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.

English Textual Concepts: Point of View

In my teaching adventures last year I had the privilege to teach a Year 8 class with additional learning needs and I can say (and have probably already said on this blog before) that it was one of the most rewarding teaching/learning experiences I've had so far in my career. Teaching such a diverse range of little people helped me re-frame a lot of teaching strategies in a way that would make them more accessible and inclusive for those with learning difficulties. At this point I had already been experimenting with integrating the English Textual Concepts into my programming for a few years and the resources below represent one of these forays in relation to the aforementioned Year 8 class. 

For some additional context: the English Textual Concepts have been in development for quite some time. When I first heard about them at the 2014 ETA Conference they were referred to as the 'English Concept Continuum' and after this it popped up in various English-related professional learning scenarios and I kind of made it my mission to attend as much of PD sessions as possible. These days it is now being taught at Western Sydney University and is endorsed by the Department of Education as an invaluable resource for English programming - it isn't a mandatory part of being an English teacher but it's certainly a helpful one! When I get stuck in the formative stages of programming I find it's useful to have a squizz at the Textual Concepts and locate a concept that might work as a way to pull everything together.

So, anyway, I wanted to teach Point of View to my Year 8 class because I'd noted some of the students struggling to comprehend how writers establish a relationship between narrator and audience. Here's what the framework says in regards to teaching this particular concept to Stage 4:

Point of View - Stage 4

Students understand that choice of point of view shapes the meanings, the values and the effect of the text.

Students learn that

• a narrator can tell a story, comment on a story or break out from the story to address the responder, directly
• point of view is a device for persuading 
• point of view directs the responder to the values in the text

The Qinling Panda, with its brown fur, is one of the most endangered mammals in the world

Animal Conservation

At the start of 2017 the unit my school was teaching Year 8 focused on endangered animals and text types, which works well with Point of View if you want to look at how different text types utilise first, second and third person for particular effect. Anyway, here's a breakdown of the lesson:

1. Start the PowerPoint Presentation on Point of View. On the second slide brainstorm with students the language used for first, second and third person (IE. 'I, 'Me', 'Myself' for first person; 'You', 'Your', 'You're' for second person; 'He', 'She', Proper Nouns', 'His, etc. for third person). This explicitly identifies and classifies the sort of language the students will be looking for in the next part of the lesson.
2. Students are then shown three pieces of writing about the American Bison in the PowerPoint Presentation; hand out these extracts as a separate sheet and have them highlight the language that differentiates the pieces as first, second and third person.
3. On the 6th slide students are asked to consider the implications of how point of view affects the relationship between writer and responder. Think about: the first person text could be either non-fiction or fiction, however, the third person feels more resolutely like fiction and the second person example moves into a different realm altogether (it can be seen as an instructional text of some kind, perhaps even a travel guide). The questions build upwards ala Bloom's Taxonomy, starting with the 'what' questions before asking students to engage with some basic evaluation (which version appeals the most and why?)
4. The last slide gives students a first person piece of writing that they must rewrite as third person. It's a fairly straightforward activity that allows a struggling class a reasonable degree of success. The scaffolding of analysis before this final activity should also prepare students to discuss their piece of writing afterwards in relation to the way shifting point of view can help the responder to see the content of the text in new ways.

Sometimes I think we (the teacher) underestimate the value of explicitly teaching what we might take as obvious - there are some students who come to high school with a very real need for continued support in developing key comprehension skills that some students can already access unconsciously. In any event, it certainly doesn't hurt to let students achieve success in regards to exploring Point of View before moving forward to more advanced English processes.

Target Audiences, Context, and Mad Men

There's a wealth of texts that we can use in the classroom with students when looking at advertising and the role it plays in relation to communication. As part of a Year 10 unit that examines this topic I settled on using two main texts - carefully-selected excerpts from the reality TV satire Nathan For You (see this blog and this blog) and the historical drama series Mad Men. As it's unlikely that many students will be aware of them it's worth bringing your class up to speed on the context of these TV series before launching into either of them in conjunction with activities. 

