MFE

She was tall and slim with curly brown hair and dark brown eyes. She was eye candy to all the young boys in her small town in Poland. She had an extremely large,wealthy family, three sisters, two brothers, and her mom and dad. She was young, vibrant, intelligent, and thrived for excitement. That was, before the [|Germans came in] and tore up her small town and family. I have never really been able to get too much information out of my grandmother about her past and experience in World War II, and my mom has always warned me to stay away from the subject to keep from getting her riled up. All she can tell me is that I should never experience the horrors she went through. I rode the elevator to her high rise apartment, and razzng the doorbell to her penthouse suite. She opened the door with open arms dangling her gold bracelets. Her fingers were covered with various kinds of stones, and the apartment smelt like fresh chicken soup. It smelt like the holidays, but of course my grandma's apartment always smelt like that. A person could hear her from a mile away as she was describing the night's menu as well as the preparation and work it took her to make the meal. As I walked around her apartment while she was cooking in the kitchen, I saw the thousands of pictures of my family and I, but could not keep my eyes off the one right above her bed. It was a picture of what looked like a grandmother, mother, and three little girls. I yelped from her bedroom, "Who are these people in this picture?" She did not answer, but I heard her slow footsteps moving toward me. She held the broom in her hand, sweeping away nothing on the floor and replied, "That was my grandmother Hedwick, my dear mother, Esther, and my three beautiful sisters Golda, Bertha, and Anna." Although seemingly distracted, she did not avoid my question. Alas; the perfect time to findabout her horrific holocaust experience. She walked out, and I followed her into the pearly white kitchen. I sat down at the table, and watched as she tasted the sauce of her [|magic meat.] I asked hesitantly, "How old were you when the war first effected you and your family?" She slowly thought about it, and then answered. "My brother was away working in a factory in the big city, and my father was running his business and supporting the family back home. My brother came back one day looking worn out and exhausted, and told us about how he was laid off because the Nazi's came in and forbid any Jews to continue working into the factory. He said he heard from someone on his voyage home that Hitler and the Nazis' were coming towards our small town in Poland." I anxiously waited to hear more about her story, but she stood and stared at me with blank eyes. I did not really have anything to say to her because I knew where he story was going. So, I tried to initiate more conversation on a happier note asking her what she remembered of her sisters. She immediately grabbed the silver bracelet on her right hand and looked up at and told me that her sister had given it to her when she was only seven years old. She continued saying,"My sister had a beautiful baby daughter, and a wonderful husband. My other sister was engaged to be married, and the other was young and beautiful. They all died in the concentration camps. All of them, after the war was eventually over I looked for them, but it was documented that they had all perished. Every single member of my family died in the hands of the Nazis at [|Auschwitz concentration camp] . I could not stay there anymore, so I got on a boat, and went to New York to stay with my very distant relatives." That quickly directed me into my next question, "What was it like for you to be [|living in the United States] knowing practically nobody?" She answered, "[|I had a hard time adjusting] . Most of the time I was thinking about my family, but you know? I had many men chasing after me in New York. I was a beautiful woman, I do not know what I did to get stuck with bad men in the end, but now I am alone." She had experienced a messy and unpleasant marriage with my grandfather, and continued to be disappointed by men whether it was because they were sick or the relationship was just not right. Her white house was perfectly clean, not a spot on the floor and her couches were always covered with plastic. Her refrigerator was always filled, but there was way too much for her to eat by herself. Before I could get into asking her my question she blurted out, "But I am so thankful to have your mother and my son, Arthur, because they make me so happy, and so do you children. I do whatever I can to make you comfortable in my house. You want some soup?" I knew that was my cue to end the questioning because she was getting ancy. It has been [|difficult for my grandmothe]r. Although she had faced many major tragedies in the first part of her life, and difficult relationship throughout her adult years, she is grateful for having a big family who loves her, cares for her, listens to her, and supports everything she does. She has no close relatives other than her descendants and she does not have a significant other, yet she always puts on a smile for my cousins and I and takes so much pride in our accomplishments and achievements. She puts on a strong front to make us stronger because she wants us to be able to face and defeat any obstacle that comes our way, similar to the way she conquered the war.

