The Book of Ruth and Social Justice and Levirate Laws

Here is an integration unit I created on The Book of Ruth, which can be read as a contemplation of the laws governing behavior towards the poor and those most vulnerable in the ancient world with the obligation to go beyond the letter of the law:

The Book of Ruth

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And the Winner Is . . .

For Shakespeare's birthday today, my tenth graders played a game I describe in this post. We ended up teaming the girls against the boys:

The boys working on the Shakespeare Birthday Bash Game

We dressed up for the day; this student wore this shirt to show
the motif of rule and misrule in the play she studied this year,
 A Midsummer Night's Dream

This student brought a crown to show the Elizabethan age

And the winner is . . . Wait, before I announce the winner, let me just say that one of the boys said this was the "hardest" he's ever worked in class, and he feels like he knows all of Shakespeare's plays. How's that for "hard fun" (see Frank Moss' The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices) and a wild but still structured 40 minutes -- that also included donuts?

OK, so the winners were . . .

THE BOYS!

Here are their findings, all done on computers and iPads, in a 40-minute period:

Shakespeare Game: Boys

4/23/13

1) “Though this be madness there is method in’t”- Hamlet; Act 2, Scene 2, Line 203 (Polonius)

2) “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ‘em.”- Twelfth Night; Act 2, Scene 5, Line 144 (Malvolio)

            CONTEXT: Malvolio is reading Maria’s fake letter, from Olivia

3) “ Out, out damned spot”- Macbeth’ Act 5, Scene 1, Line 35 (Lady Macbeth)

            CONTEXT: Lady Macbeth, who was anxious about the murders she was         responsible for, hallucinated that there was blood on her hands.

4) “This is very midsummer madness.”- Twelfth Night; Act 3, Scene 4, Line 56 (Olivia)

            CONTEXT: Malvolio and Olivia are fighting

5) “ Friendship is constant in all other thing, save in the office and affairs of love. Therefore, all hearts in love use their own tongs; let every eye negotiate for itself,  and trust no other agent.”- Much ado About nothing, Act 2, Scene 1, Line 158-162 (Claudio)

7) “Men at some times are masters of their fates, the fault dear brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings” Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2, Line 35 (CASSIUS)

8) “The poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling.” Midsummer Nights Dream, Act 5, Scene 1 (Theseus)

            CONTEXT: Hippolyta is taunting Theusus about his “Lover”

9) “Life is but a walking shadow.”- Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5,  Line 24(Macbeth)

            CONTEXT: It means that there is no originality left in life.  

10) “If I be waspish, best beware my sting.”- Taming of the shrew; Act 1, scene 10, line 1,059 (Katherina)

11) “Ay me! for aught that ever I could read, Could ever hear by tale or history, The course of true love never did run smooth.”- Midsummer nights dream; Act 1, Scene 1, Line 132 (Lysander)

12) What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god. The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. And, yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? – Hamlet; Act 2, scene 2, Line 1397(Hamlet)

Shakespeare's Birthday Bash Game

Today, in honor of Shakespeare's birthday, first we're going to eat "Duncan" Donuts, and then we're going to divide the class in two. Each group has to locate the plays, acts, scenes and lines in which the following quotations can be found. You also have to find the characters who said them. For five of the quotations, the groups also have to explain the context of the lines. All of these quotations are what make the Bard so famous and so admired.

As Ben Jonson wrote in his ode to the poet, "Nature herself was proud of his designs/And joyed to wear the dressing of his lines." Notice that this sentiment reinforces the idea we talked about, that Elizabethans loved the artificial, that is, Nature enhanced by art.

Here are the lines the groups have to research:

Friendship is constant in all other things,
Save in the office and affairs of love.
Therefore, all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself,
And trust no other agent.


How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child.


Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.


Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them.


If I be waspish, best beware my sting.


The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,.
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.


Ay me! for aught that ever I could read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth.


Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.


Out, out, damned spot.


Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings.


This is very midsummer madness.


