Using a compare\contrast pattern of development focusing on both the text and our world today, address the theme of morality and hypocrisy, which appears in Mark Twain’s novella, The Mysterious Stranger.
It is a challenging job to be a student. All students juggle multiple priorities and responsibilities trying to gain the highest grades at the same time. Please offer your strategies on time management and study skills to your peers. Provide minimum three of the most helpful tools and/or strategies that you use to a high degree of success. Tell us how you apply those tools or skills by sharing an example. Discuss the tips offered by your peers and reflect how or if they will work for you. Some of the additional information could be found in Helpful Tips overview.
Grendel gives us a different perspective of the Geats and the Danes than we find in Beowulf. Pay attention to the details Grendel provides of mankind as you read the first 5 chapters of the novel. What is his perspective on men?
In what ways can the learning environment be enhanced to improve learning ability and retention of newly acquired information in the older learner? What factors can disrupt older people’s acquisition of new information?
o Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? You should write at least one page (double-spaced, 12-point font) on aspects of culture and technology, in this first part of the novel.
When beginning to write, you don’t need to spend a whole paragraph introducing the novel or the nature of this assignment — just leap in and start telling us about your reactions!
Here are some questions that might help you organize your thinking, as you read the first six chapters:
How do the main characters use technology?
Is the technology in the novel used for leisure, or for religious purposes?
How does technology relate to the characters’ personal lives?
Their professional lives?
What is the relationship of technology to money? To entertainment?
You can also think about the style of the writing. Did anything in the text strike you as funny? (Why?) Were you particularly sympathetic to one character? What surprised you in these chapters?
More hints: When thinking about this assignment, consider whether the uses of technology bear any comparison with the ways you and your classmates discussed technology, during our first class. This is a science-fiction novel — but does it describe anything that feels familiar, in our current-day experience of technology and culture? If you see a point of comparison, tell us about it. Have fun with this!
