April 8th 3rd Hour Scribe

This is the scribe for yesterday. Sorry, I got the stomache flu last night and forgot to do the scribe. Before we did our dicussion we talked about how Mrs. Moritz can help us to learn Grammer better and the general concensus was that we had learned most of it in previous years but needed a refresher on grammer definitions and she said that we could come see her on our own time if we needed extra help. Also, she plans on doing more discussion led by her and not only the student led discussions. We discussed pages 69-117 of 1984. The group leaders were Erin, Olivia and Catherine Cole. Our "ticket" into class was having a question prepared for a socratic seminar. They collected these questions and but them into a hat, then put everyone's name into a bag. They began by assessing our reading comprehension by doing a five question quiz, which if you had read the section, should have known the answers to. For instance two of the questions included "What does the note that the brown haired girl gives to Winston say?" and "Where does Winston meet the brown haired girl?" Then we circled up and commenced with the socratic seminar. The way that it worked was that one of the group leaders would have another person in the cirle draw out a name from the bag and a question which they would ask the person whose name they had drawn. A few of the questions included " What was the revolution and what happened during it?, What were the purges?, What does the glass, coral hemishpere represent? Is every aspect of life in the society in 1984 negative, even love and relationships? Is Big Brother a real person or not?, How does Winston go from wanting to bash the brown haired girl with the glass hemishpere int the head to passionatley loving her?" For the first question, we discussed how the revolution was when Big Brother first came to power and when the other revolutionary leaders, Rutherford, Aaronson, Goldstein and Jones, were exiled. Then we talked about how the purges may have been a time when the older generation, who had remebered life before the revolution, were killed and the people who were against the Party were taken away and killed as well. In this way the Party was cleansing itself of anti-party ideas. Catherine thought that the glass hemisphere represented Big Brother's opressive power over the Party the same way that a paperweight holds down paper. Other people (Joe?)thought that the glass hemishere represented life as it was before the revolution and as preserved history. I think another opinion was that it represents the love between Winston and the brown haired girl. Then we talked about Winston going from wanting to kill the brown haired girl to loving her, which led Mrs. Moritz to ask whether relationships and love in their society are always negative. Erin stated that when Winston thinks that the girl hates him then he hates her and when he thinks she loves him he loves her back. Then we talked about how the emotion of love and hate both fuel relationships and they are sort of the the same emotion. Then Mrs. Moritz mentioned that the theme of this book is negative and dark so their relationship is in many ways negative, at least when it begins. It has to be negative because that would ruin the mood of the book if it was positive. Then we ended by talking about whether Big Brother is real or not and the majority of the class didn't think he was real and was simply a symbol of the Party. I mentioned that the statue of him pointing southward in Victory Square could be symbolic of an event that may have happened though it could be a made- up event that was made to be fact. Then we finshed class and had parts of a new Grammer Packet assigned on commas.