Ethics

Read the poem "Ethics" by Linda Pastan found below.  
In your post, write a response to the poem in which you analyze the attitude of the speaker and the devices used to convey the attitude, keeping in mind the title.  Think about point of view, symbolism, imagery and diction.  

"Ethics"

In ethics class so many years ago
our teacher asked this question every fall:
if there were a fire in a museum
which would you save, a Rembrandt painting
or an old woman who hadn't many
years left anyhow? Restless on hard chairs
caring little for pictures or old age
we'd opt one year for life, the next for art
and always half-heartedly. Sometimes
the woman borrowed my grandmother's face
leaving her usual kitchen to wander
some drafty, half-imagined museum.
One year, feeling clever, I replied
why not let the woman decide herself?
Linda, the teacher would report, eschews
the burden of responsibility.
This fall in a real museum I stand
before a real Rembrandt, old woman,
or nearly so, myself. The colors
within this frame are darker than autumn,
darker even than winter - the browns of earth,
though earth's most radiant elements burn
through the canvas. I know now that woman
and painting and season are almost one
and all beyond saving by children.

Poetry

Anyone who writes poetry will tell you that it is more than a line, more than a literary device, and more than the sappy splashing of ideas on a page making an abstract idea emerge.  Poetry is about being human.  It is about emotions and language colliding on a page.  

Watch this TEDTalk on Why People Need Poetry.   Pull out three things that he says that support the necessity of poetry.  Explain what he says and then add one other reason that you think we need poetry.  (Yes, I know some of you may not think we need poetry.  Try anyway.) 

Layers

Prompt: Think of a book that has shaped the reader that you are.  How has that book impacted the way you take on text?  How has reading impacted you, your schooling, your outlook?  I have given you a glimmer into my reading world.  It is personal and it makes me a little vulnerable.  Please respect this glimmer.  Perhaps, you will see how out of the ashes of failure, knowledge can rise.


As a child I did not read much. Not because I did not want to.  Reading was hard.  I never really read until middle school. I decided that I wanted to get better at reading.  So, I went to the library, and I picked the book The Grapes of Wrath. This was a book I had heard of and the people in my world all spoke so highly of the text. I checked it out and took it home to read. The book was hard for a 6th grader and I only understood that it was about people who were poor and had to move. This book was returned, and I was a defeated reader. I could read all of the words. The problem, I lacked the ability to read the layers. 

This book needed to be peeled back piece by piece. As a 6th grader, this was not my goal. I just wanted to read something good. I went back to the library and grabbed a book that was in the adult section, like the previous book, but further down the alphabet of authors.  That summer, I read all kinds of books that would be considered beach reads. These books taught me to unravel characters, to identify patterns in plot, to pick up on archetypes--I did not know that word then--to differentiate between sentence structures that worked and ones that did not, and to know what good writing sounded like.  

My uncle who was and is an advocate for the classics questioned my book choices. My response, "I'm a teenager who reads. That should be enough." That summer, through these books not deemed by those who dub books as having literary merit, I turned into a reader. It was this door that became my wardrobe leading to Narnia. Words and their power awoke within me a new language hidden behind my own ignorance. It was here that those layers I could not peel back before began to emerge. I could look at text and pull each layer back. Each layer revealed something about the text and it revealed something about me as a reader: constant reading and attention to language made me smarter in all aspects of my learning. I realized that no one is just born a good reader. It takes time, patience, and a willingness to wrestle with what is not understood. Once this happened, this ability to take on text created a hunger in me that only reading could satisfy. 

I read constantly: books, poetry, magazine articles, news articles, professional development texts, essays, and the like. Since then, I have come to terms with Steinbeck. His books are nourishment for any
reader. But, I have him to thank. Without his text being a struggle for a young ambitious reader, I do not think I would be where I am today.  His text taught me to look at text as ever changing.  Though I am older, and his words are the same, the meaning I glean from our conversation is forever changing.  I just need to be willing to look.    

Parents and Children

Analyze the passage below and answer the prompt.  The passage comes from Toni Morrison's book, The Bluest Eye. 

How is the complex nature of parent child relationships illustrated through Morrison's use of figurative language?  What does the reader ultimately come to understand about this father and daughter?

Your response should show a slow and patient unpacking of the text.

Morrison—The Bluest Eye: 61

My daddy’s face is a study.  Winter moves into it and presides there.  His eyes become a cliff of snow threatening to avalanche; his eyebrows bend like black limbs of leafless trees.  His skin takes on the pale, cheerless yellow of winter sun; for a jaw he has the edges of a snowbound field dotted with stubble; his high forehead is the frozen sweep of Erie, hiding currents of gelid thoughts that eddy in darkness.  Wolf killer turned hawk fighter, he worked night and day to keep one from the door and the other from under the windowsills.  A Vulcan guarding the flames, he gives us instructions about which doors to keep closed or opened for proper heat, lays kindling by, discusses qualities of coal, and teaches us how to rake, feed, and bank the fire.  And he will not unrazor his lips until spring.