This week has been a good one, and tiring. With the air-conditioning repaired in the portable, and a Monday AM trio to the book room, we were able to get a little traction and get some things done.

The kids began reading Aldous Huxley's Brave New World this week. It is a difficult read in many ways. Huxley uses the language of his time and place (1930s England), which is alien enough to the MTV educated youth of today. Furthermore, he intentionally wrote long mechanical, repititious sentences which illustrate the mechanical process and precision used to create and maintain order and stability in this Brave New World. I heard some complaints.
Despite these complaints, on Friday, when we took the day to re-examine techniques for literary analysis (multi-level questioning) and some of the themes and motifs explored in Brave New World, we had a raucus, humorous and productive conversation. Even if it isn't the easiest or most exciting read, they seem to be enjoying the analytical process.

I began the discussion with a quote from Joseph Goebbels:

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, conomic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

I wanted to see what kind of connection they could make between it, Huxley's hypnopaedia and "neo-Pavlovian conditioning" and the information they are exposed to every day.

Honestly, I was hoping to get them thinking about the advertising tactics designed to "see to it that all country sports shall entail the use of elaborate apparatus. So that they consume manufactured articles as well as transport." However, during the following class discussion, I was suprised to hear my students in this very conservative area (this is a school district that, earlier in the week, had voted to include "Intelligent Design" in the SCIENCE curriculum) indentify "WMD in Iraq" and the "Iraq-9/11 connection" as the biggest lies they had heard repeated enough to change the way people think.

These kids are not stupid and they don't yet commitedly subscribe to an ideology (even though some of them would like to think they do, or, more often are borrowing one from their parents.)

We also worked through some of the political philosophy of John Locke and considered some of his ideas on which our country was built. We imagined our class as a group stranded on the ubiquitous desert isle. Would we become Golding's Lord of the Fllies nightmare of brutality, distrust and betrayal? Or would we be more like those 7 happy cataways on Gillihans Island, who seem to work to gether without any political or even social hierarchical structure, everyone doing what they could to pitch in. Based on this hypothetical scenario, I put the kids into groups to determine what Locke called "Natural Rights," and later Thomas Jefferson called "Unalienable." Life, liberty and property. I was impressed and a little suprised that the kids, when asked to detemine what ethey felt were the most "natural" and "unalienable" rights necessary in their lives, they suggested:

• Privacy
• Safety
• Stability
• Education
• Thought and Freedom

These rights seem obvious to these kids. I can't wait to get them taliking about how we (Americans) go about protecting them.

This week has been fascinating for a variety of reasons. First, the kids seem to be politically intelligent but have little interest in politics. I was hoping that was not going to be the case, but I think the stereotypical anarchist and politically radical youth syndrome may only be seen in college kids these days (if anywhere.)

They are remarkably opinionated though, and they seem to have already figured out that I like the discourse, so they can get me off topic pretty easily. I am rapidly developing the "you and I are really talking about the same thing" reversal, though. I think some of their diversions have become "learning moments" despite their best efforts.

I began the week with an assignment to get some information about the media about Cindy Sheehan so that we could discuss the motivation of the media and its involvement in the political process. I was hoping to make a clear differentiation between politics (particularly the soap-operaesque, "he said - she said" world of controversy politics) was a seperate from government, but closely related.

I was disappointed to find that almost all of them were ignorant to current events and reluctant to change that much. Those that did actually look for some news on the topic were able to engage in an intelligent, and I hope educational, discussion about it.

I have been much more confident than I was at this stage of the game last year. I feel that My lessons are less engaging than they should be, though, and I haven't been able to plan as well as I would have liked for this week. Next week, however, is a full one and should be a little more structured and interesting.

Finally, though I was getting used to the idea of being isolated out in the sticks in my old portable classroom, its age and relative disuse is really showing. The swamp-cooler blew hot air for a couple of days until it stopped blowing completely. This, in the end, was actually a good thing as when it was blowing there towards the end, it was blowing hundreds of flying ants into the room. Thankfully, the kids were gone by then, but the problems have had us roaming from romm to room in search of cool air and a teacher with a convenient prep block. I have been carrying our classroom set of books around for the last two days.