I went to [|this website] and was able to listen to other people's stories that seemed and connected me to my grandmother's own stories. Hearing their stories about the hardships and events they went through enabled me to obtain a greater understanding. media type="youtube" key="-2lqxTgZU8g" width="224" height="187"

Sitting in the class Watching the computer screen I’m about to lose

Quotes are on the bored I read them everyday They make the class laugh

Othello is dumb He should not trust Iago That is why he dies

Muller is so smart He says all the right things I want to be him

Wikispace is great We love discussion questions O Technology

Our class is so smart Better than the other class That is why we rule Michelle, Lindsey, Jen The prettiest girls in class They are just the best

Michelle Feldman 1/11/2009 Book 1: Lesson Plan Book 1: Privacy or Security?Cancel


 * __STANDARD:__** __Language Arts Literacy 3.G.1 Identify, describe, evaluate, and synthesize the central ideas in informational texts.__


 * __EXPECTATIONS:__**
 * They will connect and discuss their involvement with modern day networking site.
 * My group will be able to compare the technological advances we have today with that that they had when the book was written, and when the book took place.
 * They will show understanding of the character in 1984, and relate themselves to him.
 * They will discuss and create the most efficient and safe way to maintain security and privacy.


 * __MATERIALS:__**
 * Laptop with internet connection
 * Picture of face book on worksheet
 * News article on wikispaces
 * PowerPoint or paper and writing utensil


 * __OPENING:__**
 * I will show my group an image of the information page of face book, and we will discuss the information an average person gives out to the public, and the dangers of all of that information being available. We will discuss the privacy settings the networking sites provide as well as government provides, to the lack of privacy given to people in “1984”


 * __MIDDLE:__**
 * The group will read an article on my wikispace about the boundaries between [|security and privacy]. We will discuss how that would tie in to the times of 1984 and whether they provide any privacy with their security procedures.
 * They will then think about themselves in the shoes of Winston, and think about the actions that would follow the high-pressure security, and whether or not they would rebel.
 * I will be present in the discussion to keep the topic flowing.

=Security vs. Privacy: The Rematch= Jennifer Granick 05.24.06 This month USA Today reported that the National Security Agency has been compiling and searching a massive database of Americans' telephone call records and data mining it for suspicious patterns. NPR reported that this activity was part of the same eavesdropping program The New York Timesrevealed in April. With the new revelations (which the phone companies have denied) an old debate has again reared its ugly head. Proponents of strong government say civil libertarians don't appreciate the terrorist threat, and civil libertarians say that advocates of mass surveillance don't appreciate the danger of a prying government. But that trade-off between privacy and security is mythological. Giving up privacy does not necessarily result in greater security, and greater security does not necessarily require a loss of privacy. As a country we need to move beyond this false security vs. privacy meme and craft laws that improve both -- laws that take into account the changing privacy landscape, and the indisputable need to fight terrorism. One piece of the answer lies in acknowledging how digital technology has upended our traditional understanding of privacy. In the past, a good deal of privacy was part and parcel of physical reality. For example, when I walked down the street, if no one else was there, I could assume I was unobserved, and take the time to fix my lipstick. But with the advent of video-surveillance cameras, this is no longer the case. A hidden camera can observe me even when I think I'm alone. With early analog cameras, someone needed to be watching the video feed for my privacy to be at risk. It was expensive to catalog and store videotapes, and hard to go back and find interesting stuff after the fact. With digital video cameras, however, it's cheap and compact to store the video forever. Machines assist investigators searching the videos by tagging the points where someone is moving in the frame, and eventually, perhaps, with [|facial-recognition software]. That's just one example. Modern technology affects privacy in whole new ways by making information collection possible, cheap, easy, searchable, storable and aggregatable. Practical difficulties and expense used to be the main obstacles to government invasions of privacy. As technology wears away these obstacles, the law may be the only speed bump for government surveillance to overcome. Privacy protections in the law, therefore, need to become stronger, not weaker. Imposing legal hurdles to surveillance protects civil liberties by placing an independent judge in the loop, to check and make sure that there's adequate cause for investigation. But it also imposes costs that prevent a government with limited resources from pursuing the most extravagant, unlikely avenues of investigation. In general, this is a good thing.
 * __ENDING:__**
 * The group will have a couple minutes to themselves to think about a compromise or an invention that can help control one’s privacy while at the same time maintain national security.
 * They will create either a short power point, or draw a picture with a brief explanation of their idea and share with class.

