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What do we mean when we say that anything is ideal or perfect? Can different people have unique definitions of whether something is ideal or not? If not, then who gets to decide what the criteria for perfection are, what influences our values and ideas? These are all questions which these resources are designed to explore, so feel free to question everything.

👉This mini project's topic is about:

The Ideal: How is your "ideal" constructed?

👉Why are we doing this mini project?

Well, very shortly you will be doing your own multigenre study, working through this mini project together will help introduce you to the skills needed to successfully complete your own multigenre study.

👉What do we do with these texts?

1. Explore, listen, read, play, or whatever you need to do to become familiar with the text. Record your thoughts or ideas while you do this.

2. Discuss the following questions:

How does this source relate to the topic?

How did reading or viewing the source help you understand the topic better? (maybe you don't agree with the understanding, but that is ok)

How did the creator or the text get these ideas across to the reader/viewer? (Here you can comment on how the creator or the piece may have used, for example, literary, visual, or dramatic techniques to get his/her point across.)

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What do we mean when we say that anything is ideal or perfect? Can different people have unique definitions of whether something is ideal or not? If not, then who gets to decide what the criteria for perfection are, what influences our values and ideas? These are all questions which these resources are designed to explore, so feel free to question everything. 👉This mini project's topic is about:
The Ideal: How is your "ideal" constructed?

👉 Why are we doing this mini project?

Well very shortly you will be doing your own multigenre study, working through this mini project together will help introduce you to the skills needed to successfully complete your own multigenre study.

👉 What do we do with these texts?

1. Explore, listen, read, play, or whatever you need to do to become familiar with the text. Record your thoughts or ideas while you do this.

2. Discuss the following questions:

How does this source relate to the topic? How did reading or viewing the source help you understand the topic better? (maybe you don't agree with the understanding, but that is ok) How did the creator or the text get these ideas across to the reader/viewer? (Here you can comment on how the creator or the piece may have used, for example, literary, visual, or dramatic techniques to get his/her point across.)
News Feed Curated by:
Cassandra Taylor

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9.10.2019: How is your "ideal" constructed?

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What do we mean when we say that anything is ideal or perfect? Can different people have unique definitions of whether something is ideal or not? If not, then who gets to decide what the criteria for perfection are, what influences our values and ideas?

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11B Eleanor

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11B Seven

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The Movie (linked below)

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Young11B

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Lily 11B

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Life: There is 1 Physical Board Game in the classroom. 

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Life: There is 1 Physical Board Game in the classroom. 

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There are 2 links in the article that you can follow to get more information about the Golden Ration

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The famous Fibonacci sequence has captivated mathematicians, artists, designers, and scientists for centuries. Also known as the Golden Ratio, its ubiquity and astounding functionality in nature suggests its importance as a fundamental characteristic of the Universe.

We've talked about the Fibonacci series and the Golden ratio before, but it's worth a quick review. The Fibonacci sequence starts like this: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 and so on forever. Each number is the sum of the two numbers that precede it. It's a simple pattern, but it appears to be a kind of built-in numbering system to the cosmos. Here are 15 astounding examples of phi in nature.

Leonardo Fibonacci came up with the sequence when calculating the ideal expansion pairs of rabbits over the course of one year. Today, its emergent patterns and ratios (phi = 1.61803...) can be seen from the microscale to the macroscale, and right through to biological systems and inanimate objects. While the Golden Ratio doesn't account for every structure or pattern in the universe, it's certainly a major player. Here are some examples.

1. Flower petals

The number of petals in a flower consistently follows the Fibonacci sequence. Famous examples include the lily, which has three petals, buttercups, which have five (pictured at left), the chicory's 21, the daisy's 34, and so on. Phi appears in petals on account of the ideal packing arrangement as selected by Darwinian processes; each petal is placed at 0.618034 per turn (out of a 360° circle) allowing for the best possible exposure to sunlight and other factors.

