I believe in the power of empathy to positively transform the teacher and student experience in the classroom. If you’ve been in a school for any length of time, you know that whether you’ve asked for it or not, you’re bound to encounter anything. For example, everyday teachers and students are facing difficult/ complex situations in school – questions about belonging and forgiving, advantage and ability, and conflict and acceptance. These are all themes we can find in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. According to Baker et al., “some elementary school children face constant threats to their academic, social, and emotional growth and development. Equally, in meeting the goal of educating and nourishing the whole child. many schools face threats from unacceptably high rates of school violence, bullying, school dropout, youth suicide and other negative behaviors and psychological health” (209).
The purpose of my game is to teach students the story and themes of the novel, Frankenstein. After the students finish playing “The Amazing Odyssey”, they will gain an understanding of the story and themes of Frankenstein, they will learn more about empathy, and in the end, students will learn why the creature was such an empathetic character. The tagline for this game is #buildempathy. “The Amazing Odyssey” is supposed to be a 10 – week designed journey using the Oculus Rift. Win Smith claims that “Integrating the VR experiences with lesson plans could have huge benefits for kids who might not typically retain information from a textbook” (Babcock, Stephen. “This edtech startup is bringing virtual reality to the classroom.” https://technical.ly/baltimore/2015/05/29/alchemy-learning-virtual-reality-classroom-oculus/)
Using the concept of The Amazing Race TV show, the students will have a chance to become the creature and will be given clues that will lead to a scene or narrative passage in the novel, Frankenstein. Where the player has to complete a task with a character from the book that explores, promotes, or endorses empathy among themselves and the other characters in Frankenstein. According to Cheok et al., “Storytelling is an effective and important educational mean for children. With the augmented reality (AR) technology, storytelling becomes more and more interactive and intuitive in the sense of human computer interactions” (22). One particular theme I found that students can learn from “The Amazing Odyssey”is the unlikely friendships in Frankenstein. For example, in the 1931 Frankenstein film, where the creature meets a young girl. Although a little afraid, she accepts him and plays games with him. After they throw all the petals from a flower into the lake, he looks around for something else to throw. He picks her up and throws her in. In my VR game, this scene can be recreated with the creature and the little girl also having an unlikely friendship, but with him learning how to be a gentle friend.
One cool thing about this game is that ”the creature” will be able to collect books each time the player and character accomplishes a task. The more books the creature collects, the more he learns about his human nature. So, in the end, the students should have an empathic creature. Also, the more books you earn, the more levels up you go which creates a cool gaming aspect for the students. I have not found a virtual reality game like this. This game is for fifth grade – twelfth grade. Principals will definitely purchase this game for his/her teachers.
Baker, Jason, et al. “Teaching Social Skills in a Virtual Environment: An Exploratory Study.” THE JOURNAL FOR SPECIALISTS IN GROUP WORK, Vol. 34, No. 3, Sept. 2009, pp. 209-226 https://ezproxy.stevenson.edu:2101/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=7&sid=6dcb2500-927a-4261-9933-59ce08a3b58d%40sessionmgr104
Cheok, David Adrian, et al. “Virtual reality and mixed reality for virtual learning environments.” Computers & Graphics 30 (2006) pp. 20-28 https://ezproxy.stevenson.edu:2106/S0097849305002025/1-s2.0-S0097849305002025-main.pdf?_tid=e1b51003-a517-48ce-911a-6b8a7ef8c5ef&acdnat=1542724968_d5eea48f1db6bb365e924cb5a4500301
Stephen Babcock. “This edtech startup is bringing virtual reality to the classroom.” Technical.ly. May 29, 2015. https://technical.ly/baltimore/2015/05/29/alchemy-learning-virtual-reality-classroom-oculus/
On October 30th, I listened to Dr. Cheryl Wilson’s A History of Frankenstein presentation. Truly, it was an experience. At the beginning of the semester, when I heard we would read Frankenstein in class, I really didn’t like the idea because I thought it was a scary story. I repeat I dislike scary stories, but after reading this story I really enjoyed reading Frankenstein. And Dr. Wilson’s A History of Frankenstein presentation brought Mary Shelley’s work home for me. One thing I really enjoyed what Dr. Wilson talked about that day was the quote from Mary Shelley’s book, “my hideous progeny”. Reading Frankenstein changed my mind and made me feel very sympathetic towards the creature. Unlike me, many readers still believe Frankenstein is just another scary story. If you read the introduction, you will see how she compared Frankenstein’s Creature and Mary Shelley’s novel is very similar. Opening the front page can absolutely change your perspective on the meaning of this story and why she wrote it.
