Persuasion in Democratic Politics

Meaningful Explorations - Classroom Activities

Rather than lay the activities out on a calendar suggesting when they should be used, I arranged them into categories, or stores, of provisions – Sample Journal Prompts, Writing Speeches, and Close-Readings. This way, any teacher can freely return to them each year, altering them or adding new ones as they see fit, and reassess how they want to incorporate them in the new school year with new students.

Sample Journal Prompts

I begin each year, and every class, with the same journal prompt, from the Talmud, "We see things not as they are but as we are." This is not an endorsement of any religion but rather the first of many attempts to teach my students, and to remind myself, that what and how we perceive in life is as telling of ourselves as it is of the things we perceive. It is to make students aware of the lenses or filters we have within ourselves. I have two posters that I use with this prompt, Michael Schofield's Midsummer's Search and a Photomosaic of Grant Wood's American Gothic, for the purpose of getting students to see the illusions that light, color and form, etc., create. I ask them to consider how their own experiences in life might affect how they perceive the images and, more importantly, other people, as in American Gothic. I also have them consider the metaphorical nature of Schofield's painting that depicts a bend in a path that cuts through a vibrant, wooded area. Is the road a journey in life? What is around the bend? Is it safe to leave the path? Etc. This discussion becomes, naturally, an introduction to David Wagoner's poem, "Lost," that the students copy into their journal in the Associate section after they have written a response to the above prompt. For the Observe section of the first journal, I ask students to write about a time they misperceived something or someone, and what they later learned, or I allow them to write about a place or mindset in which they felt lost, and how they found home or themselves. Finally, I ask them to consider all three parts of the daily journal and that they try to synthesize them as they reflect on themselves.

For a latter journal prompt, sometime during the teaching of Persuasion and this unit, I will use Ann Darr's The Formula, ¹⁸ a brief but striking poem that suggests that if one is too rigid in their view of life, or if students believe in someone else's formula for living, that they begin to disappear from life. The point I make to my students is that there is no formula for life, at least that no one knows it. This also connects back to David Wagoner's "Lost." For part 2, Associate, I refer to Fred White's The Daily Reader for the excerpt from R.D. Laing's The Politics of Experience that addresses "our intolerance of different fundamental structures of experience." ¹⁹ I will have already had students copy excerpts of classic and great speeches from history, i.e. Frederick Douglass' "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro" and John F. Kennedy's 1961 "Inaugural Address," and will certainly include other speeches that reveal intolerances or address our need to overcome them, as in Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream." For the third section, Observe, students can provide a detailed account of a personal experience with another culture or way of living different than their own. I ask them to consider what shapes their view of others.

This last sample fits the study of Lincoln's speeches and William Golding's Lord of the Flies. I want my students to become aware that the difficulty of finding the right words to suit an occasion is not only their own. The prompt for the day is from Pericles' Funeral Oration, "It is, in fact, hard to fit words exactly to events whose verisimilitude is in question, since the informed and well-disposed man may want more than the speaker makes him feel, or know more than he brings to mind, while the uninformed man resents as overstatement any praise that goes beyond what he feels capable of." ²⁰ This leads to a continued discussion of how Lincoln practiced finding the right word. I then have my students copy the second to last paragraph in "A View to a Death," the ninth chapter in Lord of the Flies, starting with "Along the shoreward edge…" and ending with "Then it turned gently in the water." ²¹ This is a moving passage of nature seemingly paying tribute to Simon who was mistaken for the beast, "The strange attendant creatures, with their fiery eyes and trailing vapors, busied themselves round his head." I want my students to consider William Golding's mastery of words. For their personal reflections, in Observe, I have them write a descriptive piece in honor of someone or something sacred to them. This will be prep work for writing a Eulogy (activity 4 below) and longer speeches.

Writing Speeches

I include six activities for practice in writing speeches. They are derived from Lincoln's writings, found in Garry Wills' Lincoln at Gettysburg, and geared towards a closer reading of Lord of the Flies. The first activity is for students to write short but effective persuasive speeches following Cicero's five steps discussed above. At least one of these speeches will be as if they are characters in Lord of the Flies and are participating in the decision-making, but others will be as if they are confronting a group of friends or family regarding an issue they want to address or resolve. These latter ones will happen before we actually start Lord of the Flies when I first teach them the five steps of writing a persuasive speech. The second activity relates to the paragraph packets described above but focuses on how Lincoln edited William Seward's suggested conclusion to Lincoln's First Inaugural. ²² My students will work in groups of three to rephrase Seward's words, making them clearer and more effective. Then they will share their revisions and compare. Afterwards, we will examine and discuss Lincoln's revision. The third activity is to write a brief Ciceronian denunciation of a character from Lord of the Flies. This is similar to Shakespearian insults, a common classroom activity where students get to play at being verbally abusive by using Shakespearian language and phrases. In this case, we will read Cicero's first speech against Catiline to see how he undermines Cataline's character in front of the Roman Senate, "When, O Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience?" ²³ The fourth is for students to write a eulogy, a high praise of someone who has died, for Simon or Piggy, characters in Lord of the Flies. These are brief exercises in writing, but a great place to practice finding the right word to suit the occasion. The fifth is a brief speech-writing activity, but one that also requires clear and effective diction: write an Island Address, like the Gettysburg Address, to pay tribute to the fallen. See pages 59-62 of Lincoln at Gettysburg for a breakdown of the structure for this type of speech. This is practice for the final speech, the Inaugural Address. The sixth writing activity, the Inaugural Address, is modeled after Lincoln's 2 ^nd Inaugural in which he addresses the nation as it concludes its Civil War. This is the culminating activity and speech for this unit. The students are to write their own Inaugural speech for all the surviving boys in Lord of the Flies as if they have returned to school for the following year. Their speech is to be modeled after Lincoln's and designed to bring healing to the boys and lead them forward into the new school year.