2. Seed heads

The head of a flower is also subject to Fibonaccian processes. Typically, seeds are produced at the center, and then migrate towards the outside to fill all the space. Sunflowers provide a great example of these spiraling patterns.

In some cases, the seed heads are so tightly packed that total number can get quite high - as many as 144 or more. And when counting these spirals, the total tends to match a Fibonacci number. Interestingly, a highly irrational number is required to optimize filling (namely one that will not be well represented by a fraction). Phi fits the bill rather nicely.

3. Pinecones

Similarly, the seed pods on a pinecone are arranged in a spiral pattern. Each cone consists of a pair of spirals, each one spiraling upwards in opposing directions. The number of steps will almost always match a pair of consecutive Fibonacci numbers. For example, a 3-5 cone is a cone which meets at the back after three steps along the left spiral, and five steps along the right.

4. Fruits and Vegetables

Likewise, similar spiraling patterns can be found on pineapples and cauliflower.

5. Tree branches

The Fibonacci sequence can also be seen in the way tree branches form or split. A main trunk will grow until it produces a branch, which creates two growth points. Then, one of the new stems branches into two, while the other one lies dormant. This pattern of branching is repeated for each of the new stems. A good example is the sneezewort. Root systems and even algae exhibit this pattern.

6. Shells

The unique properties of the Golden Rectangle provides another example. This shape, a rectangle in which the ratio of the sides a/b is equal to the golden mean (phi), can result in a nesting process that can be repeated into infinity - and which takes on the form of a spiral. It's call the logarithmic spiral, and it abounds in nature.

Snail shells and nautilus shells follow the logarithmic spiral, as does the cochlea of the inner ear. It can also be seen in the horns of certain goats, and the shape of certain spider's webs.

7. Spiral Galaxies

Not surprisingly, spiral galaxies also follow the familiar Fibonacci pattern. The Milky Way has several spiral arms, each of them a logarithmic spiral of about 12 degrees. As an interesting aside, spiral galaxies appear to defy Newtonian physics. As early as 1925, astronomers realized that, since the angular speed of rotation of the galactic disk varies with distance from the center, the radial arms should become curved as galaxies rotate. Subsequently, after a few rotations, spiral arms should start to wind around a galaxy. But they don't - hence the so-called winding problem. The stars on the outside, it would seem, move at a velocity higher than expected - a unique trait of the cosmos that helps preserve its shape.

8. Hurricanes

9. Faces

Faces, both human and nonhuman, abound with examples of the Golden Ratio. The mouth and nose are each positioned at golden sections of the distance between the eyes and the bottom of the chin. Similar proportions can been seen from the side, and even the eye and ear itself (which follows along a spiral).

It's worth noting that every person's body is different, but that averages across populations tend towards phi. It has also been said that the more closely our proportions adhere to phi, the more "attractive" those traits are perceived. As an example, the most "beautiful" smiles are those in which central incisors are 1.618 wider than the lateral incisors, which are 1.618 wider than canines, and so on. It's quite possible that, from an evo-psych perspective, that we are primed to like physical forms that adhere to the golden ratio - a potential indicator of reproductive fitness and health.

10. Fingers

Looking at the length of our fingers, each section - from the tip of the base to the wrist - is larger than the preceding one by roughly the ratio of phi.

11. Animal bodies

Even our bodies exhibit proportions that are consistent with Fibonacci numbers. For example, the measurement from the navel to the floor and the top of the head to the navel is the golden ratio. Animal bodies exhibit similar tendencies, including dolphins (the eye, fins and tail all fall at Golden Sections), starfish, sand dollars, sea urchins, ants, and honey bees.

12. Reproductive dynamics

Speaking of honey bees, they follow Fibonacci in other interesting ways. The most profound example is by dividing the number of females in a colony by the number of males (females always outnumber males). The answer is typically something very close to 1.618. In addition, the family tree of honey bees also follows the familiar pattern. Males have one parent (a female), whereas females have two (a female and male). Thus, when it comes to the family tree, males have 2, 3, 5, and 8 grandparents, great-grandparents, gr-gr-grandparents, and gr-gr-gr-grandparents respectively. Following the same pattern, females have 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on. And as noted, bee physiology also follows along the Golden Curve rather nicely.

