I know, voting can be a hassle. And it really won’t make much of a difference anyway, right?

But here are ten reasons you may want to consider showing up and making your voice heard on Election Day.

10. Because It’s a Ritual

You may not be personally deciding who the next president is going to be, but taking part in the process is a ritual that has more than symbolic value. When you personally go to the polls and perform the physical act of voting, you are establishing yourself as a member of a democratic society who has an investment in the outcome. Complaining is passive; voting is active.

9. To Create a Personal Narrative

Your voting patterns over the years can form a personal history. Were you a Reagan Democrat? Did you support Perot in 1992? I still remember that, two months after I turned eighteen, I participated in my first election. I strutted into the voting booth, and proudly cast my ballot for Michael Dukakis. That’s not a good example, but I think we understand each other.

8. Because You Never Know

In 2000, the final count in the Florida election put Bush ahead by just 537 votes. This decided the election. Your state’s presidential pick may be a foregone conclusion, but there are plenty of down-ticket races where you just might make a difference. The League of Women Voters has more examples of close races.

7. Because They Don’t Want You To Vote

In this case, “They” describes the people who have the polar opposite views as you do. They disagree with you on every major issue. They would take the country - in your opinion - in the absolute wrong direction. And they hate you. They don’t want you to vote. They have invested considerable time and resources into discouraging you to vote. Drive them mad.

6. To Represent

In the post-election analysis, pundits who suddenly have a lot of time on their hands will be breaking down the data from the election to see which demographic groups had the greatest impact. The interests of those groups will be of great interest to politicians moving forward. Just ask a soccer mom. By turning out and representing your demographic, you increase the visibility of your group and its needs.

5. For a Sense of Community

They say that all politics is local, and that always makes me think of Election Day. My polling place is an elementary school gymnasium. When I arrive, there is a bake sale in progress to raise money for the school. Elderly volunteers kindly direct me to my district’s section of the gym. And when it’s my turn, I vote. I may be alone in the booth, but we’re all in this together. I always purchase a snack on my way out - it’s for a good cause.

4. To Qualify for Jury Duty

Okay, now that’s just crazy. Isn’t that a reason not to vote? No, jury duty is every bit as much of a civic duty as voting. Sure, it can be a drag. So is paying taxes, but we do it because of what we get in return. If my house is on fire, someone will come and put it out. That’s awesome! Think of jury duty as a government tax on your time. What do you get in return? You get to live in a country where, if you get arrested, you get to be judged by a jury of your peers, not the guy who arrested you. That’s awesome!

3. To Be a Part of History

One way or another, we’re going to make history tomorrow, whether we elect a black president or a female vice president. You don’t want to be able to tell your grandchildren that you voted in that election? You don’t want to be a part of that moment in time? When the results are announced, and the numbers are tallied, you don’t want to be counted among them? I think you do.

2. Because People Have Fought and Even Died For It

That one pretty much speaks for itself. People fighting for the right to vote didn’t consider it trivial. Blacks got the right to vote in 1870. Women got the right to vote in 1920. In 1971, during the Vietnam War, the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18. The reasoning was that a citizen who is old enough to be drafted to fight for the country is old enough to vote for the people who make the decisions about war. Voting is important.

1. Because Democracy is about You

The idea behind our democracy is rule by the people. There is no special class of citizens who make the decisions for the rest of us. It’s up to each of us to take part in our democracy. That’s the only way it works. It’s this incredible experiment where a people stood up and said they didn’t need a king and that they could govern themselves. When we become apathetic about that enormous responsibility, we allow the country to be taken over by interests other than our own. Voting is not only our right as citizens; it is a solemn duty.

The system is far from perfect, and you may not fully buy into all of the reasons I’ve presented. Churchill said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all of the others. So vote for whatever reason you want. Vote to get the little sticker that says “I Voted”. Indeed, it is a powerful statement.

Ironically, the title character in what many consider to be Shakespeare’s central dramatic work is most famous for his long speeches. One speech in particular stands out as almost interchangeable with Shakespeare and perhaps even the theatre as a whole. The soliloquy manages to sum up, in just thirteen letters, the fundamental question of existence itself. Once we agree to tackle that question, then the rest of the speeches, well, they may as well just be anagrams of the big one…

From Hamlet:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and, by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life…

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

O! that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew;
Or that the Everlasting had not set
His precept ‘gainst self-slaughter! Rebuke! Rebuke!
How weary, foul, puffed, and abominable
Seem to me the questions of this place.
Fie on ‘t! O fie! ’tis a once heeded garden,
That’s left to pot; the rank and weed in nature
Possess it merely. But he should come to this!
Not four months dead: nay, half as much, but two:
As superior a man; so as, to this step,
Hyperion to a satyr; so caring to my mother
Permit he not beteem the beams of stars
Access her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!

