The time has come.
My sixth grade ELA class is reading The Giver.
If you have been to middle school in the past 20 years, you have read The Giver and it has changed your life. If you don't think it changed your life, you just haven't realized yet. I didn't know The Giver had changed my life until I reread it a couple months ago (having not read it since seventh grade) and it dawned on me that all of my ideas about what the future (or, now, present) should be like have come from this dystopian little gem of a YA novel.
I'll get back to The Giver in a moment, but I have to digress to share my most deeply held belief. If you are reading this you are probably a person I know, and if you are a person I know, we have probably had this debate. And you have strongly disagreed with me. But you have not diminished my resolve, and now I am going to write this on my blog and I'll fight the whole internet over it. Here is my belief:
It is super weird and archaic that we still give birth to babies.
Imagine that you were cryogenically frozen in the 17th century. Now look around you in the year 2014. Everything is absolute magic. iPads! 3D printers! People wearing spandex clothes, like astronauts! Astronauts! Cryogenic technology! It is all just impossible.
"How do you get from place to place?" you ask.
"Well, we have these airplanes that can fly across the entire country in like 6 hours, and rapid transit systems that can cross an entire city in 30 minutes," answers the spandex-wearing person.
"How do you nourish yourselves?" you ask.
"We take this one box and put it in this other box and press a button on the second box and it comes out as food. It takes about 90 seconds," says the ostensible astronaut.
"How do you perpetuate the species?" you ask.
"Oh... we carry our young in in our wombs for 9 months and then birth them out of ourselves... basically the same way it's been done for all of human history," responds your crazy new future friend while capturing a moving picture of herself on her mysterious glowing brick. Womp.
Another thing that is super weird and archaic is weather. If I haven't mentioned this yet, we are living in the year 2014. We can clone mammals. I don't understand what the Higgs Boson is, but we discovered that. And yet we still have to deal with rain?
I'm not saying these are easy problems (yes, childbirth and weather are both problems) to solve. I'm just saying, this is not how I pictured life in the mid-teens of the third millennium AD.
Which brings me back to The Giver. Namely this:
"The first Ceremony began right on time, and Jonas watched as one after another each newchild was given a name and handed by the Nurturers to its new family unit."
And this:
"But what happened to those thing? Snow, and the rest of it?"
"Climate Control. Snow made growing food difficult, limited the agricultural periods. And unpredictable weather made transportation almost impossible at times. It wasn't a practical thing, so it became obsolete."
Oops. All of my ideas about how an advanced society should operate are dystopian. And were planted in my head at age twelve by a YA novel.
And now, as a reading teacher, I proudly pass this baton to a new generation of twelve-year-olds. The dystopian future is now.
Speaking of twelve-year-olds, another great thing about The Giver is when the preteens in the book start having wet dreams ("the Stirrings") and have to take pills for them. Sometimes I can't tell if my kids are so mature that they don't laugh at things like this, or if they're so immature that they don't realize they should laugh at things like this, or if they have really poor reading comprehension, which is more concerning. In any case, I posed this question in a class discussion on Thursday: "Does Jonas want to keep having these dreams, or does he want them to stop?" I knew I needed to call on a child strategically, so I called on a sweet boy whom I am going to refer to here simply as Kitten, because that is what he is. Kitten's response:
"I think Jonas wants to keep having these dreams because they give him pleasure. Jonas is pleasured by the dreams."
No. One. Laughed.
(Except for the two other teachers overhearing my lesson, who laughed a lot.)
Are the kids amazingly professional and mature? Nope. They're just sort of bad at vocabulary. Neither Kitten nor the rest of the class understood the nuanced difference between "pleased" and "pleasured." So to everyone in the room under thirteen, all Kitten had said was that the dreams were pretty nice.
You guys get to work on the childbirth and weather issues, and I'll start making my class some vocab flashcards.
My sixth grade ELA class is reading The Giver.
If you have been to middle school in the past 20 years, you have read The Giver and it has changed your life. If you don't think it changed your life, you just haven't realized yet. I didn't know The Giver had changed my life until I reread it a couple months ago (having not read it since seventh grade) and it dawned on me that all of my ideas about what the future (or, now, present) should be like have come from this dystopian little gem of a YA novel.
I'll get back to The Giver in a moment, but I have to digress to share my most deeply held belief. If you are reading this you are probably a person I know, and if you are a person I know, we have probably had this debate. And you have strongly disagreed with me. But you have not diminished my resolve, and now I am going to write this on my blog and I'll fight the whole internet over it. Here is my belief:
It is super weird and archaic that we still give birth to babies.
Imagine that you were cryogenically frozen in the 17th century. Now look around you in the year 2014. Everything is absolute magic. iPads! 3D printers! People wearing spandex clothes, like astronauts! Astronauts! Cryogenic technology! It is all just impossible.
"How do you get from place to place?" you ask.
"Well, we have these airplanes that can fly across the entire country in like 6 hours, and rapid transit systems that can cross an entire city in 30 minutes," answers the spandex-wearing person.
"How do you nourish yourselves?" you ask.
"We take this one box and put it in this other box and press a button on the second box and it comes out as food. It takes about 90 seconds," says the ostensible astronaut.
"How do you perpetuate the species?" you ask.
"Oh... we carry our young in in our wombs for 9 months and then birth them out of ourselves... basically the same way it's been done for all of human history," responds your crazy new future friend while capturing a moving picture of herself on her mysterious glowing brick. Womp.
Another thing that is super weird and archaic is weather. If I haven't mentioned this yet, we are living in the year 2014. We can clone mammals. I don't understand what the Higgs Boson is, but we discovered that. And yet we still have to deal with rain?
I'm not saying these are easy problems (yes, childbirth and weather are both problems) to solve. I'm just saying, this is not how I pictured life in the mid-teens of the third millennium AD.
Which brings me back to The Giver. Namely this:
"The first Ceremony began right on time, and Jonas watched as one after another each newchild was given a name and handed by the Nurturers to its new family unit."
And this:
"But what happened to those thing? Snow, and the rest of it?"
"Climate Control. Snow made growing food difficult, limited the agricultural periods. And unpredictable weather made transportation almost impossible at times. It wasn't a practical thing, so it became obsolete."
Oops. All of my ideas about how an advanced society should operate are dystopian. And were planted in my head at age twelve by a YA novel.
And now, as a reading teacher, I proudly pass this baton to a new generation of twelve-year-olds. The dystopian future is now.
Speaking of twelve-year-olds, another great thing about The Giver is when the preteens in the book start having wet dreams ("the Stirrings") and have to take pills for them. Sometimes I can't tell if my kids are so mature that they don't laugh at things like this, or if they're so immature that they don't realize they should laugh at things like this, or if they have really poor reading comprehension, which is more concerning. In any case, I posed this question in a class discussion on Thursday: "Does Jonas want to keep having these dreams, or does he want them to stop?" I knew I needed to call on a child strategically, so I called on a sweet boy whom I am going to refer to here simply as Kitten, because that is what he is. Kitten's response:
"I think Jonas wants to keep having these dreams because they give him pleasure. Jonas is pleasured by the dreams."
No. One. Laughed.
(Except for the two other teachers overhearing my lesson, who laughed a lot.)
Are the kids amazingly professional and mature? Nope. They're just sort of bad at vocabulary. Neither Kitten nor the rest of the class understood the nuanced difference between "pleased" and "pleasured." So to everyone in the room under thirteen, all Kitten had said was that the dreams were pretty nice.
You guys get to work on the childbirth and weather issues, and I'll start making my class some vocab flashcards.
Fantastic. I love you blog!
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