August 30, 2013 - Finding Textual Evidence to Support Thesis

Purpose: I can highlight textual evidence that supports my thesis.

Example Thesis: The power of authority can impact one's choices and how responsible they feel for their actions.

• Look at 10D the Eichman article and highlight lines that support your thesis
• In the margins write how that each highlighted line helps supports your thesis. 

August 29, 2013 Grammar Warm Up: Adjectives

• Copy definition of an adjective on the bottom of pg. 541 (in bold)
• Copy highlighted section about the position of adjectives on pg. 542

August 28, 2013 - How to Write and Introduction

When I asked students how do they write an introduction, most kids said the following:

• write the main idea
• list the main points that you will talk about 
• use a hook
• introduce your topic

While all these responses were valid, imagine how bored you would get as a TCAP grader if you had to read a thousands essays that sound like this:

"First I am going to tell you about how Eichmann didn't feel responsible for his actions. Next, I will tell you about . . . "  BORING!

"How does power of authority affect how responsible people feel for their choices?" BORING 

Now imagine you graded 999 papers, and you read this introduction:

Shhhh.  Listen to the power.  

Clapping could be heard around the camp.  And laughter.  He stomped his combat boots against the hard dirt because clapping was not enough.  The sight was hilarious.  And it was all for him.  Without his power this never would have happen.  Without his power he never would have laughed and clapped and stomped his combat boots.  What a sight it was.

Shhhh.  Now listen to death whispering between the clapping hands.

Death.  Death.  Death.  Three people hung from the gallows.  Tongues out.  Soiled pants.  Necks hanging to the side, eyes bulging out as if something on the ground  waved for attention.  

Nothing about that is funny.  There should have been no clapping or laughing or combat boot stomping.  There should have been no deaths.  Without power, without authority, with some acceptance of responsibility none of that would have happened.

Responsibility comes with power, but with power comes the ability to relinquish responsibility to higher authorities if the choices made are deemed unnecessary or wrong .  

Your assignment: Paint a picture of a scene we have encountered in one of the texts we have read this quarter for your introduction.

Try this:

• Make a list of CONCRETE IMAGES from an article (example: gallows, noose, chair, skinny, rib cage, Nazi Uniform, combat boots, etc.)
• Then choose one image to focus your introduction around. (the example above used the concrete image of combat boots). 
• Write! Don't worry about over thinking it. Just write and then read and edit it. 

August 28, 2013 Grammar: Editing Thesis Through Listening

For your grammar warm-up today, share your three thesis statements with a partner.

• What to listen for:
• Did it make sense?
• Did it sound like a complete sentence?
• Did it address the prompt?
• What to look for:
• The words: responsibility and power of authority
• punctuation/capitalization

August 27, 2012: Writing Assignment - Constructing Thesis Statements

Purpose: I can construct a concise thesis statement that clearly address the prompt and the idea of power of authority and how it relates to responsibility. 

For the past two weeks, we have been reading about the atrocities carried out by Nazi officers, the willingness to “shock” an innocent as carried out by Milgram’s experiment and the choices and responsibility carried by Kevin Carter and colonel Tibbets.  Each person possessed a power and technically had a choice, thus each person could be considered somewhat responsible. 

How does the power of one’s authority affect their choices and how responsible they feel for their actions?

Thesis:

Thesis:

Thesis: 

August 27, 2013 - Grammar Daily Warm-up: Revision of Notes

• Instead of a grammar activity, I want you guys to review, discuss, and improve your notes from yesterday's listening activity.

August 26, 2013: Active Listening

In college, students frequently have to listen to a teacher's boring lecture and take notes of important things the teacher says. Let's Practice! Take notes as I tell you about the article below:

* Things you should be listening for and thinking about:  How does Kevin Carter's dilemma relate to our unit theme of power?  Did he make the right choice taking the photograph?  Should he have attempted to save the child and not show the world the horrors of hunger in Africa? Did Kevin Carter feel responsible? How do we evaluate our own decision making and responsibility? And, when we make decisions, do we accept responsibility?

 How can you use this discussion and your notes about Kevin Carter to help you write about power and responsibility? Is there any relationship to Holocaust or Milgram articles?

*IF YOU TRULY THINK ABOUT THESE QUESTIONS AND TRY TO MAKE CONNECTIONS YOU WILL BECAME A BETTER READER AND WRITER. 

