The Arc of the Summer

Recently, Franny shared a post with me that has stuck in my mind.  Check it out.  It's stuck with me, in part, because I'm unsure what to make of it, or rather I suspect it has more layers than I've yet been able to peel back.  It's about language, to be sure, and art and it's relationship with truth.  It's also about the nature of history as fact, faith as a way of knowing, and is painfully pertinent to the world right at this moment.  Humanitarian crises swirl in the Ukraine, Iraq, Gaza, Nigeria, along the U.S.-Mexico border, and beyond. This morning, listening to a news report of a fatwa issued by the members of ISIS, ordering all females in Mosul to undergo FGM (which, though it may be an erroneous report, is no less horrifying), I thought ruefully of some words of hope.  Some arcs, I thought, curve so gently as to appear linear.  I thought also, as we have before, together, of the intersection of truth and moral right with perspective.  These are the times, in the face of horror, that I struggle to understand the other side. We must not, surely, be asking one another to honor every perspective.  Isn't there, in some moments, an objective "right," and accompanying wrong?  Here, then, is your challenge: pluck a situation from this week's news, one where you see a clear moral distinction.  Defend it as such, then filter it through the origin of this post (the man on the bench). How do the two relate?  End with a knowledge question, please, and post by your local noon on Wednesday, 30 July.

Saving You From a Life of Crime

I told you this was the most importent course in the world.  Thirty-one years after he first proved that ice cream and accordions do mix, "Weird Al" Yankovic is back to insure that you're use of language is more than a way of knowing that you don't know what your talking about. Watch this video.  Twice. Does anything you c make you blush?  Is their a rule or a example there about which you're unsure? Considering you're in the middle of writing your extended essay isn't now a great time to make absolutely certain that you arent perpetrating a crime? Is the answer to all of these questions the same?  For your local noon on Wednesday 23 July, please post the following; one grammatically perfect paragraph identifying and explaining the most interesting discovery to date from your EE; a correction of 1 error from this paragraph. There are 15 errors: you must find one that nobody else has yet identified.

Don't Tell Me What To Draw

As the summer heats up, let's think about perspectives and the ways they're provided.  Consider three cartoons, the information they offer, and the ways that they deliver their messages.  First, examine this installment of xkcd, which allows you to draw your own conclusions (or does it?).  Likewise, this Doonesbury strip leaves the door open for readers to fall into the same trap as the patient--the first sign of effective satire.  Then again, it was pretty cold this winter...For local noon on Wednesday, please compose and share two knowledge questions about the ways of knowing employed in these three comics.