What a piece of work is a man!
How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties!
In form and moving, how express and admirable!
In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.
The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.
And, yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

Modernism and Postmodernism Assignment

To prepare for our discussion of The Great Gatsby, my 11H class and I have been discussing Modernism and Postmodernism. We read the Modernist poems, "The Snow Man" by Wallace Stevens; "Desert Places" and "Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Robert Frost; "pity this busy monster, manunkind" by ee cummings; and "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath. We also read the Postmodern poems, "The Writer" by Richard Wilbur and "The Story We Know" by Martha Collins.

Today, I asked my students to explicate a Modernist poem or write one of their own. I allowed students to write in a more Postmodernist mode if they wanted. Here is the actual assignment and how their work is coming along.

Sophomore Explorations Continue

My sophomores have been busy this year with the theme of exploration. We spent third quarter exploring the creative power of the Renaissance, and the students divided themselves into groups to research and analyze different Shakespearean comedies. The students blogged about their work on their new class blog, 10H Explorations.

As we continue with our next era, the Enlightenment, and our next work, Candide, the students will be completing an outside reading assignment that allows them a little freedom in their reading selection and also reiterates the themes of creativity and innovation we've been focusing on since the Renaissance. Here is the outside reading assignment.

The March to Freedom: Passover and the Arts

Passover is a time when we contemplate freedom, and this year I happen to be thinking about the freedom to be artistically creative. When we took our Passover break in school, I was in the middle of the Renaissance with my AP Art History class, and right before our vacation, we saw how the Renaissance began a process that eventually freed art from the constraints of the political and religious powers it was under in the ancient and medieval worlds.

Bronzino's Portrait of a Young Man, 1530's
This portrait from the Mannerist era,  a bridge movement from the Renaissance
to the Baroque period, is of an aristocrat and shows the importance that the individual
began to have in the Renaissance world

True, art was bound from the Renaissance to the 19th century to traditional subjects such as mythology, history, religion, and portraiture, with landscape, still life and genre painting becoming acceptable in the 17th and 18th centuries, but these small steps towards artistic freedom should not be belittled. They were important ones that led to the freedom artists such as Gericault took advantage of when he painted Insane Woman in the early 19th century:

Gericault never could have painted a portrait of an insane woman
if the Renaissance hadn't opened up the Western world to the power
of the individual

By the 20th century, artists such as Picasso, Duchamp and Kandinsky shook things up even more by abstracting art to basic, even nonsense forms, thus releasing it forever from any kind of standard or straitjacket. Mark Tansey makes fun of this process in his triptych, A Short History of Modernist Painting, which takes us from the Renaissance all the way on the left, with its "opening up a window onto the world," to Modernism in the middle, which is about the artist coming up against the constraints of form, to the post-modern world, which contemplates itself ad infinitum, to the point that we are all absurd, or as Tansey suggests, chickens:

Mark Tansey's A Short History of Modernist Painting

The Israelite and other slaves in Egypt as well as slaves in additional parts of the ancient world did not have any kind of freedom, artistic or otherwise. When my AP Art History class and I study ancient Egypt, we note that though the Israelites were not the ones to build the pyramids, Khufu's pyramid, for example, took 84,000 slaves 80 days per year for 20 years to build. The Bible, Exodus 1:11, records the fact that the Israelites were responsible for building the store-cities of Pithom and Raamses. We often learn about city planning as a form of art. Here is a Hippodamian city plan from Hellenistic times that the class studies:

Not only were slaves in the ancient world conscripted to build the pharaoh's tombs; they were also conscripted to build cities and anything else the pharaoh decided he wanted. Even in the Renaissance, a time when art was changing and wealthy patrons began to support individual artists who could then earn an autonomous living with their work, an artist as great as Michelangelo couldn't escape the demands of the pope, who ordered the artistic genius to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Michelangelo tried to hide with the Medici family in Florence, but it's really hard to ignore a papal summons. (For more information on this topic, go to this informative site.) 

If Michelangelo had had complete artistic freedom,
the world would have been denied his wondrous Sistine Chapel ceiling

Eventually, Michelangelo relented, though he was furious at the thought of having to paint, when all he wanted to do was sculpt. Michelangelo first and foremost considered himself a sculptor. (Side note: I wish my second-best talent could produce something on a par with the Sistine Chapel ceiling.) The relationship between artist and patron could be contentious as the one with Michelangelo and Pope Julius II shows. 