Kevin Carter: The Consequences of Photojournalism Article by Cinders posted over a year ago

In 1994, South African photojournalist Kevin Carter won the Pulitzer prize for his disturbing photograph of a Sudanese child being stalked by a vulture. That same year, Kevin Carter committed suicide. Without the facts surrounding his death, this behavior may seem surprising. But Carter received heaps of criticism for his actions. While in Sudan, near the village of Ayod, Carter found a small, emaciated toddler struggling to make her way to the food station. When she stopped to rest, a vulture landed nearby with his eyes on the little girl. Carter took twenty minutes to take the photo, wanting the best shot possible, before chasing the bird away. The photo was published in The New York Times in March of 1993, and sparked a wide reaction. People wanted to know what happened the child, and if Carter had assisted her. The Times issued a statement saying that the girl was able to make it to the food station, but beyond that no one knows what happened to her. Because of this, Carter was bombarded with questions about why he did not help the girl, and only used her to take a photograph. The St. Petersburg Times in Florida said this of Carter: "The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering, might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene." Filmmaker Dan Krauss said, "In his famous picture of the vulture stalking the Sudanese girl, I began to see the embodiment of his troubled psyche. I believe Kevin did, too. In the starving child, he saw Africa's suffering; in the preying vulture, he saw his own face." Carter's daughter Megan responded to such comparisons with, "I see my dad as the suffering child. And the rest of the world is the vulture." Carter is the tragic example of the toll photographing such suffering can take on a person. Carter's suicide is not a direct result of the Sudanese child, nor the accusations that he staged the scene, or criticisms that he did not assist her. Carter had spiraled into a depression, to which many things were a factor, his vocation as a photojournalist in 1980s Africa definitely a large part of it. Excerpts from Carter's suicide note read: "I'm really, really sorry. The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist...depressed ... without phone ... money for rent ... money for child support ... money for debts ... money! ... I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners... I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky."

On August 5, 1945, Tibbets formally named B-29 serial number 44-86292 Enola Gay after his mother. On August 6, the Enola Gay departed Tinian Island in the Marianas at 02:45 for Hiroshima, Japan with Tibbets at the controls. Tinian was approximately 2000 miles away from Japan, so it took six hours to reach Hiroshima. Because of the fear that the Japanese could have captured the plane, twelve cyanide pills were kept in the cockpit; in case of the failure of the mission, the pilots were supposed to use them. The atomic bomb, code-named "Little Boy", was dropped over Hiroshima at 8:15 local time. When the A-bomb was dropped on the city, Tibbets recalls that the city was covered with a tall mushroom cloud.^[7]

In 1946, the Manhattan Engineer District published a study that concluded that 66,000 people were killed at Hiroshima out of a population of 255,000. Of that number, 45,000 died on the first day and 19,000 during the next four months. In addition, "several hundred" survivors were expected to die from radiation-induced cancers and lukemia over the next 30 years. 

Aftermath

When Colonel Tibbets had accomplished his mission, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross (United States) immediately after landing in Guam. His photos started to appear on the front pages of all American and world newspapers. He became a very popular person in the United States; pictures and interviews of his wife and children were printed in the main American newspapers. Colonel Tibbets was seen as a national hero who ended the war with Japan. There were, however, no parades or testimonial dinners for him or any of the other Enola Gay crewmen.

Tibbets was interviewed extensively by Mike Harden of the Columbus Dispatch, and profiles appeared in the newspaper on anniversaries of the first dropping of an atomic bomb. In a 1975 interview he said: "I'm proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it, and have it work as perfectly as it did .... I sleep clearly every night."^[9]

In the 2005 BBC premier, Hiroshima: BBC History of World War II, Tibbets recalled the day of the Hiroshima bombing. When the bomb had hit its target, he was relieved. Tibbets stressed in the interview, "I'm not emotional. I didn't have the first Goddamned thought, or I would have told you what it was. I did the job and I was so relieved that it was successful, you can't even understand it."^[10]

Later life

The U.S. government apologized to Japan in 1976 after Tibbets re-enacted the bombing in a restored B-29 at an air show in Texas, complete with mushroom cloud. Tibbets said that he had not meant for the reenactment to have been an insult to the Japanese.^[9] In 1995, he denounced the 50th anniversary exhibition of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian Institution, which attempted to present the bombing in context with the destruction it caused, as a "damn big insult,"^[9] due to its focus on the Japanese casualties rather than the brutality of the Japanese government and the subsequent necessity of the bombing.^[9]

August 23, 2013: Reading and Annotating an Expirement

Purpose: Annotate to make connections between powers of authority and responsibility.

Think about: How does Milgram's experiment connect to the Holocaust articles?  What does the experiment prove? How could you use the results from the experiment to support your ideas about power of authority and responsibility?  What does Milgram's study and the nazi officers actions reveal about the power of authority? What do they reveal about personal responsibility?

http://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html

The Milgram Experiment

by Saul McLeod  published 2007

One of the most famous studies of obedience in psychology was carried out by Stanley Milgram (1963). 

Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience.

He examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the World War II, Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their defense often was based on "obedience" - that they were just following orders of their superiors.

The experiments began in July 1961, a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiment to answer the question "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" (Milgram, 1974).

Milgram (1963) wanted to investigate whether Germans were particularly obedient to authority figures as this was a common explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II.

Milgram selected participants for his experiment by advertising for male participants to take part in a study of learning at Yale University.  The procedure was that the participant was paired with another person and they drew lots to find out who would be the ‘learner’ and who would be the ‘teacher’.  The draw was fixed so that the participant was always the teacher, and the learner was one of Milgram’s confederates (pretending to be a real participant).