Michelle Feldman 1/11/2009 Book 2: Lesson Plan

Book 2: To trust or not to trust?

=There’s no need to audition – you could already be a TV star= Published: 30/12/2008 DO YOU realise you are probably a television star? No, I thought not. But if you visit any of our cities, the chances are that you will be on a TV screen several times during the same day. You won’t necessarily be on I’m a Celebrity. . . Get Me Out of Here! – though the fact that they’re now down to Z-list celebs means that any one of us could qualify for a place on that show. The news that the number of council-controlled CCTV cameras operating in Aberdeen has rocketed 12-fold in five years doesn’t surprise me. It seems that cameras controlled by Aberdeen City Council have increased from just 33 in 2003 to 396 today. It’s worth reading that sentence again. The P&J has reported that the increase in Aberdeen mirrors a nationwide rise in the number of surveillance systems. So what are we to make of all this? Some people argue that the increase is unacceptable in a free society. Human rights lawyer John Scott said: “These figures show further evidence we are very much sleepwalking into a surveillance society. I’m sure the public are aware of the cameras in Scotland’s cities, but whether they are fully aware we are the most watched country in Europe, I’m not so sure.” Others feel that the more cameras in our streets the better if we are to feel secure. Aberdeen councillor Martin Greig, chairman of the city’s community safety partnership, said: “CCTV cameras are there to reduce crime, trace offenders and give reassurance to members of the community. The majority of the cameras are not in public spaces but in buildings such as schools. The purpose of the cameras is to fight crime and on the whole I think this has been a very effective tool in doing so. CCTV systems are there to protect citizens and not to create a Big Brother society for normal, law-abiding people.” So what do you think? Personally, I’m concerned that more and more ordinary citizens are coming under surveillance in one way or another. Britain has more CCTV cameras per head of the population – 4.2million, one for every 14 people - than any other country in Europe. Then there are thousands of speed cameras on the roads. We will soon have to carry biometric ID cards. We will all eventually end up on a national DNA database. There are reports predicting that by 2016 shoppers will be scanned as they enter stores, schools will bring in cards allowing parents to monitor what their children eat and jobs will be refused to applicants who are seen as a health risk. George Orwell’s brilliant satire, 1984, warned about this very thing. He was the one who coined the phrase “Big Brother is watching you”. He imagined a state-controlled society in which the government monitored everyone’s movements and even tried to control people’s thinking. Well, we already have government “spin”, in which the truth is distorted for political purposes. Alastair Campbell is reputed to have had more power than many government ministers when he was Tony Blair’s spin doctor. Did you know that there are 1,000 surveillance requests a day? Did you know that 1million people who have been convicted of no crime are already on the government’s DNA database? Did you know that pupils in 5,000 schools have been fingerprinted? Mr Greig has a fair point when he says that CCTV cameras have a role to play in combating crime. The problem is that the cameras seem to be breeding like rabbits. When the increasing number of cameras is backed up by more and more personal information stored on national databases, we have to ask some serious questions. Here’s one. Do you trust the government to safeguard your personal information? I don’t. Look at the number of cases where discs with details of benefit recipients have gone missing. Countering terrorism is obviously a major issue. But modern terrorists can easily produce fake ID documents. The government’s secret services have powers to eavesdrop on conversations. That’s fine if they have to argue a case before a judge, but anyone who believes that the rules are always followed is living in cloud cuckoo land. In America, Edgar J Hoover, former head of the FBI, used to bug the phone conversations of leading figures like Martin Luther King. It’s very tempting for people in power to monitor their rivals’ personal conversations for political purposes. The words “national security” cover a multitude of sins. Do you know that the secret services already have powers to read your e-mails? The argument made against the steady expansion of surveillance powers is that if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear. Really? If that’s the case, why have there been so many miscarriages of justice? And that’s only the ones we know about. When I was in Canada for a year, I kept being stopped by the Mounties and having my car examined. Every time it happened, I told the members of the congregation I was serving. They were astounded. Many told me that they had never been stopped in a lifetime’s worth of