Below is a brief bit of context that sets up one particular scene I like to use from Mad Men.

Context

Mad Men is a 2007 TV drama set in 1960. It focuses on an advertising agency called Stirling-Cooper where a Creative Director, Don Draper, must come up with creative ideas to help companies sell their products. Companies decide whether they will hire Stirling-Cooper based on how good Don's ideas are. The show can be confronting for modern audiences because it honestly depicts the attitudes of the time (sexism, cigarette smoking, racism); allowing the audience to see how different the 1960s were to 2007. In this clip, Stirling-Cooper is dealing with a Jewish client for the first time.

Show students the questions below first and then let the clip play through a couple of times so they can watch for the answers. I find that students are much more willing to focus if they know what they're looking for so there's little use in just showing the clip without any of the context above or letting them know the purpose behind it.

The questions focus on comprehension and explanation, and scaffold students towards a point where they will be asked to discuss the concept of a target audience. They are (and I'm sure you could probably add a few of your own):

1. What is the agency's plan to boost awareness for Menken's Store?
2. Why is Miss Menken against the idea of coupons?
3. What has prompted Miss Menken to seek a new image for her store?
4. What kind of target audience is Miss Menken after?
5. Why does she say "the customer is always right?"
6. Give an example of sexism or anti-Semitism (discrimination against Jewish people) from this clip.
7. Find one example of sarcasm in the clip and explain its purpose. 

After the students have thought it through (and formulated some responses) you can then discuss some possible answers:

Potential Answers

1. The agency plans to boost awareness of Menken's through the use of coupons and a TV spot designed to increase their exposure.
2. Miss Menken is against coupons because of the connotations associated with them, IE. That they appeal to people trying to save money, whereas Miss Menken wants to appeal to a more affluent / well-off demographic.
3. Miss Menken's father previously ran the business, however, last year they reported their lowest sales so now she is seeking to revitalise the brand and find new customers.
4. Miss Menken wants a rich, upper class audience for her product, and gives an example of the sort of brand she wants her store to be compared to.
5. The phrase 'the customer is always right' is delivered by Miss Menken to remind Don Draper and his colleagues that she is currently his customer and that he should be listening to her ideas.
6. The reference to 'the village' is an allusion to Jewish people stereotypically living in a more 'backward' or primitive fashion. The phrase 'Your people' is also a reference to Miss Menken's Jewishness. Draper and co. also mention Miss Menken's father, alluding to their preference to work with him rather than her, which demonstrates sexism.
7. Miss Menken is being sarcastic when she says "this place runs on charm", as she obviously believes the opposite. 

Another example of sexism

The rest of the lesson can then be spent on some paragraph writing practice, with a formula of your choice. If I'm working with a mixed ability class who have limited confidence about this sort of thing  then I'll use a fairly open-ended question such as:

Write one paragraph outlining how you would aim to change the target audience for Menken's Store to suit Miss Menken's vision.

Students should aim to start their paragraph with a statement of some sort that re-frames the question so that an unsuspecting reader could follow the paragraph without having read the question. After this point the student is free to explain what their idea is, how they would go about implementing it and making it work, and then finishing up with a confident assessment of why their idea is the best option for Miss Menken.

Writing a paragraph in this way provides scope for students to just get some independent writing done (which can be a struggle at times), plus they can practise their command of rhetoric - which is pertinent in light of the overall topic's focus on persuasion and advocating for ideas. 

Reading Roll: Late 2017/Early 2018

My last Reading Roll was back in March last year but, the thing is... I never stopped reading! I just stopped posting reviews because I switched to reading the texts on the new HSC NSW English Prescriptions List, and have been talking about them in the context of their appropriateness to the new English syllabuses here, here, here, here and here. Every now and again I make a little time to read some non-Prescribed texts and below are some of these non-Prescriptions, most of which were graphic novels. Some of these I read just for fun but would still be good for classroom use.

