Rhetoric gone bad: Goebbel's propaganda Red Army produces not resolve among Germans, but guilt

In Richard Evans' "The Third Reich at War," Richard Evans' claims:

The last two years of the war were filled with atrocity propaganda emanating from Goebbels's mass media: the Red Army in particular was portrayed, not entirely inaccurately, as hell-bent on raping and killing Germans as it advanced. Yet the effects of this were not what Goebbels intended. From from leading to a strengthening of resolve amongst ordinary Germans, this propaganda only served to reveal deep-seated feeling of guilt that they had done nothing to prevent the Jews being killed

. In 1944, the SS reproted that Goebbels's propaganda graphically portraying the lootings, killings, and rapes carried out by Red Army Troops in Prussia, (following is quotation from the SS report)

in many cases achieved the opposite of what was intended Compatriots say it is shameless to make so much of them in the German press... 'What does the leadership intend by the publication of such pictures as those in teh National Socialist Courier on Sunday? They should realise that the sight of these victims will remind every thinking person of the atrocities we have committed in enemy territory, even in Germany itself. Have we not murdered thousdands of Jews? Don't soldiers again and again report that Jews in Poland have had to dig their own graves? And how did we treat the Jews in the concentration camp in Alsace?... (The opinion of numerous people from all classes of the population.)

Here's Calvin College's website with Nazi propaganda material, including posters: http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/ Poster of Red Army soldiers raping a German woman: http://robertlindsay.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/art057.gif Original website of the poster: http://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2010/01/16/cool-nazi-era-photos/

Christopher Hitchens' essay on Gatsby

Teaching Gatsby? See Christopher Hitchens' recent essay in Vanity Fair!   vnty.fr/JzSNli

It contains an argument about why it's a definitive American novel and has some great examples of old-school analysis:  

There are two key words in the book. They are “pointless” (and its analogues) and “careless.” They recur with striking and mounting emphasis as the narrative shakes off its near-permanent hangover. A dog biscuit at Tom Buchanan’s adulterous and nasty gathering is represented as “decomposed apathetically” in a saucer of milk; Myrtle on the same horrid occasion “looked at me and laughed pointlessly.” At Gatsby’s bigger but even hollower party, there’s a cocktail table—“the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.” After “a somehow wasteful and inappropriate half hour,” Jordan Baker wants to leave. In New York one hot evening, Nick notices “young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.” Driving through Central Park, Gatsby “came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor.” Is there a line more expressive of vicious tedium than Daisy’s petulant demand: “What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon, and the day after that, and the next thirty years?” If there is, it’s the earlier pettishness when she insists on knowing whatever it is that people do when they make plans. Even the great cars are bored and affectless: “The dilatory limousine came rolling up the drive.” When Tom talks about getting gas, “a pause followed this apparently pointless remark”; when the stop for gas is made, the expression on Myrtle’s face at first seems “purposeless and inexplicable.” In West Egg, Daisy dreads “the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a shortcut from nothing to nothing.” As Nick takes his penultimate leave of Gatsby, he quits him “standing there in the moonlight—watching over nothing.” Here is the full-out horror of torpor and morbidity and futility and waste, saturated in joyless heat and sweat. Gatsby came out in April of that year of grace 1925: the cruelest month seems right.