Michelangelo used a portrait of Pope Julius II to represent the prophet Zachariah.
One of the two cherubic-like beings behind the pope gives the Holy See a rude finger gesture
known as The Fig, showing Michelangelo's feelings for his employer

Though we love the results of Pope Julius' tyranny over one of the most famous Renaissance artists, we can also come to appreciate in this short sojourn through the history of art how much artistic license artists have today. In the Western world, we are free to create and imagine anything we can think of, and we can earn a living if others appreciate our artistic expressions. Andy Warhol encapsulated this democratic spirit, albeit sarcastically, as he also pokes fun at our highly commercialized world, in his famous Coke ad:

Everyone, rich or poor, can enjoy a Coke (and a cavity, obesity and diabetes, but that's for another post ;). Though one may argue about whether Warhol intended to be so embracing of universal man, a democratic ideal can be seen in the work, which shatters the concept of high art, art that has traditional subjects, and replaces it with subject matter that is accessible and understood by everyone. 

In the beginning of March, I remarked on the production of The Comedy of Errors that the Frisch Parents Association brought to the school. When I reread the play and some scholarly articles on it ("Consideration, Contract, and the End of The Comedy of Errors" by Andrew Zucher and "The Comedy of Errors and the Meaning of Contract" by Paul Raffield), I learned that the dispute over the chain in the play heralds a new focus on the rights of the businessman and contract law, a realm of law that would slowly move the Western world to the commercial one in which we live today. It is no accident, then, that the Renaissance word painter, Shakespeare, ends his play, in which servant twins are beaten dreadfully and for great audience laughs, with the servant twins speaking to each other:

DROMIO OF EPHESUS
Methinks you are my glass, and not my brother:
I see by you I am a sweet-faced youth.
Will you walk in to see their gossiping?

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE
Not I, sir; you are my elder.

DROMIO OF EPHESUS
That's a question: how shall we try it?

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE
We'll draw cuts for the senior: till then lead thou first.

DROMIO OF EPHESUS
Nay, then, thus:
We came into the world like brother and brother;
And now let's go hand in hand, not one before another.

Exeunt

Act V Scene I

The two Dromios see in each other not hierarchy and class, but an equal, a brother, in the most literal sense of the word, since they are twins, and their conclusion, as they debate who should enter the house where the other characters are celebrating, is to eschew seniority, rank and power and instead replace it with fraternity and brotherhood, in other words, democracy. 

We who follow in Moshe's path, who note the injustices of the world and will not be quiet, who aim for equality and freedom for all, can recognize the march to liberation that the Western artistic world has taken and that has been somewhat limned in this post, because that march was begun in the Torah, by the Reed Sea, in the story we celebrate on Passover, the festival of freedom. 

Chag sameach.

The Passover Seder with Games and Background Context

My sister Smadar Goldstein, founder and partner of JETS, Jerusalem Ed Tech Solutions, always makes her own sedarim highly interactive. Past years have seen her kids putting red food coloring in a bathtub to replicate the plague of blood; building tents to mimic B'nei Yisrael's journey in the wilderness; ad adopting the Sephardic practice of beating the parents with scallions (parents do seem like wicked taskmasters to their children, no doubt).

Smadar shared with me the games she made for this year's seder, one of which is based on an integration unit I've given to elementary and high school students on how the plagues attack the Egyptian theological worldview. Below are Smadar's games as well as my integration unit:

Smadar Goldstein's Pesach Seder Games by Tikvah

God vs. the Egyptians by Tikvah

The list of Egyptian gods and plagues comes from here. Much of the information in my "source sheet" makes use of Nahum Sarna's JPS Torah Commentary on Exodus.

Yossi Prager, Executive Director of AVICHAI, uses some of my information and points out additional ways to make your seder more interactive and meaningful on this eJewish Philanthropy blog post:

Reflections of a Parent-Educator and Amateur Egyptologist on Seder Night

Enjoy your seder and have a chag kasher v'sameach!