It’s been a while since I’ve really written anything, but I’ve been busy with a number of things, mostly work related. I’ve also been working on a new resource for this website which should be available shortly. Watch this space!

Last weekend, I attended a social studies conference that I’ve been meaning to write about. One of the speakers was Phil Gersmehl, who discussed the latest research in spatial intelligence. It seems that there are now believed to be eight different types of spatial intelligence, each housed in a different section of the brain. He suggested that geography education, at an early age, could help to strengthen these abilities. I say, it’s never too late.

Via The Media Dude, here’s a geography game that will help you practice your map skills. His brother, The Boy Wonder, points us toward an old Nintendo game called Warehouse 18, which is less about dexterity and more about using spatial thinking to solve visual puzzles.

And yeah, I’ve been pretty busy with these, too.

I’ve been too busy to blog much lately, and I’m too tired to blog effectively now, but I did want to acknowledge that it was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day today before I went to bed.

I’m actually teaching a unit that involves Dr. King right now. We didn’t have school today, though, so we didn’t work on the unit today. In short, we celebrated Dr. King’s legacy by not studying it.

I’m not complaining or anything, just noting the irony. The kids will study King (and many others) over the next few weeks.

I was far more poignant last year.

Have a good night.

This blog just reached 10,000 hits. Huzzah! Huzzah! That’s 20,000 eyeballs! I guess it’s time to break out the cake and SiteMeter counter.

For the record, the 10,000th hit came in at 1:22pm today via a link from an English teacher’s webpage at Xavier High School, right here in New York City. The teacher is a former graduate student of mine. So here’s a big shout out to Mr. Cambras and his 9th and 10th grade students who I see are studying Romeo & Juliet, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth. (…and some other good stuff, too.) Welcome to all.

If this blog teaches you nothing else, it’s that studying great works of literature will allow you to take the letters from passages in those great works of literature, mix them around, and form new pieces of writing that kind of relate back to the original passage. And if you do that, then eventually 10,000 people will come to see them.

I had to access an old hard drive to find the final exam that had the five questions I used for the last Conundrum. While I was looking through it, I also found a list of Shakespeare assignments that might be of interest to readers of this blog. Every now and then, not too often mind you, but every now and then, this blog is actually about teaching Shakespeare.

These assignments were for a graduate course on Shakespeare, but one in which I did not assume that the students had any prior experience in Shakespeare. I later adapted these into a list of assignments for a more advanced course on Shakespeare, which is the same class who got the final exam. The earlier class did not have a final exam, but instead were assigned to design a final exam for the course, and provide an answer guide and grading system. That assignment worked out really well. They also were given the assignments below, some of which you may notice are similar to the extra credit assignments I give my English Education students.

Please choose three of the following assignments:

1) Write at least 24 lines of iambic pentameter. This does not need to be in Elizabethan language, nor does it need to rhyme. It can be anything you want, as long as it’s once piece of cohesive writing in iambic pentameter. Each line of iambic pentameter contains ten syllables, with the stress on every second syllable.

2) Choose any text, such as a poem or a song, that has been written in the last twenty years (at least 15 lines). Add footnotes that annotate this text for an audience reading it 400 years from now who might not understand contemporary allusions and idiomatic language. Be sure to choose a text that is conducive to this assignment.

3) Choose any passage from one of the plays we’re studying this semester (at least 30 lines). Rewrite the scene in contemporary language. You may choose a contemporary setting and style as well, but try to stay as faithful to the meaning of each line as possible. The use of iambic pentameter is not required.

4) Choose a scene from one of the plays we’re studying this semester. Approach the scene as a director and describe your concept for the scene in a 5-7 page essay.

5) Choose a character from one of the plays we’re studying this semester. Approach the scene as an actor and trace the character’s development through the play in a 5-7 page essay.

6) Choose one of the plays we’re studying this semester. Approach the scene as a teacher and develop a three-lesson unit plan to teach the play.

7) Watch two movie versions of one of the plays we’re studying this semester. Compare and contrast them with each other and with the original text in a 5-7 page essay.