Hot Dog Taste Test by Lisa Hanawalt

Hanawalt is probably best known for her work on the TV series Bojack Horseman. This graphic novel is less a novel and more a collection of comic vignettes exploring absurdist tangents and autobiographical snippets of Hanawalt's life (mostly in regards to food). The author's hilariously askew sense-of-humour had me laughing out-loud a lot, and it took me absolutely no time at all to read from cover to cover.

The Imposter's Daughter by Laurie Sandell

Joining the hallowed annals of graphic novel memoirs is no mean feat but I would easily put Sandell's story alongside other personal accounts such as Craig Thompson's Blankets and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. Sandell is probably best known for her work as a journalist and editor for magazines such as Glamour, Marie Claire, Esquire, GQ, etc., however, in this frank and sometimes unbelievable memoir she weaves together an arresting narrative of finding her feet in writing and gradually discovering her father's uncanny (and highly damaging) gift for con-artistry.

Big History by DK

Have you ever looked at the subject of history and wondered, "Where's all the stuff that happened before humans came along?" Well, if so, then Big History is the coffee table book for you. This vibrant, illustrated DK guide to David Christian's groundbreaking combination of history and science helps to make clear the recurring patterns that unify all of history as we know it. A hugely informative book.

Wilson by Daniel Clowes

This graphic novel is a disarmingly brisk jaunt through the life of the titular misanthrope, a curmudgeonly loner who insists on voicing his criticisms in just about every situation. What's perhaps most interesting about Wilson is its structure, with Clowes depicting his protagonist's life in a serialised form over the course of single-page strips (like the sort of comic strips you'd see in newspapers) despite the whole thing having been constructed as a graphic novel. This means that we get these snapshots of Wilson's life, condensing a much larger narrative into 70 single strips that each end in a twisted take on the stereotypical gags associated with Sunday morning newspaper cartoons.

Night Air and Volcano Trash by Ben Sears

My only criticism of Sears' fantasy/sci-fi series is that each volume flies by so quickly that you're left wishing you didn't have to wait so long until the next installment of Plus Man's exhilarating adventures with his robotic sidekick Hank. Think Adventure Time mixed with the buoyant, minimalist artwork of Tintin. Great for all ages!

Last Look by Charles Burns

Charles Burns is probably best known for his creepy, psychedelic graphic novel Black Hole. The volume Last Look brings together his most recent trilogy of graphic novels, and complexly weaves together two narratives that dance around themes of psychosis, anxiety, and guilt. Burns is a master of symbolism and the bizarrely disturbing, and all I'll say is that if you read this you'll need to commit to the whole thing - everything in this narrative is perfectly intentional, no matter how weird it might seem, and the ending will make you look at the whole thing in a new light.

Some Comics by Stephen Collins

I was drawn to this collection of single strips after reading Collins' brilliantly absurd The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil. Unlike the aforementioned graphic novel, these single-page comics are much more comedy-oriented. I appreciated Collins' twisted sense of humour though and eagerly await whatever he does next!

Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis

I'm about 6 or so volumes into this '90s cyberpunk series that, sadly, still feels blisteringly relevant in its satirical subversion of politics, society, and all things 'modern'. The protagonist, Spider Jerusalem, is one of the great non-superpowered anti-heroes of comics, and his invective-laden rants against the grimy futuristic dystopia he lives in are sharp enough to cut steel.

Comfort Food by Ellen Van Neervan

I grabbed Van Neervan's poetry volume after all the controversy that came out of her poem Mango being included in last year's HSC. Her work is sparse, thoughtful, intense, sensory, personal... I really enjoyed the wide range of verse and all I'll say in regards to the controversy is that it was unfounded, the Mango poem did its job in provoking such a diversity in responses. I hope Van Neervan has many more volumes of poetry to come.