driving. Why was I stopped so often? Because I was driving an ancient Chevrolet with bump marks on it. The only people who drove such vehicles were teenagers and native people from the reservations. Work it out for yourself. Think about teenagers and Moslems in today’s Britain. It’s dangerous to surrender too many of our hard-won personal liberties. We must also do everything we can to support the independence of our judiciary. It’s our only bulwark against abuse of powers. So, dear readers, have a good new year. But remember you’re on candid camera. And if you’re not on a television screen, somebody may film your celebrations on their mobile phone and you’ll be an unwitting star on YouTube. There is no escape. http://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/Article.aspx/1007296/?UserKey= Book 3: Hitler v. Big Brother          > **Could the Internet Have Stopped Hitler?** **Silicon Insider: The Internet Could Have Discredited Hitler Early On** **COLUMN By MICHAEL S. MALONE** Dec. 12, 2008, 2008 http://www.abcnews.go.com/Business/IndustryInfo/Story?id=6443258&page=4 Godwin's Law -- the notion that every conversation on the Internet eventually ends up talking about Hitler and the Nazis -- comes at last to the Nobel Prize ceremonies. This year's Nobel Laureate, France's Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, said that if the Internet had existed in the early 20th Century, it might have stopped Hitler. (AP Photos) You probably know that new Nobel Laureates in Literature are asked to give an acceptance lecture at the awards banquet -- and that some of them having proven quite memorable, such as William Faulkner's famous "I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail" speech in 1950. You may also have read that this year's laureate, France's Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, used the occasion to say something that, if not quite as profound and enduring, certainly has provoked a lot of discussion. What Le Clezio said was: "Who knows, if the Internet had existed at the time, perhaps Hitler's criminal plot would not have succeeded -- ridicule might have prevented it from ever seeing the light of day." That's an extraordinary comment, suggesting that somehow digital technology, had it been around back then, could have stopped the most evil figure of modern times. And not only that, but would have done so via ridicule. That last part strikes me as a particularly French point of view, as if social embarrassment might have frozen the Beer Hall Putsch in its tracks, Hitler, Hess, Bormann et al. slumping away to the general laughter of amused Munich burghers. That might work west of the Meuse – but having seen rows of passed-out drunks in silly hats arrayed on the hillside outside the beer tents at the Oktoberfest, somehow I don't think it works the same way in Bavaria. But let's leave aside that little bit of Gallic reasoning and ask the more interesting question: Could the Internet have stopped the Third Reich and saved more than 30 million lives? A number of commentators found even that notion risible; they pointed out that the Internet has done little or nothing to alleviate the horrible fate of the victims in Darfur, or even Zimbabwe. If the Web can't stop a bunch of stoned teenagers with AK-47s, much less a petty tyrant starving his country to death, how could it have had the slightest chance of stopping a racist megalomaniac commanding the world's most powerful army and ruling one of the world's wealthiest nations? In making this argument, most writers simply dismissed Le Clezio's notion as absurd on its face. But I'm not so sure there isn't something to his notion. Not only that, it's an interesting exercise to look at this idea more closely – if nothing else, to perhaps give us some clues on how to fight dangerous totalitarian movements in the future. **Hitler and the Internet** Let me explain. I'm not a scholar of the Nazism or of the Third Reich, but I do know enough to appreciate that it had a very distinct trajectory consisting of several eras. The first was young Adolph Hitler, like many other disgruntled WWI veterans, finding himself in a Germany that seemed to be falling apart under the weight of Versailles payments, war loss guilt, an economic depression, Weimer excesses, and a growing internal threat from the Communist Party. He eventually drifted to an extremist group, the National Socialists, where he found not only like-minded individuals, but also a gift for leadership. Eventually, but prematurely, in 1923, these Nazis led by Hitler attempted a bungled coup d'etat, during which Hitler was arrested and imprisoned. This is the period, in which Hitler and Brown Shirts looked like bunglers and buffoons, that I think Le Clezio is talking about. So, had the Internet existed and videos of the Beer Hall Putsch been posted on YouTube, would there have been sufficient ridicule to drive Hitler and his gang out of public life forever? I don't think so. On the contrary, I think just the opposite is true. Even at that young age, Hitler was apparently already a mesmerizing