Stephen King on Guns

Stephen King has written an essay, Guns, in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre. As master of the horror genre, King has special insight into our deepest psychological fears and the lethal ways they can combust especially in adolescence. The piece deals in part with his early novel Rage, which he had pulled after it was implicated in several shootings,

My book did not break or turn them into killers; they found something in my book that spoke to them because they were already broken. Yet I did see Rage as a possible accelerant, which is why I pulled it from sale. You don’t leave a can of gasoline where a boy with firebug tendencies can lay hands on it. 

King asks gun-owners to similarly accept responsibility and work for sensible gun restrictions. A provocative read for those who want to wrestle with First and Second Amendment dilemmas! Download the essay here. You can also learn more about the essay from Brain Pickings.

(Don't forget: take action to stop human rights abusers from getting weapons here)

Our July Authors: Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

For all those people hitting this site looking for discussion questions for Three Cups of Tea (and I realize I just invited a ton more), I'm going to disappoint you. However here are links to the more obvious sites and if you hang around here in the next few days, we will have more posts with interesting links to explore, both fun and serious, that provide some more context for your reading of this book, as our own (off-line) discussion of the book approaches this Sunday.

First, here is the website for the book Three Cups of Tea and one for co-author David Oliver Relin. The Central Asia Institute has its own site, one desperately in need of a blog, I might add. Fans/supporters need to know what's goin' down! At least there are a few pictures. Pennies For Peace is the website for teachers and students and includes a downloadable curriculum guide and a list of age-appropriate suggested reading.

Coming up: links to interviews with Greg Mortenson...

Blood Diamond Curriculum Guide

I've noted that the blog is getting search queries for discussion questions on the film, Blood Diamond, and since I didn't mention in my previous post on the subject I thought I would provide this helpful pointer to the Blood Diamond Curriculum Guide even if you're not planning a discussion on the subject, you might find some interesting information in this package.

Valentine's Action

Don't forget to take action on the Clean Diamond Trade Act this Valentine's! More resources including a curriculum guide for the movie here. Back when the movie first came out, Greg Campbell, author of the Rights Readers selection Blood Diamonds appeared on the News Hour to discuss the issue,

One of the other biggest problems is that, from the point of extraction, the first point where the diamond is found and mined, to its first point of export, there are no certificates or guarantees. There are pledges that the diamonds that are being offered for export under the protections of the Kimberley Process are conflict-free.

But, you know, I've been to some of these mines in Sierra Leone. And, you know, we're talking about very unindustrialized mines. You know, the diamonds are extracted by human labor and physically handed hand-to-hand from one person to the next.

And it's very simple, in fact, to move diamonds that are from conflict zones into legitimate parcels that are being offered under the protection of the Kimberley Process certificate.

Visit the NewsHour website to view or read the whole transcript of the interview.

Catch A Fire

Last weekend I attended a preview screening of Catch a Fire, the new thriller about real-life South African freedom fighter Patrick Chumasso. Director Phillip Noyce and Patrick Chumasso were present for Q&A after the film and a great dialogue about the past, present and future of South Africa ensued. I was ready to give the film a big thumbs up anyway, but now I find that Amnesty has its own little promo page for everyone to take in, including a curriculum guide, trailer, reports on South Africa and other goodies. And please don't overlook the curriculum guide if you aren't a teacher! World music buff that I am, I especially enjoyed all the links in the lesson plan on protest music. Go see the film!

Child Soldiers: Nonfiction

Now that I've finished Beasts of No Nation, I have many questions, as do other Readers, I'm sure, about child soldiers and am ready to turn to nonfiction for some answers.  Here are some suggestions,

First, Amnesty International has created a curriculum guide to accompany the book Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers go to War by Jimmie Briggs.

Another nonfiction book on the subject is P.W. Singer's Children at War.  You can get a sense of the book from this video presentation (30 minute talk plus 30 minutes of Q&A).  I found this very informative. 




Or, try this half-hour interview with Singer on NPR's Fresh Air.  Some related material is also available at his Brookings page. (Singer will show up as an expert in Shadow Company as well.)

One other note, Amnesty has also collaborated with the creators of Innocent Voices, a film about child soldiers in El Salvador released last fall.  An article about student responses to the film can be found in the current issue of the Fourth R, the newsletter of Amnesty's Human Rights Educators Network (download pdf here). As far as I can tell, the film is not yet available on DVD.

Tags: child soldiers, teaching resources

Dead Man Walking School Theatre Project

Sister Helen Prejean, author of Rights Readers selection Dead Man Walking, and Tim Robbins, director of the movie by the same name have created the Dead Man Walking School Theatre Project in an effort to promote order public discourse on the death penalty, are offering the stage version of Dead Man Walking for performance at colleges and universities. The project's website offers photos of student performances of the play, accounts of student research for their parts, including prison visits. There are many useful resources on the site, including a lists of films about the death penalty. Converting theater into action are accounts of student projects that go beyond the play: students at Elms College in Chicopee, MA marked the 1000th execution in the US since the death penalty was restored in 1974 by building a display of 1000 small wooden crosses. Hmmm, your Faithful Reader put together a similar display a few years ago. An ambitious project! We salute past and future college thespians and look forward to more accounts of student theater on the stage or in the street!

Tags: Helen Prejean, death penalty, teaching resources, drama, theater

Naomi Hirahara Recommends...

Last but not least, my final post on Naomi Hirahara, author of Summer of the Big Bachi.  Here is a link to an article where she suggests titles for further reading (many for children or youth) on the Japanese-American experience.

Tags: Naomi Hirahara, teachingresources

Terezin

A final post relating to Sebald's Austerlitz, this time focusing on Terezin/Theresienstadt (thanks to Loyal Readers who suggested links). 

Visit the official website of the Terezin Memorial for photos and the site for the film, Terezin: Resistance and Revival, has a companion newspaper series including some multimedia features of survivors, artists and musicians (with music samples).  For more on the music of Terezin visit the Terezin Chamber Music Foundation (which offers an educational curriculum through its online store) or the Viktor Ullmann Foundation.  The composer referenced more or less at the climax of the novel (p. 250), Pavel Haas, has his own foundation with underdeveloped website.  A snippet of his Study for String Orchestra can be found here,  For fun and in keeping with the child focus of the novel, here's a Minnesota Public Radio feature on Hans Krasa, composer of the children's opera, Brundibar, which Maurice Sendak and Tony Kushner recently transformed into a children's book.  Finally, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has an eclectic online feature on Music of the Holocaust  I plan to spend some time with in the future.

Magic Carpet Ride

Feeling a little inspiration from Satrapi's drawings, I found a little art activity for you all, Magic Carpet. Hey what did you expect, I do teach art! Have fun with the other art games, very math-geeky art games I would add, at the Protozone Interactives site. Maybe it's the homesick Midwesterner in me, but I'm partial to Snowflaker.

(More educational resources here on the art-math nexus and oriental rugs at Math Forum.)

Another Cartoon... and a Human Rights Video Game!

More pop genres with human rights-themed subjects:

Here's a slick little cartoon that aims to explain the recent Paris riots: The French Democracy

Even more intriguing is this description of a soon to be released video game, A Force More Powerful which "teaches nonviolent strategies and tactics that have been used successfully all over the world by individuals and groups struggling to win freedom or secure human rights." Creator of the game, Ivan Marovic describes it as "a game where a player will be able to organize a mass movement against a dictatorship. It's going to be violent game with prosecutions, with arrests, with kidnapping. The only person that will not be allowed to be violent is the player." More on how Marovic's creative thinking aided Serbian and Ukrainian democracy advocates here.