8) See a live production of one of the one of the plays we’re studying this semester. Write a 3-5 page essay describing the choices made by the production in interpreting the text.

9) With at least one other person, prepare and present a scene from one of the plays we’re reading this semester. (minimum 15 lines each). Memorization is required. In a one-page essay, describe your reasoning for choosing this scene and the approach you intend to take.

Which assignments would you have chosen? What assignments could I have added to the list of choices? How could these assignments be adapted to make them more appropriate for high school students?

Via UPI:

LONDON, Nov. 18 (UPI) — The BBC is embarking on an ambitious project to produce new versions of all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays over the next 12 years, employing an ensemble cast.

The BBC originally presented Shakespearean works 30 years ago in a widely heralded seven-year series.

This time around, the BBC enlisted Oscar-winner Sam Mendes to produce the entire series. Among the notable stars being called upon to act in the Bard’s plays are Judi Dench, Jude Law, Ian McKellen and Kate Winslet, The Sunday Telegraph reported Sunday.

“The moment I took the idea to the BBC, they grasped it with both hands, and in a sense they are the only people who could help pull it off,” Mendes said.

BBC is discussing a joint finance deal for the series with HBO.

This is incredibly exciting. I am a big fan of the original series, because sometimes I need a video of one of the more obscure plays, whether I’m teaching it, or I’m just in the mood to watch it. And it’s difficult to find a good production of, say, Measure for Measure at Blockbuster, so it’s nice to have access to a complete set.

But the prospect of another complete set, with modern-day actors and production values is even better. Plus, there will be the opportunity to compare the two versions, which always makes a good classroom activity.

But even forgetting all of that, we’re going to get 37 new BBC Shakespeare video productions over the next twelve years! I do hope HBO gets on board, or at least that there’s some way to see the videos in America (BBC-A?). I can’t wait to see another Pericles, another Measure for Measure, another King John, and another Cymbeline. And yes, another Hamlet and another King Lear and another Richard III too – there’s plenty to be excited about!

Perhaps we can even discuss the productions here, as they air.

Last week’s Conundrum about kings named Henry reminded me of a Shakespeare final I gave about five years ago. This was for an advanced graduate course on Shakespeare, and I actually decided to give the final exam as a takehome. What’s more, the first five questions were True or False. Surprisingly, only two students got all five questions right. Sounds like quite a Conundrum to me…

TRUE or FALSE?

1. Twelfth Night is named after a holiday in December.

2. Gloucester (in King Lear) has two sons; the bastard one is named Edmund.

3. Katherine of Valois was wife to Henry V, mother to Henry VI, and grandmother to Henry VII.

4. Based on evidence in Hamlet, it is reasonable to assume that Shakespeare may have read at least some of the writings of Sigmund Freud.

5. The title of The Merchant of Venice refers to a Jewish merchant named Shylock.

I should point out that the five questions combined were ten percent of an exam that was ten percent of the final grade, so these questions alone were not enough to affect anyone’s final grade. I don’t believe in trying to trick students, but I felt that a takehome exam deserved a little extra bite. The rest of the exam was short answer and essay and was very straightforward.

Can anyone answer all five questions correctly?

Posting has been light this weekend, but I’ve been at the NCTE conference. Perhaps I’ll blog about the conference later in the week. For now, enjoy this video of Weird Al as Obi-Wan Kenobi recounting the entire plot of The Phantom Menace to the tune of American Pie by Don McLean.

There’s a new website called FreeRice that helps you improve your vocabulary and fight world hunger. When you go there, you play a simple but addictive vocabulary game, and every time you answer a question correctly, the site donates ten grains of rice through the UN World Food Program.

At first, I thought this was another site to get humans to participate in an automated task that computers can’t do, like read book scans or create picture captions. But it works by generating advertising revenue. When you click on the answers, you indicate your visit to the advertisers, and they pay for the rice.

I just donated 2200 grains of rice, and was able to reach a vocabulary level of 48. And I was worried I was going to be unproductive today!

Ro has a thought-provoking post about the relationship between learning something and knowing it. Before I address that question, it might be worth taking a moment to consider what it means to know something.

