustrating.

22.5 Essay

Writing Situation

We spoke last week about how our prejudice towards the way things are can keep us from making choices that would make us happier/more successful/however-you-wish-to-define-it. Of course, the best way to explore these ideas is to try and see how they play out in your everyday life. I was thinking that teaching with a student response system (like the ActiExpressions from yesterday or Google Docs) is obviously a better way to get people to understand the material that they are supposed to learn. When I talk to other teachers about this, though, they never adopt it. They immediately, too, express a great many reasons (some good, some invalid, I think) why it won't work.

Writing Prompt

Do you agree or disagree with me that using these kinds of technologies regularly to teach in front of the classroom is a more effective way to teach the needed lessons? Write a letter to me expressing your position on this issue. Make sure to use reasons, facts, and examples to support your position.

22.2. Research: How Does a Book Become a Movie?

We're going to start talking about research this week, because I want your group's blog to have a researched, collaborative essay on a reading-related topic (note the comma between equal adjectives and the hyphenated adjective).

Things to know about research:

1. It's takes a really long time.
2. It's really important to you if you are going to college.
3. It's built on ideas that are really interesting.

Here is the prompt:

Write a research report about the process of turning a book into a movie. Choose a book that someone in your group has read, then conduct research on the process online. How does a book get turned into a movie?

Here's the document where you should keep all your work. Make a copy and share it with your group and me.
Guided Research Step-by-Step