Texts and Human Experiences: Orwell, Stalin, and the History Paradox

I forgot how much fun teaching Nineteen Eighty-Four was. Perhaps that's a paradoxical statement, considering the miserable nature of the text and the misery-inducing state it can inspire in the reader (Orwell's masterpiece is more likely appreciated than 'enjoyed'). That said, paradox works here due to the text's inclusion as part of the Year 12 HSC Common Module Texts and Human Experiences, in which readers gain insight into 'anomalies, paradoxes and inconsistencies in human behaviour'. I can see that Nineteen Eighty-Four isn't a joyful book and yet... I enjoy teaching it so much!

There's a certain comorbidity between the Advanced English and Extension History courses in that both involve interrogating the text to identify degrees of subjectivity. If you're lucky enough to have students who do both courses you'll notice their growing aptitude in relation to this. In regards to Nineteen Eighty-Four there's also a lot to be gained from students who do the Modern History course with all its political -isms. One key concept from Orwell's text that benefits from this increased historical understanding is the idea of a palimpsest.

The palimpsest is an ancient or medieval manuscript page that has been 'cleaned' of its original text and re-used. There's nothing sinister about this; in pre-Gutenberg times parchment was invaluable and hard to come by so repurposing was par for the course. In Winston Smith's world, however, Orwell uses the term to refer to the Party's habit of literally re-writing historical and journalistic documents. Smith's occupation is to locate any documents that contain information the Party has decided no longer fits with their official history and then rewrite them to fit with the new 'facts'.

Orwell was inspired by real practices in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. Every time Stalin 'purged' an offending member from his Party and made them 'disappear' an order would go out to schools to have the students paste new text into their textbooks over the old information, essentially rendering the figure a non-person; someone who never existed. Stalin's comfort with rewriting history can also be observed in the doctored photographs from this era, whereby purged members were painted out of the pictures as if they were never there. 

Activity

My friend Kira told me that she likes to start her students off in studying Nineteen Eighty-Four by imposing an Orwellian atmosphere on the classroom with a series of strict rules designed to get them thinking about totalitarianism. It can be hard for us, having grown up with relatively high levels of privilege, to understand what it might have been like to live in the kind of nightmarish government-controlled state that Orwell describes. I wanted to do something like this and help students get their heads around the palimpsests that Winston is tasked to make throughout the course of the novel.

I don't know how else to relay this other than just describe what I did. So here it is:

• I wordlessly stopped the students at the door. This was automatically different for them because I've never been one for making kids line up outside the classroom. I usually say hello to them too but this time I just held my hand up and went back into the room for a bit as I wanted to heighten their anxiety a little.
• I drew up a table on the board, like this:

• Then I beckoned the students in and told them to place all their bags at the front of the room, and that there was to be no talking or communication. I also had a cardboard box with 'Phone Haven' written on the front and told them to place their phones into it for their 'safekeeping'. The students were very confused by this point and my straight face and lack of eye contact seemed to prevent any discussion around what was going on.
• I then dictated the following:

Year 12 HSC Advanced English is a very intense subject and requires concentration and consistent engagement. In order to foster a better working arrangement it has been decreed that you can now call your teacher by his first name within the confines of this class room. There will also be a rotating roster in which one of you must walk the room every four minutes and check that everyone is OnTask. Infractions or OffTask behaviour will be reported to the teacher immediately.

• Students then copied the table into their books, with four student names placed into the roster.
• I then gave them this context sheet to work on and had Student A start their rounds, checking that each person was doing their work. I asked Student A quietly (the room was so silent that everyone could hear me still) to report back on who was working well and who wasn't. 
• Student B had to report to me on who they thought was enjoying the activity the most and who wasn't. 
• At this point I was admittedly getting a little bored, so I gave Student C a ruler and asked them to make sure that everyone's things were at least 5cm from the edge of the table.
• Student D was told to make each individual student raise their index finger on their non-dominant hand and count slowly to five. There wasn't any relevance to this, I just wanted to emphasise how arbitrary the rules were.  
• This is where the palimpsest comes in. I looked at the roster on the board and decided which student had complied least willingly. To be truthful, all of the students had gone along with the activity with surprisingly little complaining, so I just randomly picked Student A. I told him that he hadn't done a very good job and that he was to stand outside the classroom. I then removed his name from the roster on the board, replaced it with another student's name, told this new student in front of everyone that they had done a good job as the first monitor, and then provided the whole class with paper, glue and scissors.
• I told them that they needed to change the roster in their books to reflect what was on the board. That this had always been the roster. Furthermore, I was to only be referred to as 'Sir' and not my first name and that the text in their book should reflect this. Students wrote out this new information and pasted it over the 'offending' parts of the dictated text. 

All in all, this took about 30-40 minutes. I couldn't help but laugh by the end of it, having kept a straight face for so long, and the students were relieved for the spell to be broken. This Advanced English class had only had me for a teacher for 1 lesson before this (I didn't have them for their Preliminary HSC) so a few were seriously worried that this would be how the class was like from now on!

