Letter to StudentsThis is a featured page

Welcome to the online raft, our own class wiki!


Dear American Myth students,

We have two stories for you.

12x16 raftFirst, in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the young narrator Huck discovers that the river liberates him from the constraints of the land-dwellers, represented by his strict aunt, his abusive father, and community after community of chaos. On his raft, whose dimensions are 12 feet by 16 feet, he and the runaway slave Jim create their own world, one in which white and black, youth and experience, faith and superstition, racism and acceptance coincide and coexist. Huck decides that if being on this 12x16 raft with Jim is going to get him sent to hell, then "All right, then, I'll go to hell." He undoes his learned racism and undergoes a paradigm shift. That's 192 square feet of change.

The 12x16 raft (or a 12x16 curriculum) is a safe space, in which Huck and Jim (or students and teachers) can co-create and negotiate. It is when only one group creates (teachers delivering curriculum, students regurgitating the teacher's delivery) that animosity is born, when boredom thrives, when the potential thrill of learning is stifled, and when no one risks anything. Students and teachers come from all kinds of backgrounds, with all kinds of identities, skills, talents, and interests. A classroom should be a safe space for all learners (including the teacher) to co-exist.

Public Domain icon E.W. Kemble, 1884 edition


Pius XI High American Myth Home - Pius XI High American MythSecond, in Walden, Henry David Thoreau wonders why so many of us lead "lives of quiet desperation," always working,
sweating, toiling, rarely with any purpose or end in mind. He experimented with happiness, purpose, and simplicity by building a small hut at Walden Pond. The hut was only 10 feet by 15 feet, but he found joy in the very act of building his own dwelling and living "deliberately," not desperately. For two years, he demanded answers from his world:

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life living is so dear...I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily...as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms."
That's 150 square feet of living. A 10x15 hut (or a 10x15 classroom), then, is a place where we should be able to ask and answer:

  • How can we alleviate our quiet desperation?
  • How can we build our own huts?
  • How can we ask questions and demand answers from our world?
  • How can we live deliberately and suck out all the marrow of life?

This wiki website will be our central meeting place, our online 12x16/10x15 space to plan, to share, to discuss texts, and to work outside of class and between classes. We will invite you to join the site and participate regularly in the discussions. We look forward to co-learning with you!

Sincerely,

English Department
Pius XI High School



DominicI
DominicI 		Latest page update: made by DominicI , Jan 4 2009, 6:19 PM EST (about this update About This Update DominicI Edited by DominicI

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