In volume 2, chapter 7 of Frankenstein, Felix hits the creature with a stick and shuns him away from the cottage because of his monstrous appearance. In chapter 7, the creature is talking to himself and screaming at the sky about his existence. Also, he’s mad at the family for treating him like a creature he is. “Cursed, cursed creator! Why did I live? Why in that instant, did I not extinguish the spark of existence which you had so wantonly bestowed? I know not; despair had not yet taken possession of me; my feelings were those of rage and revenge.”(Shelly 103) After throwing a tantrum all night, the sunshine calms his vengeance. The creature visits the cottage again and visit, the father De Lacey again, to bring him to his side of his predicament. “But I did not believe my errors to be irretrievable; and, after much consideration, I resolved to return to the cottage, seek the old man, and by my representations win him to my party.” (Shelly 104) This shows the last of his humanity because the night before he wanted to kill that family that hurt him. But, in the morning he believes in the humans’ niceness so he gives the family another chance. But, was he too trusting in the humans and their humanity because De Lacey and his family moved out of the cottage. “‘It is utterly useless,’ replied Felix, ‘we can never again inhabit your cottage. The life of my father is in the greatest danger, owing to the dreadful circumstance that I have related. My wife and my sister will never recover their horror. I entreat you not to reason with me any more. Take possession of your tenement, and let me fly from this place.’” (Shelly 105) After seeing the exchange between Felix and the landlord that sends the creature into a fit of rage over the preconception they have of the creature’s desires. A few more bad things happen on his quest to Geneva which put more distrust in humans and fueled his hatred for Victor and humans.
Citation:
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York, Pearson Longman, 2007.
Discussion Question #1: Do you think the discovery of Victor’s diary entry in the jacket really matters to the creature?
Discussion Question #2: Do you believe one bad day can turn someone into a murderer?
Can you imagine testing your intelligence to emigrate to a new planet? What if you were denied entry because of unknown reasons, and you found out that you didn’t pass the entry test because of your very own genetic makeup. What if the government told you that you couldn’t reproduce, marry, or emigrate to another planet? Well, this is what happened to John Isidore. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, John Isidore is known as a “chickenhead” who works a “simple” job. A job that would be beneath someone else, but he did that job with no bitterness. When I think of humanity, I think of a person like John Isidore. John Isidore is a person with mental issues because his genes were severely damaged by the radioactive fallout. He is both described as a “special” person and as a “chickenhead”. According to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, a special is a person who has failed an IQ test. For this, he was now known as a special on Earth. A chickenhead is a special who “had failed to pass the minimum mental faculties test” (Dick 19). He lives by himself in an apartment building in San Francisco. In the novel, John practices Mercerism, a “religion” that brings the Mercerites closer to Wilbur Mercer, by increasing their empathy. While reading the book, the readers found out that John had a mental condition and had a low IQ. For this reason, John was not able to leave Earth for Mars, the new America.
Several times throughout the book, John was alone in his apartment, he uses the Mercerism religion to give himself a purpose in a life that other people would call awful. Remember, the use of Mercerism connects John to other humans. We all love human contact, right?!? Therefore, John is the moral compass of the novel. He believes that all forms of life like plants, animals, and androids deserve respect. Stop reading and raise your hand, if you have ever heard about the Common Core. I can bet a dollar that you have heard about the Common Core, the Scholastic Assessment Test (SATs), and the American College Testing (ACT) in your lifetime. According to Merriam – Webster’s dictionary, a standard test is “a test (as of intelligence, achievement, or personality) whose reliability has been established by obtaining an average score of a significantly large number of individuals for use as a standard of comparison” (“Standard Test.” Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 8 Oct. 2018.) So, are standardized tests biased? Let’s find out!
