REMINDERS and UPCOMING ACTIVITIES

• All propaganda PowerPoints or videos should be ready to upload to the front desk computer at the start of class on Tuesday (except for Orkila group and the three students I spoke with this morning). 
• We will hear 3 or 4 on Tuesday and the remainder on Wednesday.
• With the rest of Tues./Wed (maybe into Thursday) there will be a group assignment related to the slogans.
• Friday will be a 1984 wrap-up day--essays ideally due so you are done.
• Final Exam:  1984 only (GradeCam objective plus two paragraph responses)
• 5th period--on Monday, June 5th, during regular class time
• 1st and 2nd periods--on Wednesday, June 10th, during regular class time

From the Magna Carta to 1984
There are two things tonight that feed into our reading and thinking about 1984.

1)This entire article captures the significance of this document that was, yes, just one of the many historical facts about England that consumed some of our (your) time during the first semester.  We are NOT going back to that semester  now except for this one thing;  read this article, and be able to tell me which paragraph most resonates with our study of Orwell. (Okay, there's more I want you to get out of it, but just read it, please.)
The Magna Carta: 8 Centuries of Liberty

2) The attacks we've come to summarize as 9/11 happened at a point that I was substituting, and so I was not even teaching senior English, let alone teaching 1984 at a point that the country barely debated the implications of the Patriot Act during a tense and very fearful time in our nation's history.
But the renewal and possible revision of certain points of the Patriot Act a few years later prompted very lively classroom and written discussion.  From time to time, there have also been local xconcerns--the proposal to place security cameras in certain Seattle parks, for example--that allowed students to debate the conflicting merits/limitations of measures, powers, or devices intended to provide greater protection (viewed in one way) or to encroach on personal privacy and freedoms (viewed in another).

So far this year we haven't made explicit connections between Orwell's world and ours.  But as you might be aware, the Patriot Act has been the subject of intense Congressional scrutiny in the past weeks and days.  There are three articles in this section that you need to read for Tuesday (students in clas today got a headstart).

Here is an a basic "starter" article from Sunday night:
The Patriot Act Lapses

And this one is updated this morning from the Seattle Times (as you can see); it also has a sidebar column containing the actual text of the most controversial provisions:
Seattle Times Patriot Act article

Article that spells out the most controversial parts and also explains the next steps.

Read these three, please--and consider what YOU think the Senate should do. And is your opinion affected by whether an article starts out by discussing a "surveillance program" that has lapsed, or if it says that a "spy program" has been suspended?

Is this English class? YES.  Because George Orwell wants people to think about the role of government, government policy, the language we use to talk about the actions governments take, the role government plays in people's lives, and at what cost (not so much money--but everything else)--and clearly, the cost can be for both what government DOES as well as what it does NOT do. Orwell's guidance and his opinions are useful only up to a point, because his perspective is over 66 years earlier than yours.  And yet people keep making connections--why??

And A Couple More
3) Here's a random thing--a weather article, sort of--that I saw the other day; it takes awhile to get to the key phrase, and maybe you think the connection is a bit strained; my point is simply that even in the seventh decade after 1984 was published, allusions in the press pop up all the time.  This one was from last week:
Connecting Texas Floods to Big Brother?

Beyond the technology slant of the article, here's a thought regarding Washington state. Where is the line between telling people where they CAN'T build a home vs. where it might be dangerous to build a home?

4)  Finally, we ran out of time during Frankenstein before we could see "AI" or really discuss lots of other ways in which scientific capability (or near-capability) might run afoul of ethics or somehow run amok by violating laws of nature that we don't even fully understand.  But this article touches on an area that both Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking have also cited as a very major fear.
A Frankenstein Connection?