What do we mean when we say we know something? For the individual, it might be the same as saying we unequivocally believe it. But is that enough? If Iago believes his wife has been unfaithful, and he has no evidence to support his belief, does that count as knowledge? Probably not.

Socrates argued that a belief must be justified to be considered knowledge. Othello might say that he knows his wife Desdemona has been faithful, because he has reason to believe in her love and trustworthiness. His belief is justified. But that doesn’t necessarily make it true, and so that probably doesn’t count as knowledge either. Knowledge must be both true and justified.

When we say someone else knows something, that might mean that they believe it and we believe it too. If Iago uses manufactured evidence to manipulate Othello into believing that Desdemona has been having an affair with Cassio, Othello can say that he knows that Desdemona has been unfaithful, because his belief is justified by evidence that has been presented to him. But we would not say that Othello knows it. He still believes it, but we do not.

Which brings us to the Gettier problem. Imagine that while Othello is being manipulated by Iago, Desdemona has been secretly having an affair with the Duke. Othello makes the statement that he knows Desdemona has been unfaithful. Does he know it? This time, his belief is both true and justified. And yet Gettier would not count this as knowledge, because Othello’s belief, while true and justified, is based on false evidence. He has no knowledge of the actual affair. Robert Nozick would point out that if the statement weren’t true, Othello would still believe it.

Now let’s go back and look at the question originally posed by Ro, which has to do with the relationship between knowledge and learning. If I say I learned something, that means I know it, which means I believe it. If I say you learned something, that means you believe it and I believe it. For example, President Bush got into a bit of trouble for including the following in the 2003 State of the Union address:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

By citing the British government, Bush’s speechwriters sought to insulate the administration from claims they already knew were false. But by using the word “learned” they implied the word “knew” which means that Bush was essentially saying that he also believed that the statement was true. It was later discovered that the statement was not true, and that the Bush administration was aware it was not true at the time the speech was written. Saying “The British government has learned” did not provide the out they were hoping it would.

Ro’s other question was whether knowing something implies that one has learned it. A strict empiricist might say yes, but even John Locke allowed for some a priori knowledge gained through reason alone. The classic example is from René Descartes: Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. Is this knowledge? Was it learned?

Finally, I can also attest that it is possible to have learned something and not know it. I demonstrate this condition several times every day.

Last night, inspired by a response to my deliberately vague Question of the Week, I picked up my old worn-out copy of Dune. I was assigned the book in high school twenty years ago, and still have the same copy, which means either they had given it to us, or more likely, I never got around to returning it.

Still tucked into the almost definitely stolen book is a bookmark that also must have been given to us in high school. It’s a “Cultural Literacy” bookmark, based on the book by E.D. Hirch that came out at about that time. My high school English teacher was a huge proponent of this book which literally listed pages and pages of references that a culturally literate person should know. Our teacher, who yet was cool enough to assign us Dune and Catch 22 (which I also somehow still have), would photocopy the pages of the book and assign us cultural references to look up and present to the class.

The bookmark has a very small sampling of these terms, which includes basal metabolism, taproot, intransitive verb, Tito, ombudsman, capital gains, and byte. If you can’t define all of those terms, this bookmark says you’re illiterate.

Hey, in 1987, byte was a toughie.

And that’s really the point here. This bookmark just screams the point: You can’t know what students will need to know in twenty years. The skills needed today are so much more complex than memorizing lists of references. In a constantly changing world, creativity and the ability to learn new skills are far more important than knowing offhand what a Eustachian tube is. If I did learn that in high school, it’s gone now, and I don’t seem to miss it.

And I do think kids need to learn facts. But facts need to be learned in context. If historical dates are important, it’s only because they allow us to understand how two or more events are connected to each other. Did we invade Iraq before or after 9/11? Knowing that can profoundly affect our understanding of both events.

If, in the future, both events were scattered among a list of “cultural literacy” items and students were required to look them up and present them to a class, that sense of context would be lost. Much better to give them authentic tasks that allow them to construct meaningful understandings. They’ll still learn the facts, and will remember them longer.