You can compare it to the original speech here (starting at line 133).

Shift around the letters again, and it becomes:

I have of late, - but wherefore do not seek, - lost all my cheer, ashamed that the oddest mood upsets me so seethingly that our lush frame, at the earth, soon seems to me a detested sterile promontory; this aesthetic roof toasted by stoked mythical golden fire truthfully appears to me therefore as such a both foul and pestilent congregation of bath vapours. What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! in theme, how impressive and truthful! in action as an angel! and apprehension as a god! the beauty of the world! the crest of beasts! But, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

You can compare it to the original speech here (around line 250).

Shift around the letters again, and it becomes:

O! what a rogue and peasant slave am I:
Is’t not monstrous that this player here,
Could force his soul so to the best esteem
That from her working feebled all his looks,
Have tears in eyes, add a tempest of bombasts,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to top esteem? and all for nothing!
Frets Hecuba to him for he to tear
That he so pretty sobs? What would he do
Had he not the uttermost cue for passion
As by me? He could drown the stage in tears,
Atone the guilty and appal the free,
Confound the temperate, and to quite impress
The seemly faculties of eyes and ears.

You can compare it to the original speech here (starting at line 382).

Shift around the letters again, and it becomes:

How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge! What’s a man,
If his chief hope and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a helpless beast, thou.
Sure he that made us with much large esteem,
He looked from before to after, gave unto us not
That potential and smoothest reason
To fust in us effetely. Whe’r it be
Bestial petty sloth, or some softer scruple
To foresee too precisely on a theme,
A knot, which, quarter’d, hath but one part hero,
And also three parts coward, I see not
Why yet I be to say ‘This thing’s to do;’
Sith I have cause and lots of strength and means
To do ‘t.

You can compare it to the original speech here (starting at line 37).

Shift around the letters again, and it becomes:

Alas! poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of endless mirth, of most splendid fancy; he hath paraded me on his shoulders a thousand separate times; and now too detested in the greatest depths of my imagination it is! Here hung those lips that I have oft kissed. When be you at fatuous gibes? at gambols? at accents? at those deftest flashes of espoused merriment, that were wont to burst the tables on a roar? But not one to be sped now, to renounce reverence? quite chapfallen? Foot you to my lady’s chamber, tell her, let her protest, of this favour she must come; see her laugh at that.

You can compare it to the original speech here (starting at line 80).

Well, I am pleased to report that the Cymbeline project turned out very well.

For their video project, the 8th grade class I was working with decided to create a modern-day talk show (instead of a reality show) with characters from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline as guests. The show includes scenes from the original play, an alternate ending, and a commercial for a Cymbeline video game… all written, performed, and produced by the students!

They presented their video at an in-school film festival, and represented their school at a citywide film festival hosted by my organization. And now, through the magic of the Internet, I share the video with you:

If you want to share this video with others, you can link directly to this post or embed the video from its TeacherTube page (where you can also watch the video if you have trouble loading it in here). We will also be featuring the video on the school’s home page.

UPDATE: The kids put the video on YouTube. It’s a much higher quality than what I was able to post to TeacherTube, so if you want to embed the video on your site, you should use that one.

We haven’t had one of these in a while…

In a normal “Pic Tac Toe” puzzle, there are nine pictures in a 3×3 grid, like Tic-Tac-Toe. In each of the three rows, three columns, and two diagonals, there is a common theme that unites the three pictures. The challenge is to find the eight themes.

In this “Pic Tac Toe” puzzle, however, there are twenty-seven pictures in a 3×3x3 grid, like a Rubik’s Cube. In each of the nine rows, nine columns, nine pillars, eighteen lateral diagonals, and four cross-cube diagonals, there is a common theme that unites the three pictures. The challenge is to find the forty-nine themes.

Imagine stacking the three levels below on top of one another. For reference, and notation guidelines, check out my last 3D Pic Tac Toe, including the comments. The rules here are identical to that puzzle.

You can click on each image to see a larger version:

Top Level - Level A

Middle Level - Level B

Bottom Level - Level C

Please post whatever you come up with in the comments section.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: Correct themes provided by Benjamin Baxter (3), Billie (24), and Neel Mehta (16). Alternate themes suggested by Benjamin Baxter (1), Billie (2), and Neel Mehta (5). See comments for discussion, or click here to skip right to the answers.