13. Animal fight patterns

When a hawk approaches its prey, its sharpest view is at an angle to their direction of flight - an angle that's the same as the spiral's pitch.

14. The uterus

According to Jasper Veguts, a gynaecologist at the University Hospital Leuven in Belgium, doctors can tell whether a uterus looks normal and healthy based on its relative dimensions - dimensions that approximate the golden ratio. From the Guardian:

Over the last few months he has measured the uteruses of 5,000 women using ultrasound and drawn up a table of the average ratio of a uterus's length to its width for different age bands.

The data shows that this ratio is about 2 at birth and then it steadily decreases through a woman's life to 1.46 when she is in old age.

Dr Verguts was thrilled to discover that when women are at their most fertile, between the ages of 16 and 20, the ratio of length to width of a uterus is 1.6 - a very good approximation to the golden ratio.

"This is the first time anyone has looked at this, so I am pleased it turned out so nicely," he said.

15. DNA molecules

Even the microscopic realm is not immune to Fibonacci. The DNA molecule measures 34 angstroms long by 21 angstroms wide for each full cycle of its double helix spiral. These numbers, 34 and 21, are numbers in the Fibonacci series, and their ratio 1.6190476 closely approximates Phi, 1.6180339.
Thanks to Calvin Dvorsky for helping with the article!

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15 Uncanny Examples of the Golden Ratio in Nature

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The famous Fibonacci sequence has captivated mathematicians, artists, designers, and scientists for centuries. Also known as the Golden Ratio, its ubiquity and astounding functionality in nature suggests its importance as a fundamental characteristic of the Universe. We've talked about the Fibonacci series and the Golden ratio before, but it's worth a quick review.

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The self-similar mathematical objects known as fractals are everywhere in the natural world

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It's hard to say where inspiration comes from. The path from the seed of an idea to its execution is often a long one. The brilliant architect Alvar Aalto expressed this sentiment well, in an extended metaphor about a fish in a stream:
"Architecture and its details are in some way all part of biology. Perhaps they are, for instance, like some big salmon or trout. They are not born fully grown; they are not even born in the sea or water where they normally live. They are born hundreds of miles away from their home grounds, where the rivers narrow to tiny streams. Just as it takes time for a speck of fish spawn to mature into a fully-grown fish, so we need time for everything that develops and crystallizes in our world of ideas."
This is a story about such an idea, born hundreds of miles away in a far off stream. It is an idea that would travel from Northern Europe to Southern California, where it would take on a whole new life before making its way back again. It is a story in three acts.

Act One: California

It's a shame that skateboarding is illegal is so many places, because skaters have a unique appreciation for architecture. They recognize the quality of concrete, the grain of wood, and the incline of a structure. They understand the way a landscape flows. Skateboarding is a way of reinterpreting the built environment, and imagining alternative uses for architecture. But it wasn't always this way.

"The very first skateboard was called the skateboard scooter," explains skateboarding pioneer and filmmaker Stacy Peralta. At some point, in the early 1960s (no one is quite sure when) someone just removed the handlebars of a scooter and rode the board like a surfer.

Skateboards were sold in toy stores and skateboarding briefly became a short-lived fad. Meanwhile, Stacy Peralta was a little surf rat growing up in Venice Beach, California. When the waves were bad in the middle of the day, Peralta and his friends went looking for a way to occupy their time - but what they really wanted to do was keep surfing. A friend's brother had a few skateboards left over from the brief skateboard fad, so Peralta and his crew took to riding them.

Those early skateboards had hard, clunky wheels made out of clay, making it difficult (and dangerous) to ride them on anything but smooth, flat surfaces. Tricks at the time were correspondingly simple, things like standing up straight, balancing on the top of the board, or doing a little wheelie. Flatland tricks.