Tranny by Laura Jane Grace

I'm a huge Against Me! fan, even if I do actually prefer the more polished and anthemic later stuff over their raw, folk-punk beginnings. In this brutally honest memoir, Laura Jane Grace combines her diary entries with a more straightforward narrative to describe her journey of discovery in relation to identity and gender. There aren't many transsexual music icons with as high a profile as Grace, which makes this autobiography a must-read for both punk-rock fans and those interested in gender politics and LGBT issues. It helps that Grace holds nothing back when discussing her family, friends, bandmates, music, etc., and it makes for a very entertaining and visceral read.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

I read this in preparation for teaching Year 11 Extension English 1 this year. I'd never read it before so I wasn't sure how it would go, but I actually liked it a lot. I'm coming around to accepting the disjointed nature of a lot of Victorian-era novels (it was always something I struggled a lot with in my younger days), and the opening five chapters of Dracula are probably my favourite part of Stoker's seminal vampire tale. I have no doubt that this because they're the most representative of how people commonly think of the Count and his predatory behaviour. The rest of the novel has elements worth reading too but, as I mentioned, it can feel disjointed at times. The biggest point of interest for me was how unromanticised Stoker's portrayal of Count Dracula is - not at all like the many iterations of vampires we've seen since.  

The Analects by Confucius

I came across a statistic somewhere that claimed Confucius's Analects is the most read text of all time. I'm not sure if it's true or not but - considering China's long history, population, and influence on the world - it sounds legit, and that's why I thought I should read it. As a work of philosophy, I found it best digested over a few months, a couple of quotes at a time. As a 2500 year old text the context sometimes made it a little difficult to translate some parts (even when written in English), but I still found many quotes to be applicable to the modern day. I guess there's a reason why the wisdom of Confucius endures. 

Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe

This groundbreaking history book couldn't be more relevant to Australian society at this point in time. Pascoe has done something truly astonishing in bringing together extensive research, documentation, testimony, and first-hand experience to reconstruct Australia's pre-European past and thus deconstruct a lot of the myths surrounding what Aboriginal society looked like before Captain Cook's arrival. Pascoe not only makes an undeniable case for the idea of an Aboriginal 'civilisation', he also outlines the racist ideologies and methods that led to the erasure of this civilisation from white consciousness in the years since settlement. I found it both fascinating and enraging.

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

When I hear the words 'experimental novel' I tend to think I'll probably need to read it with a highlighter and a notepad, but Saunders' genre-defying historical fantasy bucks the trend and manages to be remarkably entertaining and heartfelt despite its structural idiosyncrasies. Told from the point of view of a collection of spirits 'stuck' between our world and the next, Lincoln in the Bardo mixes primary historical sources with outlandish speculation to capture the voices of America's 19th century. Easily worth the many awards it's won.

Rocannon's World by Ursula Le Guin

Le Guin's early science fiction novel is often overlooked in favour of her Earthsea Quartet or later sci-fi classics such as The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. What makes Rocannon's World noteworthy is that it's the first entry in the 'Hainish Cycle' - eight science fiction novels (including the two mentioned above) that take place in the same fictional timeline/universe. Rocannon's World is a fairly brief concept-based novel that takes an anthropological look at human descendants living on an alien world, and uses some conceits related to the time distortions/differences that would arise in our theoretical exploration of space in the future. It's a neat sci-fi narrative but, as always, what makes Le Guin's work stand out is her knack for exploring the genre through a more post-modern perspective without leaving the reader behind.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

I wanted to see what all the hype was about and I think I'm lucky that I read this before I even realised it was becoming a film because the aggressively intertextual marketing campaign for Spielberg's movie would have turned me off altogether. Ready Player One isn't going to amaze any fans of award-winning literature nor will it prove intellectually stimulating to those who are normally attracted to sci-fi. What it does have going for it is a fun, geek-culture-heavy adventure that's easy to read and hard to put down. I enjoyed it, for the most part.

