Tempered Radical: False Transparency. . .

So I immediately tried to counsel my students to safety.  “Are you sure you want to try out for football?  It’s a pretty tough sport, you know.  Why not wait for the basketball, baseball or soccer season?”

Their reply blew me away:  “We’re going to be great at football, Mr. Ferriter.  We completely dominate in Madden 2008 on our PlayStations.  No one can beat us!”

These two boys who had never played an organized sport in their life—-let alone an organized sport where physicality is essential for success and where brutal hits are commonplace—-had convinced themselves that football was the right sport for them because of their video game prowess.  In their minds, mastering skills with digital players on an electronic field in their living rooms translated somehow into an belief that they would excel on a real field wearing real pads trying to tackle 200-pound kids without breaking their necks!

Wild, huh?  […]

Are middle schoolers—-who love fantasy and imagination to begin with—confused, failing to find the line between fiction and reality when determining what they “know” and “can do?”
Interesting questions, huh?

From the Tempered Radical: The Danger of False Transparency

It is an interesting question. Today was graduation at my school, and we said farewell to our ninth graders — our top grade.  The students who have just left are not so confused about the line between video fiction and reality.  But the grades after them seem to be much more fluid.

The thought occurs to me, though… GUITAR HERO and similar games are always improving.  Is there going to come a time when the student fantasy, “I am a great guitar player” is going to collide with the technological marvel of a GUITAR HERO guitar that will mimic the ability to play guitar more closely?  

Will our fantasist simulations ever be indistinguishable from reality? What will school look like when that happens?  Is it going to occur in my professional lifetime, or in some Tomorrrowland I may never see?

Increasingly, I think it will be in my professional life — medical advances and life expectancy changes mean that I may easily work another forty years before retiring.  In now’s climate of Future Shock, 40 years is an eternity — 80 machine generations, 50 medical generations, 100 biotech generations.  The horse may even learn to talk.

Sunday Links: Homer the poet

The goal every Sunday is to find ten or more links that aren’t Wikipedia which do a reasonably good job of explaining a historical event.  Ideally, I try to find three images, three secondary sources, and three primary sources.  This week, we delve into Homer, the ancient Greek poet. This one is hard, because I have to maneuver around Homer Simpson, who is a much larger cultural hero on the Internet.

1.

Homer, in a 5th century BC bust

This is of course the classic image of Homer.  It comes from Ancient Greece.com, which seems to be a reasonably reputable site.  Comapring what’s written here with what I know about Homer, I don’t see any glaring factual errors.  The one complaint that I have with the site is that it seems to have been written by someone with a less-than-perfect command of the English language.  So far, so good.

2.Behold, another excellent link, this time a painting of Homer being crowned as a divinity by the muse of poetry, while all the great poets of succeeding centuries look on in approval and wonder.  Will students get this — that by 1827 AD, Homer’s reputation was such that people wrote odes and created art celebrating the achievements of a poet who’d live more than 2000 years ago?

Apotheosis of Homer

What else?

3. Since they’re copyrighted images, I don’t want to display their modern cartoons directly on my site, but Cartoonstock.com has some moderately funny images associated with Homer.  Some of them are even available for sale on mugs, t-shirts and suchlike.

That does it for images. What about secondary sources?

4. Mythography has a pretty good bio of him, and the English writing is reasonably good.

5. Yahoo.com has an education site with cliffs’ notes-style analyses of major works of literature; here’s the one for the Iliad, along with the information about the poet and his time.  Now even if my students don’t have time to read the whole poem, I can direct them to a summary… Hmmm.

6. Here’s a site that treats Homer as the nominal author of poems composed by the collective wisdom of Mycenaean Greece, and explains why that context is important.

Primary sources?

7. Here’s a gentleman on YouTube who has a fragment of ancient Greek music played on a lyre, attributed to Homer.

8. A sample of someone reading/singing the opening of the Iliad.

9. A translation into English of the Iliad by Walter Leaf, 1902.

10. Primary sources: Iliad, Odyssey and Homeric Hymns at Project Gutenberg.

Overall grade: A-.  Good access to primary and secondary sources about Homer, specifically, as well as to his texts.  I think that one would have a harder time convincing students that “homer” wasn’t a real person so much as the conflation of a thousand-year oral tradition in one person, but that’s not vital for eighth and ninth graders, anyway.

Consider checking out earlier blogs in this series on:

• Galileo and the Copernican Revolution
• Emperor Henry IV at Canossa
• The Roman Army

Addendum: Due to graduation, I didn’t post this until the Tuesday after, but I’ve backdated it to Sunday, so that it’s easy to find in the calendar view by clicking on Sundays.