Peralta was really young, maybe seven years old, but he can remember skating for the first time. Even with those clunky clay wheels, Peralta found a blissful stillness he had difficulty articulating as a child. Right away, he realized he felt "more relaxed when I stand on a skateboard than when I walk."

Since the fad had faded, Peralta and his friends struggled to find new skateboards in shops. Instead, they would hit up thrift stores and buy pairs of roller skates, which had clay, metal, or hard plastic wheels. They would cut the bases off of the skates, and put the wheels on planks of wood, then ride their creations back and forth all day long.

Then, in the early 1970s, an invention came along that would revolutionize skateboarding: the urethane wheel. These wheels were intended for roller skaters at the the dawn of the disco era, but a small company began producing them for skateboards. Kids in L.A. bought these wheels at surf shops (since there were no skate shops), and these new soft plastic wheels had more give to them - they had better grip and could roll over rougher terrain.

Urethane wheels opened up a whole new world of possibilities to skateboarders. Now they could skate on any kind of surface. Peralta, his friends, and the young skaters of Los Angeles began to hop fences and scope out buildings and parking garages, looking for new challenges in everyday built environments.

Then, in the mid-70s, there was a major drought in Southern California.

Couples were encouraged to shower together, and people were told not to water their lawns, or to fill up their swimming pools. And in Los Angeles, there were a lot of swimming pools.

The pools of southern California are very unique. They are curvy and free-form, shaped like peanuts and keyholes and kidney beans. They're paved evenly throughout their rounded depths. As Stacy Peralta put it:

LA was the backyard pool mecca. And not just the backyard pool mecca, the properly beautifully designed backyard pool. I don't know of anywhere else in the world that has that proliferation of that kind of voluptuous, sensuous design.

In the middle of the drought, suddenly, the pools of Los Angeles were all empty. They were the perfect places to skate. "They just were so beautifully conceived and designed," says Peralta, "and we fell in love with the shapes."

Peralta and his friends would hunt for pools, finding them at houses under construction and in fancy parts of town. They would climb fences and break into places. If there was a little bit of old dirty water in the pool, they would drain it out themselves with buckets or, eventually, with an industrial vacuum they would bring along. Then they would skate all over in the pool, cruising up and down the curved surfaces.

Riding in pools was a revelation to Peralta. When he could skate up a sloping wall, he got a feeling of weightlessness. It was extraordinary. "We were these scruffy kids and here we are riding in backyard pools and we know what we're doing is beautiful. And we get to feel beautiful." Skateboarding became a form of choreography, where skaters were trying to do as much as possible in the limited space of the pool, and look graceful while doing it.

Back in the first wave of skateboarding in the 1960s, there had been a magazine called, simply, Skateboarder. It went out of business when the skateboarding fad died out, but in the 1970s, the magazine came back. And it featured Peralta and his friends, skating in these strange California pools. The magazine spread the word that skateboards were back, and they weren't just kids' toys anymore.

Eventually, Peralta and other skateboarders got so good at pool skating they were able to skate up over the edge of the pool and jump into the air. These aerial tricks led to another chapter for skateboarding, where extreme tricks took precedence. Think of the X-games, half-pipes, and Tony Hawk - all of which can be traced back to the rounded, biomorphic pools of Los Angeles.

Act Two: Sonoma

The curvy, kidney bean-shaped pools so beloved by California skaters can be traced back to one backyard in Sonoma County. And not just any yard - arguably the most famous private backyard in 20th century American history.

Justin Faggioli and Sandy Donnell are the owners and caretakers of the property known as the Donnell Garden, which is famous in the world of landscape architecture. It's not the kind of thing the public can tour. It's just a private residence: a modestly sized, retro-modern affair from around 1950 on a hill that belonged to Sandy Donnell's parents.

The garden was planted in 1948. In the first half of the 20th century, traditional gardens were more or less plant museums, with symmetrical rows or sections of different kinds of flowers, maybe with the occasional geometric hedge or fruit tree.

