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| Nick and Eva spy a visitor to the Howell Nature Center Global Village. |
As I narrated, the entire group of fifth and sixth graders acted out brief skits about the challenges and triumphs of the trip: Learning to communicate with each other, bartering for resources, starting a cooking fire, trying to cook with limited ingredients, and eventually trying to fall asleep in cramped and primitive quarters. It was a fun and breezy presentation, that will hopefully generate further conversations.
And since we're talking about equality...
This image always gets people talking. I'll come back to it in a moment.
As part of a beginning-of-the-year writing exercise, I was asking the kids about the basic elements of a story. They quickly rattled off "characters, plot, and setting," but when someone said "theme," many had a hard time explaining what it meant. As a result, I did a read aloud of a Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Have you read it? If not, you can do so here. Go on! It's a very quick read. I'll wait....
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| While you do that, here's a photo of Henry, Niko, Kaz, and Eva celebrating their success at keeping their Global Village balloon baby alive through the night. |
Well, what did you think? Vonnegut really yanks the rug out from under you at the end there, doesn't he?
Harrison Bergeron is a great story to read with 5th and 6th graders. It's funny, brief, and features a big idea that's played out to an almost cartoonish degree. The idea of mandatory equality appeals to them, just as much as the implementation of concept in the story appalls them. (And I've found that the concept of the ear piece broadcasting thought-scattering noises every twenty seconds is a great thing to reference during the times in the year when interrupting each other becomes an issue. Blurting things out when we're having a group conversation causes everyone to have to mentally reset over and over.) (If you haven't read Harrison Bergeron, and you just skimmed past that link earlier, this sentence made no sense to you. For shame.)
Kids like to talk about the different handicaps mentioned in the story, which gets us into talk about why the characters in the story would willfully submit to them (and why other characters would attempt to subvert them). The discussion eventually turns to the idea of equality not necessarily being an inherently good thing, as exemplified by the Equality Versus Justice cartoon above.
Of course, Vonnegut's story is satirical, and being very bright kids, they realized that the society represented in the story didn't match either side of the Equality Versus Justice image. In fact, the equality in Harrison Bergeron was best represented by this image:
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| Equal! |
One can interpret Vonnegut's story a number of ways (and people have! Not always to Vonnegut's satisfaction...), which is another great reason to read it with kids who are expanding their understanding of social justice, while also developing a sense of the power of writing.
