It's the Start of Something New...

  I feel a little like Troy and Gabriella at the beginning of High School Musical.  They're awkwardly thrown into this situation where they obviously feel superrrr uncomfortable.  They are made to sing in front of a ton of people (more importantly, certain people that they are clearly attracted to.  Scary!  Ahh!)

But then, they start to realize that they're capable and able to create something great, so they start to warm up to the song and to each other, and pretty soon....there is love.  And they're belting out a tweeny hit and on the road to make millions of dollars.  

I hope to have a somewhat similar experience with this class.  Maybe not with the singing, but with a newly discovered talent and lots of money in the end?  I'd be down.

This class is much different than any other general I’ve taken!  I’m pretty excited that at the end of the semester, we’ll actually have a finished product to show for it!  After thinking long and hard about how to organize our chapters and where my book, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, by Mildred Taylor, fits in, I decided on a few potential ideas to research.

My first contribution to the project will be about how piracy is becoming more and more prevalent due to the availability of books online through such platforms as Amazon and Goodreads.  I did a little bit of digging online and found this one slideshow that talked about the rise in piracy since the rise in eBook popularity.  There’s definitely a correlation there, since hackers are amazing and know how to download everything and turn it into a PDF that’s easily available for public consumption.  This causes authors and publishers to suffer because it’s really hard for them to keep a hold on their content and digital rights.  To me, this relates to how the Logan family, in my book, struggled to retain their lands while their white neighbors tried to take them away.  The white neighbors felt like the land should be their own property, just as the current internet users feel an entitlement to content online today.  It’ll work together, I promise.

My other idea, definitely not as well developed, would be how Cassie, a young girl growing up at the time, has to reconcile a collision of worlds around her, and how that relates to students or the younger generations using Goodreads and Amazon as study tools and reliable, trusted sources, rather than the traditional study methods (dictionaries, solo work, etc.)  I’ll admit, I’m not quite sure how to research this one yet.  But I’ll get there!  I think there will be a lot of papers on online research, the benefits of it, and how to reconcile/make the most of the old and the new. 

As far as putting together the actual book, my real concerns are only making sure that everything is cohesive and supports each other.  What if we have two contributors with different viewpoints on a similar topic?  Is that allowed?  Does that take away from our book, or does it add to the validity by exploring all the options?  These are just a few things I’ve been wondering.  But our class is pretty good at coming together and getting stuff done, so I’m not worried!

Rolling Out Ideas on Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

Alright, ladies and gents, fasten your seatbelts and prepare for the brain dump.  The novel, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, has a lot of possible ways that it can relate to a project about using new platforms such as Goodreads and Amazon to read and study.  I have quite a few different ways that I could go with this book, so I’ll give a brief overview of it for those of you who aren’t familiar, throw out some potential ideas for an angle, and then I am DEFINITELY open to suggestions on which are hot and which are not.

First off, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is a young adult book based in the Deep South back when all the Jim Crow laws were being enacted and racism was pretty heavy.  The story is told by Cassie, a little black girl, and all of the events are through her innocent, naïve perspective.  There is a big focus on land in the story, because her family owns their own and that is something that sets them apart from the other black families in their neighborhood.  She makes friends with a few of the white children, but is discouraged from doing so by her parents.  One of her older friends, also black, gets involved with the white teenage boys and pays a heavy price for it.  Ok, that’s a reallyyyyy brief summary.

A few ideas:

• ·         The obvious racism.  Comparing the lack of acceptance of new ways to garner information (social media, online, etc.) in favor of traditionally-held methods to the white dominance over the suppressed black culture.
• ·         Land.  It would be interesting to discuss property rights with this one, for example, comparing the dependence and love that Cassie’s family has for their land to the need that authors have to maintain ownership over their works.  Piracy and illegal downloading of material could be compared to the ease with which white people usurped the land legally owned by their black neighbors.
• ·         Cassie’s point of view.  Cassie is a child who grew up in a world where people told her that things were a certain way, but her own experiences told her otherwise.  This could be compared to our generation, who were taught as children how to use traditional methods, but automatically sort of transitioned into the digital era.  The things that we were once told would “rot our brains” are now our most powerful resource. (Compare to Cassie’s friendship with the white children)
• ·         TJ, her older friend, getting too far ahead of himself and paying the price for it.  This could go with some social media platforms getting too big too fast and becoming difficult to control. (This one is a stretch, I know, but just roll with me because it has potential in my head, sort of.)  This would probably have to be against Goodreads and Amazon, discussing the potential dangers about trusting everything to the digital and forgetting what we know to be “safe.”

Ok friends, that’s all that I have so far.  I hope that they made sense!  Things will develop more along the way, but here are a few starting points!

From Reading to Comprehending

There are moments in childhood, like the skipping of a tape or CD, when the smooth soundtrack of playgrounds and pretend is interrupted by a shocking glimpse of life in the real, outside world.  To children, everyone is a potential playmate and the world is made for laughter until proven otherwise by an outside influence.  I had one of these experiences when I was about ten years old and read the book, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, by Mildred Taylor, for the first time.

The story of a young girl, Cassie Logan, then about my age, was something that took me out of my own perspective and opened my eyes to history.  Cassie is a black child living in the midst of a racist South.  Society’s disgraceful mistreatment of her family and neighbors is told through the eyes of a little child, and I understood it as such.  I was shocked, along with Cassie, to discover that not everyone got to go to the same school or use the same books or eat the same food or have the same friends…and that sometimes, people had their houses set on fire just for being different.  I couldn’t figure out why, and that bothered me.  

So I read the book again.

And again.

Each time I read, I found myself comprehending better the motives and injustices of Cassie’s world.  I began to recognize the author making points about acceptance and the need to defend moral values, even when opposed by your supposed friends.  

The principles that I learned early on through Cassie’s struggles stuck with me more than I expected them to when I grew up.  I began to easily see those who were downtrodden and unaccepted by society, and though no houses were burning or midnight floggings were happening, ostracism, disdain, and belittlement were the punishment for those who were unfortunate enough to be different.  Each time I saw that, I think I subconsciously remembered Cassie’s wounds and understood how powerful the soothing balm of acceptance is.  Thanks to Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, I gained my best friends because I knew to look for more than that which is easily seen and only, truly, skin-deep.

 

I love this book not because it gave me comfort or immediate joy, but because it gave me a comprehension of tolerance that matured as I did.  Through lines such as the following, from Cassie’s father, I learned that sins of the past should not be repeated by those, like me, with the power to erase them:

"Still," he said, "I want these children to know we tried, and what we can't do now, maybe one day they will."