The Donnell Garden is nothing like a traditional garden. It's mostly lawn. It's a sea of cut grass, with tropical plant clusters and groups of rocks floating in it like ships or islands. And in the midst of it all sits a distinctively shaped swimming pool, believed to be the first of its kind in California.

It's hard to overstate the importance of the Donnell Garden, to both formal garden designs and everyday American yards. Designed by landscape architect Thomas Church, it helped shape the idea of the modern backyard as we know, from its lawn and deck to its pool.

"I would guess, possibly with the exception of Versailles, that the Donnell Garden is probably the most published garden, at least in the 20th century," says architectural historian Marc Treib.

Thomas Church was a firm believer that outdoor spaces could be designed for a wide variety of uses, rather than adhering to the traditional rows of flowers.

He believed that people could create whatever kind of space they wanted, which is why his 1955 book was called Gardens Are for People. Church thought yards could be like rooms of a house, able to serve real functions for owners who wanted to throw parties or simply relax and lounge in the sun or shade. And throughout the 1950s, lifestyle magazines like Sunset and House Beautiful featured the Donnell Garden on their covers. As Marc Treib puts it:

In many ways it became the icon, certainly of American modern landscape architecture. A lot of it being, of course, for the swimming pool.

Images of the Donnell Garden began to spread, and it became the epitome of the California outdoor lifestyle. Newly-minted suburbanites and landscape architects across Southern California began to imitate it.

It is impossible to know exactly where Thomas Church came up with the distinctive outline of this pool. In 1947, retro boomerang shapes were already appearing in everything from fine art to mass produced textiles and furniture. Church could have gotten the idea for the kidney-shaped pool anywhere. But there is a really interesting and widespread theory about where Church got his inspiration.

Act Three: Finland

"Skateboarding came to my neighborhood at the end of the 1980s," says Finnish skateboarder Janne Saario, in part thanks to magazines and videos featuring the California skate scene. "The first ones came when someone's dad went to, you know, a business trip to the States, and then they brought back some videos."

Saario, inspired by the California skate scene, went on to become a sponsored skater and competed in cities all over the world. Through skateboarding, Saario says, he fell in love with architecture and design, and went on to study architecture in University.

While in architecture school, Saario distinctly remembers a lecture he heard about the origins of the kidney pool. "There was a professor coming from California," he recalls. "She was having a lecture. I saw her talking about The Donnell Garden. I think she was saying that it's the mother of all kidney pools." This struck him as a bit strange, since he know of another much older such pool, designed by Alvar Aalto.

"Alvar Aalto's work and his life was exceptional in that sense in that he was a pioneer in cross-disciplinary thinking and design," explains Antti Ahlava, architect and Vice President of Aalto University, which is named after Alvar Aalto.

Aalto is easily Finland's most beloved architect. He designed public and government buildings all over Helsinki, and created Artek, a furniture company that is, to this day, successful all over the world.

Aalto is one of the most-studied architects of the 20th century. Frank Lloyd Wright loved Aalto - and he hated other architects. Frank Gehry also cites Aalto as one of the only other architects he admires. Aalto is an architect's architect. And his work helped create a unique Finnish aesthetic, which was an important part of developing a unique Finnish identity.

Finland is relatively young. It only became independent in 1917. Before that, Finland was Russian, and it looks it. Helsinki has stood in for Moscow and Leningrad in a number of films. Its buildings are regal, intimidating, and very ornate. Finland wanted to step away from Soviet romanticism, especially because the rest of Europe was experimenting with a new architectural approach called Functionalism.

Functionalism was a reaction to the dirty, overpopulated, polluted cities of the 19th century, which were loaded down with extra trim and friezes and statues. "Functionalism wanted to be healthy. There was lots of sunlight, air between buildings. It was fresh," says Antti Ahlava. Functionalism was like an architectural cleanse.

Aalto was tuned into what the Bauhaus was doing in Germany as well as the Modernist work of architects like Le Corbusier. But Aalto saw an opportunity to humanize and adapt Modernist impulses and make them more organic in terms of both form and material.