The United States is often referred to as the melting pot because there are so many different cultures that came to our country, but when it comes to people who have a disability there’s no secret about the lifelong stigmas surrounding a certain word like disability. Justin Dart once said, “The hard reality is this. Society in every nation is still infected by the ancient assumption that people with disabilities are less than fully human and therefore, are not fully eligible for the opportunities which are available to other people as a matter of right”. (qtd. in DEMOS, 2002). This post determines the accuracy of standardized tests in the new Common Core world and how it connects to the text of the unethical testing of entry to mars.
According to Davis, “To understand the disabled body, one must return to the concept of the norm, the normal body. So much of writing about disability has focused on the disabled person as the object of study, just as the study of race has focused on the person of color. But as with recent scholarship on race, which has turned its attention to whiteness, I would like to focus not so much on the construction of disability as on the construction of normalcy. I do this because the “problem” is not the person with disabilities; the problem is the way that normalcy is constructed to create the “problem” of the disabled person”. (Davis 3) People with disabilities are not seen to fit social norms. What makes you a kind human, if you judge another person for having a disability. In the olden days, people who had disabilities were viewed as sick, seen as defective, were euthanized, called retarded, and separated from their “regular” family. As a person, how do you define “normal”? When you think about “normal” and “abnormal”, do you really believe those words can tell you about a person’s character? Can assessments be used to test your intelligence to see if you can emigrate to another planet? These are questions I want you, the reader, to ask yourselves while reading this post.
Assessments are an essential part to get ready for the Common Core when analyzing a child’s reading and writing levels. In elementary school, an assessment is needed to accomplish the objective, to analyze the writing level of a student authentically, to determine the student’s reading level, and to determine the strategies needed. As a teacher, there are several ways to assess this and analyze the student’s reading behaviors. During my internship last year, the teacher analyzed the student’s behavior and asked him questions to make sense of what was occurring in his learning environment. The student responded orally to the questions asked and wrote a brief writing sample to determine the level of his writing complexity to see if it was appropriate for his grade level. According to the core standards website, “The Common Core is a set of high-quality academic standards in mathematics and English language arts/literacy (ELA). These learning goals outline what a student should know and be able to do at the end of each grade”. (Core Standards. Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2018, http://www.corestandards.org/about-the-standards/. Accessed 08 Oct. 2018.) The Common Core Standards were introduced by policymakers on Capitol Hill for the standards to be established by every state except for a certain few.
So, do you want to know why the Common Core is biased? Common Core focuses on testing and has a set of standards that are already made for the teacher, and tests are already provided for teachers. What does the Common Core tell you? The Common Core assesses the teacher’s ability to teach and assesses the student’s ability to test and learn. The Common Core measures how much the school has learned compared to the other students around the county and state, ergo the word “standardized”. So, why is the Common Core problematic? Well, some teachers have refused to help students who are struggling in the classroom because they cannot stop what they are teaching to reteach a chapter for one student. The needs of that student are pushed aside to hope that one specific child will understand later. So, do you believe that this test could be used to emigrate to Mars?
Now, let’s talk about the SATs! The SATs is a standardized test and it is used mainly for college admissions here in the United States. I remember taking the pre-SATs in 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade, but other than that I never studied for the SATs. On TV, you noticed all these students studying for the SATs with flash cards, books, and with a tutor that their parents hired. One question, did you ever study for the SATs? I probably already know the answer by asking you where you grew up. When I took the SATs in 12th grade, the test had vocabulary I never used in my life. But, this test was supposed to measure my intelligence to get into higher education. To tell you the truth, I can think of several companies in the USA that will not ask for your SAT scores when you start applying for jobs. For example, one company is Google. They look at your work ethic and test your humanity with questions before you are hired. Would you rather fill in bubbles to emigrate to Mars, or would you rather answer questions about yourself to test your humanity to get on that planet?
