Fahrenheit 451 Book Talk

Description: Fahrenheit 451 takes place in a dystopian future where books are banned. The main character is Guy Montag, a firefighter in which the profession is dedicated not to putting out fires, but destroying books. He and his co-firefighters get a call whenever someone is caught harboring books. It is there that Guy and the firefighters burn all the books being harbored, even burning the criminal if they resist. Otherwise, the criminal is arrested.

Guy is married to Mildred who is infatuated with their televisions, which are the size of the entire wall. She even has a television “family” that she watches and sometimes “interacts” with, capable due to technology. They both seem happy, as well as the entirety of the society shown here, but there are underlining things that heavily question this. Mildred at the beginning of the story actually attempts suicide by taking too many pills, and Montag finds her and calls the “emergency hospital” which sends a team of two who arrive with a machine that sucks all of her blood out, removes the poison and replaces the blood back into her body. She is out for a while, but reawakes and continues on with life ignoring the event entirely. In this society there is a superficial happiness that many belong too. This is made more evident when Montag meets Clarisse.

Clarisse introduces a new perspective of the world to Montag. She shows him for the first time the joy of simple natural things like catching raindrops in your mouth, and smelling the fresh air and flowers. This awoke in montage something that would radicalize montage completely. Montag began to see the brokenness in the society he lived in, how nobody else cared about such natural things in the world, the beauty in things real. Rather, everyone was consuming television and ignoring their depression and drug overdose’s with television families and feigned interest in social gatherings.

Books are illegal, free thought is limited, and people are complacently comfortable in some false sense of reality. Montag, after meeting Clarisse, begins to change. He encounters books in a different way. He sets to burn one, as is his duty, and ends up pocketing it. He reads it and see’s some of the same beauty that Clarisse showed him. This change in Montag propels him to seek out books and eventually become a criminal himself.

Rationale: I chose this text because I find it to be culturally relevant, considering our society’s own technological dependency, where some degree of social value and perception is held to ones success in social media platforms, i.e. facebook, instagram, snapchat. While our society is much different from that in Fahrenheit 451, there are some similarities to be made, and I think getting students to make those connections is very valuable in preserving Bradbury’s original intent for the work as a warning to our very own society.

I first read this book in school in 10^th grade which seems like an appropriate grade level for this book. However, I also worked with my first mentor teacher when this book was being taught to the 8^th graders. It seemed like a challenge to the students, but I saw evidence of their comprehension, and it was encouraging. I worked with a small group of students who needed some extra help and we read it and discussed it together. The students overall comprehension and critical thought of the book and its ideas were very good.

Teaching Ideas:

1. Have students read on their own and work in groups to discuss each section. Read with students who may be struggling.

            2. Assess their comprehension every 50 pages or so, to make sure they understand pivotal information.

            3. Pose questions that get the class thinking about how this book relates with our society; i.e. how similar, how different. Don’t give it away; encourage the students thought development of the books message.

Obstacles: This book has some controversy surrounding it for some minor profanity and the banning/burning of the bible. It is banned in some schools. (I bet Bradbury wouldn’t mind).

Readicide

In Readicide, Gallagher talks about how important it is to necessitate the joy of reading when teaching students literature. We absolutely cannot suck the joy out of reading and make it a painful task-focused learning experience. Reading is a lot about discovery as well as it is about letting the author guide your experience of the work; to tamper with that experience (by frequently interrupting for analysis or only quizzing on the book and treating it as a means to a grade) is completely inappropriate and counterintuitive. As teachers we need to give students the opportunity to enjoy reading the book and to read it through without much interruption and refocus onto the assessment of the reading unit.

Gallagher talks about a children’s books author, Mem Fox, and how her daughter Chloe’s love for reading was negatively affected. In her reading class, the teacher would very frequently stop the class to have the students analyze what was happening. While analysis is necessary, the way it was implemented was not beneficial. Gallagher states,  “Chloe’s lament encapsulates what has gone wrong in our schools: the creation of readicide through intensive overanalysis of literature and nonfiction.” It is evident that such practices cause students enjoyment in reading to suffer. Given that literature and nonfiction are meant to read with some amount of passion and enjoyment, it is inappropriate to treat those texts like research papers. These stories so full of life and meaning are meant to capture the reader so it may deliver them to its message, and in this there isn’t room for breaking down on the side of the road every mile.