Aalto made curving partitions to break up the space. He used rounded tiles, and undulating counters - all crisp and functional, but a little more natural and cosy. While many Modernists toyed with sterile concrete and clean white paint, Aalto began to work with natural wood, bending, gluing and veneering it in novel ways.

So when an art collector and lumber heiress named Marie Gullischen asked Aalto to design her country home, the Villa Mairea, Aalto wanted to keep it very stark and clean, but also friendly and natural.

Of course, in rural Finland, if you're going to have a villa, you need a sauna. And if you're going to have a sauna, you need a pool to cool off in. So Aalto designed a pool with a very peculiar, rounded, curvy shape.

The story goes that Thomas Church, the California landscape architect who designed the Donnell Garden, went on a trip to Finland with his wife Betsy in 1937. Somehow they found out the address of Alvar Aalto's home studio and got themselves there, and knocked on the door. Aalto welcomed them in and they grew to be friends. It's quite possible that designs for the Villa Mairea (and its pool) were on display in Aalto's studio while Church was visiting. Which might have inspired the pool in the Donnell Garden.

And then the Donnell Garden pool becomes famous, inspiring a slew of similar pool designs in California. And these other pools go on to be emptied out during the drought in the 70's, inspiring a new chapter for skateboarding.

And that skate culture inspired kids around the world, like Finnish skateboarder Janne Saario, to take up skateboarding and architecture.

Janne Saario graduated architecture school, and developed a specialty. Today, he is the only skatepark designer in Finland. He designs curvaceous pools all over Europe - pools exclusively for skateboarders. He believes that public skate parks and pools should be a source of civic pride, especially in Finland, where, Janne likes to tease, modern skateboarding began.

I kind of use it as a joke, when we're out with the skatepark builders - they're usually from the States or Canada. And I try to claim skateboarding for having its roots in Finland.

Pool Parti

Some say that Alvar Aalto's pool at the Villa Mairea was inspired by the soft bends in a Finnish lake. Or maybe Aalto was just excited about his ability to make wavy forms, a design tendency that would become his signature in his furniture and housewares. Or maybe Aalto was inspired by some other curvy pool somewhere else in the world that we don't know about.

Aalto didn't like to talk about his sources of inspiration. He didn't write too much about them either, save for a small passage, an extended metaphor about his creative thought process, comparing it to a fish in a stream:
"Architecture and its details are in some way all part of biology. Perhaps they are, for instance, like some big salmon or trout. They are not born fully grown; they are not even born in the sea or water where they normally live. They are born hundreds of miles away from their home grounds, where the rivers narrow to tiny streams. Just as it takes time for a speck of fish spawn to mature into a fully-grown fish, so we need time for everything that develops and crystallizes in our world of ideas."

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It's hard to say where inspiration comes from. The path from the seed of an idea to its execution is often a long one. The brilliant architect Alvar Aalto expressed this sentiment well, in an extended metaphor about a fish in a stream: "Architecture and its details are in some way all part of biology.

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Hathaway 11B

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Fire Coming out of Monkey's Head Lyrics 

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The Video

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Fire Coming out the Monkey's Head Music Video

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On his way to becoming an international icon, the subversive and secretive street artist turned the art world upside-down

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The "Danger of a Single Story", a 2009 TED Talk by Chimamanda Adichie, a young Nigerian author, provides a powerful tool for the Facing History classroom. In the twenty minute video, Adichie describes the powerful impression the multitude of British stories made on her as a young girl growing up in Nigeria. She argues that inherent in the power of stories, is a danger-the danger of only knowing one story about a group. "The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story."

Adichie recounts speaking to an American student who, after reading her novel centered on an abusive male protagonist, lamented the fact that Nigerian men were abusive. Having just read American Psycho, Adichie returns his pity, and calls it a shame that "all young American men are serial killers." The TED audience laughs at the absurdity of this generalization and her point is clear: on a micro-level, the danger of a single story is that it prevents people from authentically connecting with people as individuals. On a macro-level, the issue is really about power: almost by definition, there are many stories about the dominant culture so the single-story threatens to create stereotypes that stick to groups that are already disempowered.