I was planning to post a Greek Tragedy 24 as a follow-up to last month’s Shakespeare 24, but it turned out to be much too derivative. Part of the problem seems to be that the two genres being parodied are much too close to make such a union humorous. In fact, I would go so far as to say that 24 is today’s answer to the ancient Greek tragedy. A statement like that requires some explanation.

The most obvious similarity is the real-time format. Ancient Greek drama was, for the most part, presented in real time. The audience of that age would not have accepted the traditional story-telling techniques that we take for granted today, such as flash-backs and multiple locations. Aristotle’s unity of time is often translated as meaning that the action of a play must take place within 24 hours (which would have worked just as well for this comparison), but Aristotle never actually wrote this, and if you read the plays, they could pretty much take place in the time you spent watching them. The plays start after most of the action has already happened, and the main character is about an hour and a half away from the great reversal of fortune and recognition he has coming. During the play, characters come in and out, but the audience usually stays put. Oedipus realizes that he needs to speak with someone and has to summon him and wait for him to come, unless he just happened to have already summoned him on another matter and, oh look, here he comes now. Audiences of the time had no problem accepting that sort of thing, I suppose. Shakespeare did not have to play by these rules for his audiences, shifting his scenes between Rome and Egypt in Antony and Cleopatra, and famously skipping over sixteen years in The Winter’s Tale, to name just two examples.

Similarly, when Briscoe and Curtis (or whoever the current line-up on Law & Order is this year) get a lead on a suspect, we can immediately cut to them arriving on the scene. When Jack Bauer gets a lead on a suspect, he actually has to physically get to the location. It’s worth noting that only the unity of time, not place or action, is observed. The show can easily switch back and forth between Washington DC and Los Angeles, and have multiple story lines going at the same time. But what the real-time format does for both 24 and Greek tragedy is to give an immediacy to the events being depicted. We can feel like this is something happening in front of us in the moment. When our hero is faced with a choice to make, he has to make it right now, even if it is an impossible choice.

This element of the impossible choice is crucial to both 24 and Greek tragedy. Greek playwrights would often show characters torn between their solemn duties to their oikos (family) and their polis (state). Agamemnon is told that the goddess Artemis will not allow him to sail to Troy unless he sacrifices his daughter Iphigeneia. He now must choose between his responsibility to the polis to wage war with Troy and his responsibility to the oikos to protect his daughter. There is no right answer, only two wrong ones. In true Jack Bauer fashion, he puts national security first, and offers up the kid. Antigone makes the opposite choice. She is told by King Creon that she may not bury her traitorous brother, and she has a duty to obey. But she also has a duty to bury her brother, and she makes that decision - which she will ultimately suffer for. Actions have consequences, and the characters are willing to accept those consequences even when they did not have a better choice.

Similarly, characters on 24 are often put in situations where they have to choose between oikos and polis, between someone they personally care about and national security. National security on this show is less about “protecting our way of life” and more about “millions of people will die” if we don’t stop the threat. Either way, there will be serious consequences. The show finds just those moments where the “right thing to do” is something that most of us couldn’t do. But Jack Bauer can, and he becomes elevated to the level of the mythical hero.

And there we find another similarity. Ancient Greek dramas were often set at a time when, for the Greeks, the mythological overlapped with the legendary. Gods interacted with humans, and humans were a special breed of heroes. The stories did not have to be realistic - their mythical nature allowed the playwrights to explore larger themes. In 24, events are contrived to fit the real-time format, and we accept it. Jack is able to shuttle around from location to location in record time, and we accept it. Most of all, Jack is able to embody the courage, resolve, and self-sacrifice that we admire in our present-day heroes. He does so far beyond what any human would actually be capable of doing. And we accept that, too. In our post-9/11 world, that’s the larger theme.

To sum up: Shakespeare 24 - Very funny. Greek Tragedy 24 - Too “on the nose” to really be funny. But I enjoyed coming to that recognition, and now I am pleased to share it with you.

From The Merchant of Venice:

Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh?

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

On these eight days, just as white snow blankets outside, we light menorahs, witness joyous children amass presents, and comment on our history and freedoms. Here, we beam feats of Judah Maccabee, who defied, and so defeated, the manacles of Seleucid antisemitism.

This website wants to wish you a Happy Hanukah season.