The learner (a confederate called Mr. Wallace) was taken into a room and had electrodes attached to his arms, and the teacher and researcher went into a room next door that contained an electric shock generator and a row of switches marked from 15 volts (Slight Shock) to 375 volts (Danger: Severe Shock) to 450 volts (XXX).

Milgram's Experiment

Aim:

Milgram (1963) was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person.  Stanley Milgram was interested in how easily ordinary people could be influenced into committing atrocities for example, Germans in WWII.

Procedure:

Volunteers were recruited for a lab experiment investigating “learning” (re: ethics: deception).  Participants were 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, whose jobs ranged from unskilled to professional.

At the beginning of the experiment they were introduced to another participant, who was actually a confederate of the experimenter (Milgram).  They drew straws to determine their roles – leaner or teacher – although this was fixed and the confederate always ended to the learner. There was also an “experimenter” dressed in a white lab coat, played by an actor (not Milgram).

The “learner” (Mr. Wallace) was strapped to a chair in another room with electrodes. After he has learned a list of word pairs given him to learn, the "teacher" tests him by naming a word and asking the learner to recall its partner/pair from a list of four possible choices.

  

The teacher is told to administer an electric shock every time the learner makes a mistake, increasing the level of shock each time. There were 30 switches on the shock generator marked from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 (danger – severe shock).

The learner gave mainly wrong answers (on purpose) and for each of these the teacher gave him an electric shock. When the teacher refused to administer a shock and turned to the experimenter for guidance, he was given the standard instruction /order (consisting of 4 prods):

Prod 1: please continue.

Prod 2: the experiment requires you to continue.

Prod 3: It is absolutely essential that you continue.

Prod 4: you have no other choice but to continue.

Results:

65% (two-thirds) of participants (i.e. teachers) continued to the highest level of 450 volts. All the participants continued to 300 volts.

Milgram did more than one experiment – he carried out 18 variations of his study.  All he did was alter the situation (IV) to see how this affected obedience (DV).

Conclusion:

Ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being.  Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the way we are brought up. Obey parents, teachers, anyone in authority etc.

Milgram summed up in the article “The Perils of Obedience” (Milgram 1974), writing:

“The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations.  I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.”

Factors Affecting Obedience

The Milgram experiment was carried out many times whereby Milgram varied the basic procedure (changed the IV).  By doing this Milgram could identify which factors affected obedience (the DV).

Status of Location	Personal Responsibility
·         The orders were given in an important location (Yale University) – when Milgram’s study was conducted in a run-down office in the city, obedience levels dropped. ·         This suggests that prestige increases obedience.	·          When there is less personal responsibility obedience increases. ·         When participants could instruct an assistant to press the switches, 95% (compared to 65% in the original study) shocked to the maximum 450 volts. ·         This relates to Milgram's Agency Theory.
Legitimacy of Authority Figure	Status of Authority Figure
·         People tend to obey orders from other people if they recognize their authority as morally right and / or legally based. ·         This response to legitimate authority is learned in a variety of situations, for example in the family, school and workplace.	·          Milgram’s experimenter wore a laboratory coat (a symbol of scientific expertise) which gave him a high status. ·         But when the experimenter dressed in everyday clothes obedience was very low. ·         The uniform of the authority figure can give them status.
Peer Support	Proximity of Authority Figure
·         Peer support – if a person has the social support of their friend(s) then obedience is less likely. ·         Also the presence of others who are seen to disobey the authority figure reduces the level of obedience.  This happened in Milgram’s experiment when there was a “disobedient model”.	·          Authority figure distant: It is easier to resist the orders from an authority figure if they are not close by.  When the experimenter instructed and prompted the teacher by telephone from another room, obedience fell to 20.5%. ·         When the authority figure is close by then obedience is more likely.

Methodological Issues

The Milgram studies were conducted in laboratory type conditions and we must ask if this tells us much about real-life situations. We obey in a variety of real-life situations that are far more subtle than instructions to give people electric shocks, and it would be interesting to see what factors operate in everyday obedience. The sort of situation Milgram investigated would be more suited to a military context.    

Milgram's sample was biased: The participants in Milgram's study were all male. Do the findings transfer to females? 

In Milgram's study the participants were a self-selecting sample. This is because they became participants only by electing to respond to a newspaper advertisement (selecting themselves). They may also have a typical "volunteer personality" – not all the newspaper readers responded so perhaps it takes this personality type to do so.  Finally, they probably all had a similar income since they were willing to spend some hours working for a given amount of money. 

Ethical Issues

o Deception – the participants actually believed they were shocking a real person, and were unaware the learner was a confederate of Milgram's.

o Protection of participants - Participants were exposed to extremely stressful situations that may have the potential to cause psychological harm.

o However, Milgram did debrief the participants fully after the experiment and also followed up after a period of time to ensure that they came to no harm.