After seeing this twenty minute video, I knew I wanted to share it with students. I've observed that Africa is often students' default example of human tragedy-"starving children", "war-torn societies" and other scenes of deprivation and scarcity are conflated with "Africa." Adichie is articulate, insightful, empowered and engaging-I knew that just seeing her speak would shatter some stereotypes that students hold which oversimplify "Africa" and lump all Africans together.
[ted id=652]
Adichie's video raises questions that fit directly with Facing History's scope and sequence. Facing History begins with an exploration of identity with questions such as "Who am I?" "To what extent am I able to define myself?" "What labels do others place on me?" Defining oneself and the groups to which one belongs often means distinguishing "us" from "them." As Rudyard Kipling writes "All the people like us are We and everyone else is They." (Click here for Kipling's poem, "We and They") Adichie's TED Talk shows how this "we/they" dichotomy is established. The We/They divide is an enduring theme which you can use in any humanities classroom.

I chose to use it in my eighth grade Global Studies course as a way to reflect after last quarter's major assignment: a lengthy interview with a person from another country. This assignment is a part of a year-long "Country Project" where students choose one developing nation to investigate in depth. During the third quarter, students developed questions; scheduled, conducted, and recorded the personal interview. This goal of the interview was to move students beyond the statistics and facts they had researched about the country as well as to develop their interpersonal and interviewing skills.

The culminating assessment was a reflective essay about the lessons and content learned from the interviewing process. The students' reflections revealed "aha moments." For example, in her essay Ashley wrote of her great revelation that Chipotle was not "real" Mexican food and, to her surprise, burritos were an American concoction with roots in California. This felt like progress; but though I was encouraged at the baby-steps, I also realized that students might have trouble discerning the opinion of one Mexican person from a fuller picture of Mexico. Each student gained so much respect for the life story of the person they interviewed, that this person became the authority on anything about the country. I could see how new knowledge could be greatly over-simplified and generalized. I decided to complicate my students' thinking by introducing "The Danger of a Single Story."
The Lesson:
My students were moved by the ideas. The simple message was clear: do not stereotype. But, they picked up on the nuance of all of her points. This video clearly has many classroom applications and I would love to hear from other Facing History teachers about how they envision using this resource in the classroom.

Click here to see another teacher's take on short videos useful in the Facing History classroom, from our sister blog in Toronto: ONnetwork.facinghistory.org

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The "Danger of a Single Story", a 2009 TED Talk by Chimamanda Adichie, a young Nigerian author, provides a powerful tool for the Facing History classroom. In the twenty minute video, Adichie describes the powerful impression the multitude of British stories made on her as a young girl growing up in Nigeria.

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use this link if the website won't open: https://bit.ly/2AMVuxC

Website Citation (https://hellopoetry.com/poem/2597193/eraser/)

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I wipe marker off the board, and
I have a painful tendency of quickly growing bored.
I can't erase the ink-spots lingering
in high-up corners;
to spare the self-defeat, I teach myself how to ignore them.

Ignore the marks, and stains, and pains
pretend I'm wiped clean, all the same
with little left to lose or gain:
I leave them; growth is self-restraint.

Perfection is a non-existent notion,
so they say;
yet, unobtainability is all I can create.
For in my mind, these false ideals make tame desires stray,
and self-destructive pleasure is my antidote to pain.

I think I'm like a little plant
of stunted growth, just seeds to start,
my plantpot made from breaking hearts:
before I grow, I say I can't.

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I wipe marker off the board, and I have a painful tendency of quickly growing bored.I can't erase the ink-spots lingering in high-up corners;to spare the self-defeat, I teach myself how to ignore them. Ignore the marks, and stains, and painspretend I'm wiped clean, all the samewith little left to lose or gain:I leave them; growth is self-restraint.