Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

Last week in English II we began reading Jhumpa Lahiri's 2003 novel The Namesake. Spanning several decades from the late 1960's through the year 2000, the novel follows the Ganguli family, who move to the United States from India. The novel focuses on their eldest son Gogol (named after Nikolai Gogol, the 19th century Russian author) and his struggles and successes trying to balance the traditional expectations of his parents with those of his native country as a first-generation American.

Sage Hill School has a very diverse student population. As such, many of our own students are also first-generation Americans. I look forward to hearing their perspectives as we begin our discussion of the novel.

I am not a first-generation American; I'm a Western European mutt- mostly German, English and Irish. My father's paternal grandfather emigrated from Ireland to the United States in the late 1910's and established himself as one of the first blacksmiths in Rancho Cucamonga, California- the town I later grew up in. My paternal grandmother was adopted, so we don't really know what my background is through her, but her adoptive father was Adolph Leuizinger, one of the founding fathers of the El Segundo area of Los Angeles and the namesake for Leuizinger High School in Inglewood, California.

While I'm probably more German and English than I am Irish, for whatever reason growing up we celebrated our Irish heritage the most. My guess is that because my last name is Irish we just identified with this more. Or there's just more Irish schwag. (You don't see a whole lot of "Kiss Me, I'm German" t-shirts or mugs). But we weren't even really good at that- my mom never cooked cabbage and sometimes we even forgot to wear green on St. Patrick's Day. To be honest, I think of myself as more "Californian" than anything else.

For this week's blog, I want you to explore a bit of your chosen heritage. For some of you this is going to be your family's ethnic or national background. For others, you might not know or maybe are more closely tied to something other than your genetic material. Maybe you had an Italian godmother who taught you to cook fresh pasta or you lived abroad for some time in your life and find yourself more at home in that culture rather than your native one. Is who you are different from how you identify yourself? What does "heritage" and "tradition" mean to you? Do your parents or grandparents have different values from you and, if so, how does that impact your life?

Can I Get An [Eye] Witness???

During Friday's English II class I ran a little experiment. Unbeknownst to my students, I had arranged earlier in the day for one of my colleagues to "interrupt" class in order to borrow something from me. During the "interruption", my colleague and I exchanged a little banter and then she was on her way. Fifteen  later, I handed out a piece of paper to the students and asked them to interview the person sitting next to them, asking them to recall everything they could remember about that interaction.

Whereas some students could recall many details of the experience with great detail, others were less confident in their memories or were confident about details that were entirely wrong. I performed this experiment because, in Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the narrator is seeking accounts from eyewitnesses about an event that took place nearly twenty years before. We, as readers, might get frustrated by the conflicting memories of different characters until we realize that we ourselves are not invulnerable to misremembering something.

This very issue is something that people in the world of criminal justice deal with every day, and psychologists are constantly evaluating the validity of eyewitness testimony as well. For this week's blog post, I want students to not only reflect on the experiment that I ran in class today but also to watch the video (produced by the National Science Foundation) below, and offer their thoughts and impressions. What about the experiment that I ran in class surprised you? What did you get right and what did you get wrong? What did you learn from the video? Was any of the information offered new or surprising to you? How do you look at eyewitness testimony differently now and how will this impact your reading of the novel?