We discussed the purpose of the activity, what a palimpsest was, and some of the students who'd already read to the end of the book told me that they'd cottoned on partway through. I have some of Stalin's doctored photographs on the back wall so we looked at those and spoke about Stalin's sinister censorship practices in the Soviet Union and how this would have influenced Orwell.

This links back really well to the rubric's mention of 'paradoxes in human behaviour', after all, what greater paradox could there be than history itself being rewritten? If history is meant to be true then how can it be changed? And yet, it happens all the time.

Pushing the Paragraph

Write! Write like the wind!

A while ago I was marking NAPLAN and my desk buddy told me about something she does with her senior classes to help them prepare for the HSC. It was a while ago so I can't recall all the details but the idea was that students are given a paragraph (or essay) prompt and only six minutes to write in response to it. The reason for it being six minutes is that someone, somewhere, crunched the numbers and worked out averages to determine that this is roughly how long it should take per paragraph to generate enough output to qualify their essays as a 'sustained' response in a HSC setting.

I love this idea because, well, other things I'd tried weren't really working. I would give classes practice essay questions to do and the results would be middling at best; the high-performing students would jump into the questions and it was great practice for them, but the students who still had much more potential for further growth would find it too overwhelming. A different someone, somewhere, told me once that, "You don't run a marathon as practice to run a marathon," and I liked that; it resonated with me. The HSC is a massive undertaking that requires a highly-condensed explosion of writing unrivaled in other stages of education - the vast majority of students will never go through anything even remotely like the HSC examinations ever again so it's quite understandable that the less academically-primed students would be reticent to write essays in order to practice before they're asked to write essays in the HSC.

It's much less confronting for most Year 12 students to write paragraphs instead. And, yes, some still try to avoid it, however, when I'm collecting data every single time and letting students see their progress, it becomes difficult for the reluctant to continue non-attempting. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The Goal

In getting students to write paragraphs I want them to be mindful of what they're writing rather than simply trying to write as much as possible. Part of keeping them focused is to make them aware of the lexical density of their writing. 

Lexical density refers to the amount of lexical items found in a piece of writing. A lexical item is any word or word-group that carries meaning on its own, IE. A noun, a verb, an adjective, or an adverb. These are words that we can easily define or can swap with synonyms. If a word isn't a lexical item then it's a grammatical one - these are all the joining or connecting terms, some examples being 'with', 'what', 'it', 'the', 'however', 'in other words', etc. What we want to do is to have students write paragraphs and then test how dense they are with lexical items.

Testing the lexical density of a paragraph is to see how much 'content' is in a piece of writing. The key here is not to think about lexical density in terms of a higher amount of content equalling better writing, it's more a measurement tool that can help pick up patterns and identify trends in writing on repeated examination. 

Some things to keep in mind:

• A high lexical density (say, a piece of writing that is 80% made up of lexical items) might indicate a piece of writing that is too jargonistic, or convoluted, or loaded with words that the writer doesn't necessarily understand. 
• A low lexical density (below 50%) might demonstrate too much colloquialism, informality in sentence construction, or a lack of appropriate vocabulary.
• I'd probably say that the 'sweet spot' would be anywhere between 55% and 75%, but I'm not completely nailed down on this yet. Ask me again after I've collected data from a few more classes over the next 5 years!

The goal is to have students produce something within the 'sweet spot' bracket but, more importantly, to generate a word-count of 180 words or so within the 7 minutes given. The lexical density testing is a byproduct of building speed; by having the students focused on vocabulary in this way it ensures that they are keeping some kind of standard in mind in terms of ensuring that quality isn't sacrificed in order to just increase speed.

The Process

Written language tends to be more lexically dense and less grammatically intense than spoken language. Part of testing lexical density is to teach students to switch codes when writing and ensure that they aren't getting too conversational.

To calculate lexical density there needs to be a bit of maths in play (sorry!) This is represented as a percentage and is created through the following formula:

Get students to give you their lexical density percentage and word count after they've written a paragraph in response to an essay question. You want to do this a couple of times a term so you can start to build a reliable data set.

The Data

This is the cool bit, and it comes especially in handy during parent-teacher interviews when parents are interested in seeing how their child is progressing in their writing skills. By using the graph function in Word you can start to assemble a visual representation of student growth in regards to word count in timed conditions. It also allows both the teacher and the student to identify patterns in lexical density, which allows students to meet Outcome 9 (the reflection outcome). 

Record the information with pen and paper each time the students undertake paragraph writing in this fashion. It's best if you have a separate sheet for each student - that way you can record the information in front of the students without them seeing what their peers are doing (not that it's really a secret, students are usually okay sharing numbers related to this stuff because it's not formally assessed). The reason this is useful is that if particular students don't partake in the activity, or they make a series of excuses, they can see how this looks on paper over time. The realisation that you are collecting this information on a regular basis will prompt a lot of these students into action.