A Contract With God by Will Eisner

The name 'Eisner' has become synonymous with the graphic novel canon owing to this ground-breaking collection of longer-form comics. Eisner's use of the comic strip medium to explore dark, adult concepts was instrumental in the form's continuing development from superhero/comedy mainstay to a storytelling method that could be used to serve literature in a deeper fashion. A Contract with God remains highly arresting in its exploration of pain, loss, and displaced Jewish identity, and I found myself unable to tear away from each of the four thematically-linked stories - fascinated as much by the evidently heartfelt personal context and Eisner's seamless combination of word and image.

The Death of Stalin by Fabien Nury

It's easy to see why British satirist Armando Iannucci chose this one-shot graphic novel as the basis for his recent film of the same name. Inventively Machiavellian and as poisonous as any fatal snake bite, The Death of Stalin presents the true story of the Russian despot's demise and the political fallout that followed. In most hands this could have been a dry piece of historical retelling, but Nury zeroes in on the awful, the unbelievable, the rage-inducing, and the downright ridiculous to portray the final days of a bloodthirsty tyrant and the serpentine beginnings of the Cold War.

Sad Topographies by Damien Rudd

I'm a sucker for a quirky coffee table book. I saw this one in a Newtown bookstore and was immediately taken with its subject matter. Originating as an Instagram account, Rudd explores a series of depressingly named locations around the world with thoughtful essays on associated errata, etymological digressions, and miscellany. Places featured include Nothing, World's End, Isle of the Dead, Disappointment Island, and Port Famine.

Moonhead and the Music Machine

This graphic novel about the power of music, teenage misfitism, and what it's like to literally have a moon for a head is just the right mix of angst, comedy, and fantasy. I really enjoyed Joey Moonhead's journey towards acceptance and identity. His absurd friendships with other teenagers on the outskirts of the archetypal American high school are hilarious and visually arresting. A true gem.

The Finder Library Volume 1 by Carla Speed McNeil

Pulling together a diverse array of influences to mix together Indigenous narratives, comic styles related to Manga and online serials, and post-apocalyptic sci-fi, The Finder Library is a unique and genre-defying exercise in exotic world-building. McNeil ties together the narrative of Jaeger, a drifter with troubled origins, and the domestically-strained mixed-race family of Emma Lockhart and Brigham Grosvener. To give you an idea of the scope of this impressive series, McNeil's vision of the distant future explores the interrelation of racial identity and social standing, biological vs. culturally-constructed notions of gender, media consumption, and the impact of violence on the individual.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

I've half-read a Heinlein before and couldn't finish it, so it was with some trepidation that I gave this one a shot. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was enjoyable but also not without its issues. Told through the cynical eyes of one-armed computer technician Mannie, a 'loonie' (citizen of the Moon), The Moon is a Harsh Mistress relates the imagined revolution of Earth's lunar colony - paralleling the Bolshevism of 1920s Russia, nightmare scenarios of over-population and diminishing resources, and the 'free love' movement of the 1960s. The protagonist Mannie is thankfully the least annoying character in the novel, however, there is also a lot of political subplotting that doesn't really go anywhere quick enough, and the supporting characters veer between completely forgettable and incredibly irritating. That said, Heinlein's depiction of a lunar colony has some fairly interesting dimensions, and I enjoyed the way it plays into the counter-culture of Heinlein's era. Notable for its invention of the phrase 'There's no such thing as a free lunch!"

Film Studies: Making a Zoetrope

Okay. A little context before I start: I'm currently about a quarter of the way through teaching a two-year Film Studies course. This is a board-endorsed course that I'm currently running at my school as a Stage 5 English elective, and this term the class is looking at Special Effects. More specifically, students look at how key innovations have enabled new representations and shifts in meaning within the context of film narratives. 

The activity below could quite easily be adapted as a fun, practical exploration of film for any junior English class.

