pre-essay socratic seminar

TOPICS:

• Montag as dynamic character
• Montag as role model
• Themes of the book
• Writing techniques/ literary elements
• Symbolism
• Author tones & reader moods
• What Bradbury's predictions say about our society and us
• Individual and group psychology of the characters
• Preston's scribblings
• How we write
• What we should write about

ESSAY (due on your blogs by 11:59 PM PDT Sunday, April 9):

OPTION 1: Describe the difference in Ray Bradbury's tone with regard to Clarisse & Beatty. Support your analysis with examples of Bradbury's diction and detail.

OPTION 2: Analyze Bradbury's language, especially his figures of speech and his syntax, to convey how Montag's inner world differed from the world around him.

OPTION 3: Analyze the language and rhetorical devices that Dr. Preston uses to convey his point of view about reading. (Essay HERE)


NOTES:

• Bradbury's predictions are pretty accurate
• We eat garbage, it's not too different from Mildred overdosing
• Those @$#%$^ earbuds that everyone has
• Mildred watching TV all the time is just like everyone on their phones
• It used to be that people read books and talked to each other; now everyone is addicted to electronics
• False news stories, like the chase where they set up some innocent bystander -- there have been a lot of false stories, like Santa Maria PD lying about arrests

• You feel like you're there, like when he describes the jets flying over
• At the beginning of the book, Montag wants to burn books.  At the end he wants to save them. 
• Technology isn't making us smarter
• We believe things that aren't true
• We do what our phones tell us to do
• We spend too much time staring at screens

• Yeah but... 
• We can read anything online including books that used to be in print 

• What do you guys think about the ending?  An attack on American soil?  All of Bradbury's other predictions came true...

• Why was Mildred such a $#^! ?
• The author showed that Montag was a good person because he still cared for her even though she mistreated him
• Maybe she started off good but gave into a world where screens and earbuds were the best entertainment, and eventually became the only way she felt comfortable relating to people

• It seems like some of us have better relationships with our phones than we do with each other 
• The news of the Syria bombing reminded me of the book and how it must have felt for the planes to be flying over
• When Faber was explaining the qualities of books it reminded me how important the media is
• Montag as dynamic character; at the beginning he didn't question anything, and by the end he questioned everything.  When he was being chased, he threw off the hound at the river, and it was like he washed off who he used to be and started a new life
• Everyone is on their phones in here, quiet, and it made me wonder what if Granger and Montag and the others succeeded, and phones are our new books