Four poker friends played a hand of five-card stud. Each player was dealt one hole card face down, and then four additional cards face up. The cards were dealt, as in standard poker, one at a time around the table, from one regular poker deck. However, instead of betting each round, they decided to deal all twenty cards out in the beginning, and let winner take all!

1. As it turned out, any two consecutive cards dealt in this hand were either different color cards of the same rank or were consecutive ranks of the same suit, considering Aces as high cards only.

2. At least three of the four hole cards were Queens.

3. The last card dealt was a Heart.

4. At least one player was dealt more than one Ten. Nobody was ever dealt a Nine.

5. No Diamond was ever dealt immediately before or after a Spade.

6. Ron was dealt no Clubs, Lenny was dealt no Kings, Nick was dealt at least one Jack, and Frank’s hole card was a Spade.

Who won, and with what hand?

UPDATE: Puzzle solved by ArtVark. See comments for answer.

Last night, inspired by a response to my deliberately vague Question of the Week, I picked up my old worn-out copy of Dune. I was assigned the book in high school twenty years ago, and still have the same copy, which means either they had given it to us, or more likely, I never got around to returning it.

Still tucked into the almost definitely stolen book is a bookmark that also must have been given to us in high school. It’s a “Cultural Literacy” bookmark, based on the book by E.D. Hirch that came out at about that time. My high school English teacher was a huge proponent of this book which literally listed pages and pages of references that a culturally literate person should know. Our teacher, who yet was cool enough to assign us Dune and Catch 22 (which I also somehow still have), would photocopy the pages of the book and assign us cultural references to look up and present to the class.

The bookmark has a very small sampling of these terms, which includes basal metabolism, taproot, intransitive verb, Tito, ombudsman, capital gains, and byte. If you can’t define all of those terms, this bookmark says you’re illiterate.

Hey, in 1987, byte was a toughie.

And that’s really the point here. This bookmark just screams the point: You can’t know what students will need to know in twenty years. The skills needed today are so much more complex than memorizing lists of references. In a constantly changing world, creativity and the ability to learn new skills are far more important than knowing offhand what a Eustachian tube is. If I did learn that in high school, it’s gone now, and I don’t seem to miss it.

And I do think kids need to learn facts. But facts need to be learned in context. If historical dates are important, it’s only because they allow us to understand how two or more events are connected to each other. Did we invade Iraq before or after 9/11? Knowing that can profoundly affect our understanding of both events.

If, in the future, both events were scattered among a list of “cultural literacy” items and students were required to look them up and present them to a class, that sense of context would be lost. Much better to give them authentic tasks that allow them to construct meaningful understandings. They’ll still learn the facts, and will remember them longer.

I worked with junior high school students on haiku poetry today.

Actually, I’ve been doing quite a bit of haiku lately, as it’s part of our poetry unit. It’s an easy form for the kids to write, though their free verse poetry is so much more compelling.

Do you have a favorite haiku? Neither do I.

Frankly, I think haiku is lost to the ear of the English speaker. Haiku is a Japanese language form, and it doesn’t translate well into English. The 5-7-5 pattern of syllables sounds different in Japanese, which uses a largely consistent consonant-vowel syllable construction.

English speakers don’t hear syllable counts; we hear stress patterns and rhyme schemes. Take the wildly popular limerick. There’s no syllable counting in limericks. A limerick has a stress pattern of 3,3,2,2,3 with a matching rhyme scheme. Two limericks could have a radically different syllable count and still sound correct.

Generally there are two unstressed syllables per stressed syllable, but even that’s flexible. In fact, we could take out all of the unstressed syllables and it would still kind of sound like a limerick:

Man From France
Did Quick Dance.
Asked Why,
Would Cry
“Ants In Pants!”

But if the stress pattern or rhyme scheme were different, we wouldn’t accept it as a good limerick. On the other hand, if a haiku were a syllable or two off in either direction, we’d agree it wasn’t a haiku, but our ear wouldn’t hear the problem.

Anyway, I’m still going to teach haiku, but that needed to be said.

Sonnet LV:

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rime;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

Through brilliant sonnet rendered fifty-five,
Our poet really gives his honored trust,
In vows to quill his subject still alive,
While royals’ crypts in stone shall fall to dust;
But in short times who really truly knew,
Some simpler verse should many moons endure?
Imagine what this tribute should construe,
If real immortal fame were promised sure.
Fans read with universal lilting rote,
To wonder who that dreamboat could have been
Who should inspire this sonorous rhymed note,
As boy Fate slyly’s rolling such a grin:
All fame went to the author of that rhyme,
And not this unknown person lost to time.