George Hillocks on bad goals and objectives

In the Introduction to his book Teaching Argument Writing, Hillocks talks about bad objectives, good objectives, and how each calls for a different instructional sequence. Bad objectives can lead to ineffective teaching. Some bad goals and objectives: Students will write a persuasive essay about a school problem of concern to them. Students will explore the imagery of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." The class will discuss the various conflicts that Trueson faces in Light in the Forest. Students will study the meaning of twenty vocabulary words. Students will write an essay analyzing Mark Antony's funeral speech over Caesar's body. "These objectives are all either assignments or stipulations of how class time will be spent. They do not stipulate what students are to learn. Furthermore, they do not indicate how the learnings, whatever they are, will be assessed. Consider the final objective... My guess is that this is either an assignment or test item for students after they have read the speech alone or in the classroom. More importantly, we need to ask what instruction prepared students to make the required analysis of Antony's speech. If the instruction simply involved some classroom talk about the speech, talk that supplied some analysis, then the objective is merely about recall. Can the students remember what the teacher said about the speech and how it uses irony to undercut Brutus as an "honorable man"?" Here's a better version of the same objective: "Given an unfamiliar passage, such as Mark Antony's speech at Caesar's funeral, students will write an essay identifying the uses of irony and interpreting its impact on the meaning of the passage." "This objective requires a totally different instructional sequence.... The focus will not be on remembering the teacher's interpretation of a passage but on learning how to interpret irony." "Shaping objectives in this way demands a reconceptualization of teaching and even the curriculum. Neither can be any longer simply a matter of covering topics or works and making assignments and hoping that some of it rubs off on students. It becomes necessary to ask, How will what we do in class today help students become more expert in dealing with specific tasks tomorrow?" Here's a better objective for arguments of fact: After independently examining a set of data concerning a certain problem, students will write an argument about what the facts of the matter are. The argument must provide a claim with support including four to five pieces of evidence, warrants explaining how the evidence supports the claim and is relevant, qualifications about the limitations of the claim and warrants, and counter arguments dealing with possible opposing views.

Can Daydreaming Promote Academics?

USC assistant professor Mary Helen Immordino-Yang co-authored a paper, “Rest Is Not Idleness,” which examines the neurobiology of the brain at rest or in “default mode.”  The article suggests that diminishing opportunities for young people to look inward and reflect could have negative effects on their well-being, morality and academic success.

A child with a wandering mind in the classroom may perform poorly on the task that requires concentration. Part of helping the child to focus better, the research suggested, is to help him or her learn to manage inward and outward attention more appropriately. Attending to tasks effectively is essential for gathering new information from lessons. But the reflection a child may learn to engage during mind wandering also is potentially critical for healthy development and learning in the longer term.

Immordino-Yang argued that teachers need to distinguish between a loss of focus and mindful reflection, teaching students skills for constructive internal processing and productive reflection. She also warned against an overuse of social media among teens, which appears to be harmful to the development of the higher-thinking abilities and associated benefits.
“Consistently imposing overly high-attention demands on children, either in school, through entertainment or through living conditions, may rob them of opportunities to advance from thinking about ‘what happened’ or ‘how to do this’ to constructing knowledge about ‘what this means for the world and for the way I live my life,’ ” she said. 

http://news.usc.edu/#!/article/34757/can-daydreaming-improve-academics/

Every assessment choice is a value judgment

Howard Gardener replied to a NYT article "Nonfiction Curriculum Enhanced Reading Skills, Study Finds" (published March 12, 2012) with this:

It is instructive to know that second graders who received a Core Knowledge curriculum performed better tahn comparison gropus on measures of reading. But every choice of curriculum -- and, more important, every choice of an assessment measure -- entails a value judgment. Those educators who selected a reading program that valued fictional works (NOT those who chose the Core Knowledge Curriculum in the study) presumably thought that was an appropriate emphasis. It is now up to those educators to provide measures that might reveal better performances on their currciulum -- for example, richer imagination by students or a greater liklihood of reading books of any sort outside the school environment.

Today I was part of a discussion about rearranging curriculum so that teachers can measure student growth in writing. One teacher, Jim, noted that one unintended side-effect of this kind of thinking could make him shy away from asking kids to engage in complex, messy writing assessments which might blow up in his face, but might also yield some really good thinking and writing. Jim said, "I would be tempted to stick to the things that I know would show results." When you build a rubric, or an assessment, you're always drawing boundaries around what's important, what's worth looking at in student writing, and what's not relevant. When you build a common rubric to measure writing over the course of months or quarters or years, there's a lot that you're leaving out. There's also a tremendous advantage of naming the things that count. The goal is to keep this teeter-totter balanced.

Rhetoric: a political speech that was "a feat of mass hypnosis"

Goebbels' "Total War" speech in Febuary 1943 after Germany's defeat to Soviets at Stalingrad is thought to be a masterly work of political rhetoric. It's also an interesting example of how different audiences heard very different things. Some thought the openness about the serious nature of recent German loses was inspiring because it was honest. Others felt that the call for total war and end of luxury was absurd because standard of living was so low. Others noted its hypnotic effect on the audience. Here's a translation of he speech: http://bit.ly/KXzmQo See Richard Evans' The Third Reich at War pp 424-432.