I Read It, But I Don't Get It

In I Read It But I Don’t Get It, Tovani gives teachers stratagies to help students who are struggling with reading comprehension. One of the problems commonly found among students struggling with reading comprehension, is ‘fake reading’. This idea of fake reading compels us to reexamine what exactly reading is, and how it is not simply making sense of the words in the text, rather reading is about constructing meaning.

A few strategies in the text, used to help encourage this construction of meaning, which I especially like, are to become a passionate reader of what you teach, and model good reading. I personally have found success in applying both those strategies in the classroom. I worked with a small group of students on Fahrenheit 451, a text that was above their reading level and proved to be quiet challenging for them. They needed some extra support, so I spent some time working with them, reading the text out loud with them and talking about the book. I personally find the book fascinating, and I didn’t hide that from my students as we read and discussed it. Pretty soon we were all engaged and talking excitedly about how we relate to the world in Fahrenheit 451, and I was proud to see my students applying themselves and becoming excited about the text. Did I do some profound thing? Not at all. I was just engaged and excited about the text, and it helped. I believe students can sniff out pretty quickly when a teacher isn’t invested or motivated, and I believe students can recognize and respond well to when a teacher is.

Critical Literacy and Popular Culture in Urban Education

Within an education system that has flawed policies that are used to exploit marginalized groups, creating a disproportionate opportunity and level of education for career or college to such groups, there is a responsibility of educators to practice a literacy pedagogy of access and dissent, as the article discusses. Marginalized groups have limited access to higher education, access to rewarding employment, and access to civic life, and it is essential that our pedagogy lead these groups to greater access. “It is irresponsible on our part to imagine literacy pedagogies that do not increase the access of the populations we care about. While creating access is imperative, so that all groups outside of the majority including but not limited to women, minorities, refugees, those in poverty, can be prepared, equally as the majority, for either further education or career­­––it is also imperative that such access, and literacy education among these groups, empower them to institutional reform in schools. We cannot allow blind access without a form of dissent, and with dissent reform. “Blind access can come at great costs, including the loss of self, or alienation from one’s culture, one’s language, and one’s values.” As it stand, this access that is so important, alone, can cause severe alienation among marginalized groups, and that is because as it stands it is a system built by the majority, for the majority. The need is for these groups of people to access knowledge and gain literacy to the level of preparation for personal future goals as well as collective reform and institutional change. “In a pedagogy of dissent, however, students can acquire the skills they need to “succeed” while also developing a powerful language of critique of systems of social reproduction. This type of pedagogy is necessary so that all students can achieve literacy to be active members of their society.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Paulo Feire, in chapter two of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, gives us insight into the method of banking teaching, predominately used in the world of education, and the innately destructive nature of such teaching. “Banking” sets up a system “in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat.” This, as I have seen in teaching experiences as a student myself, takes away the human characteristic in learning. I have been told before what to (blindly) think by a teacher, but I was lucky to have been shown by a few very good teachers to maintain at times a certain attitude of disbelief, provoking a certain proneness towards challenging what I am being told. This can make life very difficult at times, but also, and more importantly, genuine. Not every student has learned yet to question what they are being taught, rather because they were first taught to listen and obey and assume the role of “student”.

The “Banking” system of learning creates this set of expectations, that Freire describes, that encourage this idea that the teacher knows everything and the student knows nothing. Freire elaborates on the dangers of this, “The more completely [students] accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.” He talks about how difficult it is for a student, in this system of learning, to develop the critical consciousness necessary to transform the world. It perpetuates oppression when the oppressors use means to transform the oppressed into their structure, to change the individual to their idea of the world. Rather, to change the structure for the oppressed is to liberate. Freire brings it back to how to radically change our education structure to liberate the oppressed; “[teachers] must be partners of the students in their relations with them… to exchange the role of depositor, prescriber, domesticator, for the role of student among students would be to undermine the power of oppression and serve the cause of liberation.”