The Zoetrope

The zoetrope is an early innovation in film technology that helped to establish the fundamental premise for turning photography into a moving image. Variations of this invention had been around for quite some time by the 19th century and were used to show simple looped animations. It wasn't until 1878, however, that the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge invented a way to take a rapid sequence of photographs to depict a horse running. He combined this system (which utilised 24 separate cameras and a series of tripwires) with the existing technologies of the zoetrope and the praxinoscope (which was like a zoetrope with mirrors) to create what is arguably the first film, The Horse in Motion. I've recreated this above in the zoetrope example.

Muybridge suffered a irreparable brain injury in a horse-carriage crash, which led to erratic and eccentric behaviour, and it was after this point that he came up with his impressive innovations in photography. It's believed that his accident damaged his orbitofrontal cortex, leading to an erasure of social inhibitions that allowed for increased creativity in his mind.

Some students will be interested in hearing this stuff, but all of my class were able to remember the content much more comprehensively after they themselves have had a go at making their own zoetropes.

My first prototype was more complicated then it needed to be - there are a couple of things in the picture above that I ended up not needing.

Preparation

There are lots of instructions online that give an idea of how the zoetrope and similar devices can be made in the classroom but I wanted to ensure that I was able to create one myself before I put it into the hands of the kids. This was invaluable because I quickly learned that some aspects of the process could be streamlined or were best avoided altogether. Click here for teacher creation-instructions, which were written after I'd fine-tuned the process.

Initially I set out to use a wire and wire cutters to set up a frame from which the device could spin but my wife Nicole pointed out that it was much easier to simply hold the string by hand and spin it that way. 

 

Additionally, the cutting of the cardboard strip also requires a fine blade and the idea of handing Stanley knives out to my Year 9 class made me break out into a cold sweat. So I pre-prepared the cardboard strips they would use in order to take this element out.

Here's what you'll need before handing over to the students:

• Black cardboard (enough for the whole class)
• Paper (to measure the cardboard strips)
• A scalpel or Stanley knife 
• A cutting board
• Plastic picnic plates (make sure they have a raised rim - this will allow for the cardboard strip to be held in place)
• A single-hole punch
• String, or thick thread
• Scissors
• Ruler
• Sticky tape

Use the paper to create a 'master' strip - this is what you'll use to measure and cut each of the black cardboard strips you'll be giving your students. The best measurements (that work with a standard-sized plastic plate) are as follow:

• 10 frames in length - 60mm per frame.
• Entire strip to be 100mm in height.
• The frames will sit in the bottom 40mm.
• Above the frames are 10 slits approx. 2mm wide and 40mm long. These sit above and between each frame. 

As you can imagine, 2mm is quite finnicky so you'll need that fine blade. Measure it all out on white paper and overlay the paper on the black cardboard to cut the black strips out. Use sticky tape to place the white paper in place and do it all on top of a cutting board. I made about 14 black strips and got my students to work in pairs (that way I had some spares in case the kids accidentally wrecked them on their first go).

In Class

I'd already covered the concept of the zoetrope in class a few times before so the students had a rough idea of what they were making. I also brought in my one to show them what a finished product should look like. This helped to really motivate the students because they could see what they were working towards. 

I gave students a series of different animations to pick from (this gives them some ownership over the final product) or the option to create their own animation (this is more time-consuming but there are a few students who appreciate getting to exercise their creativity in this way). 

Students (or student groups) are then provided with:

• 1 pre-made black cardboard strips.
• 1 plastic plate.
• A ruler to measure their own animations and to space the string-holes evenly on the plate. 
• Access to a single-hole punch to create the string-holes.
• String to cut (I let them measure and cut this themselves).
• Choice of animation or option to create their own animation.
• Access to sticky tape to fix their animation into the black cardboard barrel. 
• Instructions on how to make it. 

Some of the student zoetropes - great job guys!

The most time-consuming part of the whole process is creating the black cardboard strip but, as I'd already done this for the students ahead of time, this meant it only took approximately 1 hour for students to put the whole thing together. The instructions above are a simplified version of the teacher instructions and are easily followed by Year 9 students.