Student A shows growth in word count over time. They were already performing at a high level in terms of generating long paragraphs in short amounts of time, however, seeing this information presented in this way helped them push themselves further. The lexical density was way too dense at the outset - a lot of overstretching of vocabulary. We took at a look at some of the vocabulary used and worked on making the language more concise, which had the added bonus of increasing the amount of analysis they could get across in the time given.

Student B struggled with the concept of these paragraphs at first as they were nervous about not performing well. Eventually they joined in after realising that I wasn't going to stop running the activity, and they actually did quite well.

Student C showed phenomenal growth in word count whilst maintaining lexical density.

Once Student D joined in they started to show growth as well.

Student E really pushed themselves to extend the word counts they were achieving in 7 minutes.

At the end of each semester I give the students a copy of the data (such as the graphs above) to make sure that they're partners in the process. The above graphs are also what are given to the parents. It doesn't necessarily all have to be done the way I've described it but the main point is that students are practising writing in timed conditions without having to commit to an entire essay every time.

Ergodic Literature

As Term 4 approaches I'm about shoulder-deep in preparing resources for HSC Extension English 1 and enjoying the opportunities afforded by the new syllabus. It's one of those things where the more you look, the more you find, and part of the challenge is in parsing the seemingly infinite bounty of literature that's on offer and figuring out what will work with my particular class when exploring the mandatory Literary Worlds module. There has been some excellent Professional Learning courtesy of the English Teachers Association that I found very helpful, and the networks of hardworking Extension teachers sharing resources on Facebook has been quite a boon as well, but, as with all things, I just can't get my head completely around something until I start trying to do it myself. 

One of the joys of Extension English 1 is that the course is broad enough to allow for a multitude of cautious creepings down various literary back-alleys. One such alleyway that stood out to my sensibilities as a 'must' was ergodic literature. In exploring what a writer does, and how literature is read, the most extreme avenue to travel down must surely be those narratives that require the most effort to read.

What Is It?

The most common definition (and like its grandfather, postmodernism, its a definition that's a little tricky to pin down) is that ergodic literature is any text that requires 'nontrivial effort' to read it. That is to say, beyond reading the words and turning the page, the text will require something extra from the reader if they are to grasp the beginnings of meaning intended by the author (and that intention may even be that meaning is created almost solely by the reader). 

Here is a PPT that contains a more in-depth explanation.

And here are some examples from ergodic texts that students can look at. 

Engaging Students

Okay, so my main reason for doing this with my class is that it'll let me share two of my all-time favourite texts: Building Stories and Riddley Walker. 

Building Stories - the box

Building Stories by Chris Ware is a unique graphic novel that comes in an A3-sized box. Within this box are 14 different texts in a range of mediums - newspaper, comics, pamphlet, cloth book, flip book - with no specified order for them to be read in. Most intriguingly, there is a map of a house that seems to indicate where each of the texts should or can be read. For example, one comic is to be read in the kitchen, so I read that one while having breakfast. Another text is linked to the bedroom, one to an armchair, etc, etc.

Note the schematic - this seems to indicate which part of a house links to each of the specific texts within the box

All 14 texts - I had to step back a fair way to fit them all in one photo!

Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker appears to be more like a regular novel on the surface. It's a comparatively slim post-apocalyptic text set out in the traditional fashion, however, where the reader has to do some work is in translating the first person narrative's invented dialect into something more identifiable. In setting his story set far into a post-nuclear future devoid of technology, Hoban has constructed a version of the English language that has distorted and disintegrated over time. Some words remain the same, some words are recognisable with a little work from the reader, and some words are maddeningly obscure and enigmatic in meaning. What's great about Riddley Walker is that the more you read of it the more meaning you begin to glean from the text - essentially because the reader, with concentration, becomes increasingly fluent in this new dialect.

After introducing these two texts to the class the next step is to let the students engage with them. I've selected two relatively-easy extracts from Riddley Walker, the opening page and a section in which the oft-mentioned mythical figure 'Eusa' seems to join the text as a speaking character, with the intention for students to read and then discuss what some of the words might mean.

Extracts here.

Independent Response
After students have been taken on this little tour of the ergodic genre the next step is to consolidate their thinking. Coming about six lessons or so into a look at the Literary Worlds module, the intention is that students should be familiar with a few different literary theories about reading by this point. I'll blog more about this at a later point, but the key ideas I want them to think about are:

• The text is the message (this is the traditional, formalist approach to reading).
• The reader creates the message in conversation with the author.
• The author's intentions are irrelevant as they cannot control what or how the reader reads.
• There is no single message in a text - the shifting nature of context changes what is read.
• Reading is a 'community' act - our literary competence comes with our experience of how literature is interpreted by others. 

So, with all this in mind, students should have a bit of time discussing and reflecting on ergodic texts before responding to the following question with a paragraph-length response:

Why would an author choose to write ergodic literature?

Which should give scope for a range of responses and, at the very least, let students start to iterate what they're thinking.