29.1. "The Veldt," Ray Bradbury

What Are We Learning/Practicing This Week?

This week, we are learning our skills in reading nonfiction readings and taking multiple choices tests on them to show that we understood them sufficiently. (RL1, 2, 3, 4)

What Should We Remember to Help Us Be Good At This?

1. Don't leave multiple-choice answers blank OR make random guesses. Always guess towards the WHO+WHAT+WHY sentence.
2. When you are reading, determine whether you are reading a story or an informational reading as soon as possible from previewing. Understanding these two kinds of texts requires very different tools.
3. If it's a story (fictional or nonfiction), remember to use the Five Fingers in order to help you look for things. If you are taking a multiple choice test, you won't want to write a whole summary, but the Five Fingers still tells you what you are looking for at any given moment.
4. Thumb -- Know the BPD (background, personality, and desire) of the protagonist first and before you finish the first quater of the story.
Forefinger -- Know the conflict (both the external and internal aspect of it) by the end of the first third of the story.
Middle finger -- Track how the conflict changes as the protagonist and his friends try unsuccessfully to solve the problem. Watch how the internal conflict remains unchanged.
Ring Finger -- The last quarter of the story should present a tense moment or scene where the both the internal conflict and external conflict is resolved.
Resolution -- After you read the last words, try and determine the universally applicable lesson that the main character usually learns (and if they don't, understand that that's why the story ended unhappily for them).

What Are We Thinking About and Discussing This Week?

Sometimes, it's easiest to understand how to be good at something by observing people who are really terrible at it. To wit:



We're still talking about how parents and elders should behave and how young people or children should behave.

Art, with its perverse love of irony is especially fond of showing bad models -- the psychologist who is crazy, the teacher who is an idiot, the parent who is actively hostile towards his children. It's fun, the sour layer that covers the Warhead and makes the center seem especially sweet. The novel (and subsequent film which isn't as good, but is still pretty darn good) Matilda by Roald Dahl does this really well (if you haven't read Matilda, you need to, it's just as good when you're 14 or 34 as when you're 11).

Weirdly, you can learn better sometimes from watching people screw up.


The Text

Ray Bradbury (this year we've read "A Sound of Thunder," "Marionettes, Inc.," and "The Drummer Boy of Shiloh" by him, too) imagined a lot of the 21st century before it started. This is one of my favorites, "The Veldt," from my favorite amongst his collection, The Illustrated Man. It's called "The Veldt." I thought the text on this page was too small; if you want it larger, hold down [Apple Key + Shift] and press the = button. The text will enlarge. Click here to read "The Veldt" by Ray Bradbury.

The Assignment

Write a Five Finger summary of the story in Google Drive.