Close-Readings

For all the close-readings I do with my students, I teach them to consider each word, to ponder their denotations and connotations, and context. This is a tedious process for the students but its value far exceeds any discomfort or boredom. I also have them consider their own lives and how the literature connects to it. For my students, any connection is a worthwhile one. It helps them begin to see that literature is reflective of human experience, and studying it potentially helps anyone begin to see distinctions in life.

Class Quizzes

Class quizzes are an amazing way for students to practice close-readings and to assert their character and voice into a search for deeper meaning. For this activity, I assign a poem or paragraph, chapter or scene from a movie, etc., as the focus for the quiz. I review quiz directions and how I assess their assertions. They are basic: the class arrives at a deepest assertion of truth for the assigned reading or film scene; the teacher keeps track of who speaks and participates, and to what degree; students use any means necessary (dictionaries, thesauruses, white-boards, etc.), at the discretion of the teacher, to arrive at their deepest assertion; the teacher reviews the class discussion at the end of the period and makes assertions and justifications for the class' quiz grade; students who do not participate in the discussion are allowed to write, for partial credit, a one page synopsis of the discussion, due the following day. For the best results, give basic directions and set high expectations, and do not participate in the discussion.

Pre-Reading and Lord of the Flies

Before Lord of the Flies, I actually have my students read Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 as an introduction to the need for reading and thinking, and for the power of rhetoric – consider how both Clarisse McClellan and Captain Beatty influence and persuade the non-thinking Montag. Directly before reading Lord of the Flies, I have my students read a few poems and fables that set them up for the study of rhetoric and for reading the book. Aesop's Fable The Man, the Boy, and the Donkey and John Godfrey Saxe's The Blind Men and the Elephant are complimentary to each other and help students see that everyone's perspectives vary, and that one needs to know one's own first. For a discussion of moderation and determination, we will take a brief look at Pieter Breughel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, plus read the Ekphrastic poems it inspired, William Carlos William's poem of the same name and W.H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts," respectively. These last three actually dove-tail into Lord of the Flies quite well. Ralph and Piggy literally descend from the sky, like Icarus, following a swath of destruction cut by the crashing plane.

Ralph and Piggy are the first, and most familiar, of many boys that the students will encounter as they read the novel. Ralph seems to be the boy-next-door and Piggy the obnoxious know-it-all. Their contrasting characters are what help establish Ralph as the likeable protagonist and hero. We immediately are drawn to his affable personality, even as he begins to insult Piggy. We want to be friends with him and not Piggy, although we do sympathize with Piggy. This is where I have my students look closely at Piggy. First of all, Piggy is introduced as an echo to the phoenix-like "bird, a vision of red and yellow." ²⁴ "'Hi!' it said. 'Wait a minute!'" Already a bit burdensome, Piggy begins to talk, not of his own accord but echoing his auntie, and often. And soon, Piggy gives away his power of self-identity to Ralph, trusting that Ralph will be his friend. He tells Ralph, "I don't care what they call me… so long as they don't call me what they used to call me at school." This is very much like George Lakoff's argument embedded in the title of his book, Don't Think of an Elephant. Once the word is said, the thought is done. And Piggy adds, "They used to call me 'Piggy.'" ²⁵ No one would have known to call him by the one moniker he supposedly did not like except that he himself brings it to Ralph's attention. And Ralph, being a boy, takes pleasure in calling Piggy 'Piggy.' This relinquishment of power happens quite a bit with Piggy. We see it again when "Jack had meant to leave him in doubt, as an assertion of power; but Piggy by advertising his omission made more cruelty necessary." ²⁶ I warn my students not to give away their power but to think, before they speak, of what their speaking might do.

In Thinking Points, by George Lakoff and the Rockridge Institute, the Nation-as-Family metaphor is explained as our tendency to think structurally of our governments as our family. Our rulers are our parents, we as citizens are siblings, and our homeland is home. They break this metaphor further into frames of how we perceive our selves in our family/government: strict-father frame and nurturing-parent frame. Though these frames are discussed specifically with American politics in mind, it's pretty easy to find parallel examples in Lord of the Flies (consider the twins, Samneric, whose combined names suggest America). There is far more discussion of these frames on their website than I can give justice to here, but several of the boys' words and actions suggest they are of one or the other. Jack's behavior and decision-making seems to be of the strict-father frame. He displays a strong authority that is not to be questioned. He serves to protect the other boys, even if it is from their own, or his, savagery. Anyone who goes against Jack's view or rules is considered to be immoral. Contrarily, Piggy seems to embody the nurturing-parent frame, but to an emasculating fault. He is too protected and cannot think or act for himself. Still, he is nurturing of others, at least in thought. He is a sort of conscience to Ralph. Ralph, though, seems to shift at times between the strict-father frame and the nurturing-parent frame. He loses much of his own power, though, in shifting back and forth between the two. He loses himself, at times, to indecision until it is nearly too late. I teach these frames to my students and challenge them, as we read the novel, to look for evidence of them within the characters. We look for actions that reveal the boys' attempts and struggles to maintain the norms of society instilled in them, i.e. Ralph's conch supplanting the man with the megaphone, and the desire and call for freedom that the island offers, and which Jack abuses. This practice of close-reading is, again, for the purpose of reflecting upon one's self in the real world. I want my students to consider how they would have faired on this island with the boys, or even with their own friends, classmates and peers. Would they merely follow or would they stand still, letting the island find them? Would they stay true to their perception of themselves or would they allow others to persuade them? Would they seek the low road to savagery or the high road to excellence?