Violence and Games

A few summers ago someone at the UCLA Writing Project handed me a Lucy Calkins book about accessing and teaching the Common Core. Calkins is known for working with lower grades and for working with teachers, but the book was interesting enough. She talked about handing out articles to read with teachers, not about teaching, but just good solid nonfiction. One she recommended was a piece called "Shoot Out" about a high school assassin game. Calkins walked readers of the book through a way to talk about the article and helped me frame some ideas about Close Reading.

I love to use this article both with students and in leading professional development. I think it is nuanced enough that the first read gives a misleading understanding. To have readers revisit the piece, multiple times, especially around the diction used to describe the game itself and then the students' skills really forces students to use a text to make sense of more ambiguous and nuanced reading.

This piece is especially great with an article by Steven Johnson that was in the LA Times. This piece is an ironic yet fact filled open letter to then-Senator Clinton about violence in videogames. Johnson is known for his book Everything Bad Is Good for You which my friend David and I used with a study group around pop culture in the classroom. In the op ed piece, readers are asked to deal with sarcasm, which is often tricky for them to do in writing and it serves as an interesting companion for the "Shoot Out".

As ever, text sets are so much more interesting and exciting to deal with because they offer students multiple ways to think about a topic. These two articles work together, but they are also strong pieces to examine individually. Morevoer, they avoid the pitfalls of thinking about violence and games solely in the context of videogames nor are they simplistic Violent-Games=Bad articles. If you want to see what sorts of writing, along with the other pieces (a satire that Lucy Calkins mentioned called "The Great Office War" along with a Mother Jones article and a PBS piece) then please feel free to see the handouts from a presentation I gave at the With Different Eyes conference.

York and Fig

Marketplace has been running a series on gentrification in Highland Park called York and Fig. I am not sure how I might use this, but there are so many ideas around gentrification, urban renewal, and capitalism that might be interesting to consider. I think this would be a cool piece to integrate with an economic class or a set on the working poor. Another aspect with this series to consider is how the writers become part of the story. Similarly to Serial, at what point are the reporters a piece of what is being reported; in this case the first part of the story opens with the tagging of the bureau that the Marketplace reporters are moving into.

Panopticon and Elf on the Shelf

Since I was a high school student, I have loved Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. It spoke to me a in a way that was more real, more possible and more terrifying then George Orwell ever was. When I became an AP Lit teacher, it was one of the novels I was moved to teach.

One of the companion pieces I like to excerpt and teach is Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon. I have given the whole text before, but what is most compelling is from letter V when Bentham states:

You will please to observe, that though perhaps it is the most important point, that the persons to be inspected should always feel themselves as if under inspection, at least as standing a great chance of being so...

. In other words, for the panopticon to work, a person need not always be watched, but the person should have a sense that they might always be watched.

There are many fascinating aspects of panopticon, but the most important, to me personally is that society is, in many ways, a giant version of one. What keeps most of us in check is not actually being observed, but the idea that we might be observed. (E. Lockheart uses this idea to great effect in her YA novel The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks).

Imagine my pleasure, then, to discover a fantastic article about how Elf on the Shelf is a twisted holiday/kid version of the panopticon at WaPo. Peter Holley examines Laura Pinto's paper on how Elf on the Shelf prepares kids for a surveillance state.

There is much to disagree with here. This may not be an obvious stretch if you are not a dystopian literature scholar or a reader of Jeremy Bentham. But it is provocative.

My friends with whom I've shared this point out that this is not the first weirdness of surveillance state apparatus in the Santa Industrial Complex..."He knows when you've been sleeping/He knows when you're awake/He knows when you've been bad or good/So be good for goodness sake." (And yes, I just wanted to write Santa Industrial Complex).