You have now heard about the Common Core and the SATs, now let’s talk about one more test, the ACT. The ACT is another standardized test that is used mainly to get into College in the United States. Like the SAT, The ACT is a multiple choice test where you fill out bubbles. In the U.S., you can either take the ACT or the SATs, but both are still found to be bias and inaccurate. The ACT is biased because of race, class, and gender. If you are white and male, you have an unfair advantage. This test can be directly related to your family income. The richer the family, the higher the scores will be. For example, again, some vocabulary words on the test may not be familiar when you are taking the test. So, what is the alternative if a test has already deemed you incompetent?
In my opinion, standardized tests and IQ tests are not reliable for entry on Mars. Intelligence should be measured by how well you would do in a certain life situation (e.g. everyday smarts). I believe anyone can take a standardized test, but what would that person do if something drastic happened in their life. If that person could not handle that life complication we should not see them as intelligent. IQ is just a number! If that person cannot improve their everyday life then their so-called intelligence needs to be tested another way. IQ tests are not accurate because human intelligence is so vast. IQ tests were used in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep to differentiate people from each other. Either they had high or low intelligence, but I believe it was proven that where you lack in one area you can be seen as smart in another. But what is intelligence? Is it someone who can ace a spelling bee, someone who can do math problems without a calculator, or someone who can figure out a problem when they get in a jam? According to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, intelligence is “the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations”. (“Intelligence.” Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 8 Oct. 2018.) See, the definition is saying you must overcome your life’s challenges to be seen as intelligent. Which means intelligence is a broad term, and that means it is more than logic.
During my time at Anne Arundel Community College, I had the opportunity to learn about Dr. Howard Gardner a developmental psychologist in my special education class. Dr. Gardner is known for the theory of multiple intelligences. Dr. Gardner’s theory states that not only do human beings have several different ways of learning and processing information but that these methods are relatively independent of one another. Many other psychologists believed that intelligence is a single entity. Dr. Gardner believed life and culture were a large influence and helped determine a person’s intelligence. According to Gardner, Society held tasks and different types of intelligence at different levels. His theory mentioned that a person could be great in several forms of intelligence but can be below average in others. Since 1999, Howard has identified nine multiple intelligences. So, are you convinced yet?
If you had the opportunity to rewrite Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, would you change John Isidore’s predicament? I most definitely would! And that is why we are human. Because of our empathy! Empathy makes us Human. As readers, we connect with the characters we are reading about on the pages of a book. In this case, John Isidore was the underdog in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. I was rooting for him, we were all rooting for him to win to find love and make a friend. In our culture, we like to root for the underdog. In other countries, our country is seen as the underdog. As a human, we hope that other people can do what they put their minds to. This book is the perfect underdog story because John Isidore was a lovable character whom you wanted to root for. So, what makes you human? Is it your fear? Your wit? Your desire to learn? Or, how you’re able to empathize with others? My empathy and desire to change makes me human! Please let me know what makes you human in the comments.
In chapter 20, Iran Deckard is talking about their new pet goat with her husband Rick and she tells him they have found the goat dead. “I have to tell you something. I’m sorry. The goat is dead.” (Dick 226). In this chapter, it gives a description of the person who killed the goat, “A small young looking girl with dark hair and large black eyes, very thin.” (Dick 226). I perceived this description as Rachael Rosen who is the person who just killed the goat. The author does not give a direct reason why Rachael kills the goat. I believe she hated Rick so much because he had an affair with her and still left the hotel trying to kill the three remaining androids. According to the text in chapter 17, I believe the author was trying to foreshadow what would happen next in the next chapters. I believe what Rachael did in the story says a lot about her as a character/Andy. And in this chapter, Rachael does not hurt “Rick” physically when she finds out he hurts her friends for profit. Rachael brings up Rick‘s goat to show the readers that if she can’t hurt him personally like a “crazy jealous mistress”. Then the next best thing is to hurt his precious Black Nubian goat.
Discussion Question #1: What is your perception of why Rachael killed the goat?
Citation:
Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. New York: Penguin Random House, 1968. ebook.