speaker (at least to the German mind). Imagine what he could have done with a popular blog, a constant stream of laudatory YouTube videos, a multi-media website devoted to Mein Kampf, and a vast e-mail list. In fact, I would argue that Hitler would have been more successful in the 1920s, the Nazis attracting new members and donors not just in Bavaria but throughout Europe and even from the American Bund (which otherwise didn't happen for another decade). But the 1930s, I think, are a very different matter. A little story: As it happens, I was born in a little Bavarian town (at least it was then; now it's a tech business center) called Furstenfeldbruck. My father was a U.S. Air Force officer (and, as I've written before, a spy) and we lived in Munich. Keep in mind that this was 1954, and Munich looked like a city with more parking lots than people – all of those vacant areas being where the rubble of the bombed city had been bulldozed away. And what I remember is that years later, my mother told me that she used to look out the kitchen window at all of the men waiting at the bus stop each morning and wonder: How many of them were Nazis? **Propaganda** The answer was: a lot of them. But the point is that my mother couldn't tell. There was nobody wearing armbands at that bus station, no one who looked like a guard from nearby Dachau. Even my father's German assistant -- an extraordinary man who had fought on both fronts during the war, worked with U.S. intelligence for 30 years and then, in retirement, devoted his time to helping Serbian refugees -- had once proudly worn the uniform of the Hitler Youth. Somehow, it was during that interval between when he left Landsberg prison at the end of 1924 and when he was named chancellor of Germany in 1933 that Hitler, despite being the object of ridicule by much of the nation's intellectual and upper-classes, managed to galvanize the entire country behind him, including those men my mother saw standing at the bus stop. He did so with brilliant propaganda, ruthless tactics and appealing to a common scapegoat – the Jews – for all of Germany's problems. It is during this period that I think the Internet, had it existed, might well have stopped Hitler. Imagine 10,000 blogs and Web sites, all exposing the excesses of the Nazis: breaking leaked information from Hitler's circle, showing cellphone videos of the horrors of the SA purge or Kristallnacht, showing how Hitler's poisonous vision in autobiography and speeches were now unfolding across Germany – and pointing to its obvious conclusion. Most of all, giving persecuted Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals a voice beyond the increasingly party-controlled media. All of this would have embarrassed Hitler and the Nazis in a very different way than Le Clezio suggests, but it might have been much more effective. In showing the Nazis for the low-rent thugs they were, the Internet might have created enough doubt among the German middle class to take away the votes Hitler needed to take power. After that, it would have been too late. Once the Nazis took over the chancellory, the party would have censored the Web in Germany – and eventually all the countries it occupied – subverting it to its own ends as a propaganda organ and a tool for surveillance of dissidents. The Third Reich Web would have been, like the Nazis themselves, a dangerous institution. With one exception. I think the Internet might have stopped – or at least forestalled long enough for an Allied victory – the Holocaust. I can imagine fuzzy cell phone pictures of the ovens at Auschwitz, or videos of the Warsaw ghetto, or train schedules across Poland, somehow making their way to Allied servers and from there by-passing the mainstream media to explode on the pages of blogs and web sites all over the world. Secrecy – and Allied indifference – were crucial to the Final Solution. The Internet, even an underground one, would have made both impossible. **History Changed?** So even if the Internet, had it existed, would likely have failed to stop World War II, it might well have stopped the worst government-sanctioned mass murder in history. And that's enough to say there may be something to Jean-Marie Le Clezio's remarks after all.
 * __STANDARD:__** __Language Arts Literacy 3.D.3 Demonstrate effective delivery strategies (e.g., eye contact, body language, volume, intonation, articulation)__ when speaking.
 * __EXPECTATIONS:__**
 * Students will establish understanding of the definition of trust, and examine the trustworthiness of themselves and in their relationships.
 * Students will discuss the trust in their lives to the levels of trust Winston’s life. They will analyze an article about the trust between the students and their parents.
 * Students will discuss and analyze trust in action with one another by taking place in a writing and acting activity.
 * __MATERIALS:__**
 * Laptop with internet connection
 * Piece of paper and pen
 * News article on wikispace
 * __OPENING:__**
 * Each member of the group will go on to my wikispace and click the link to take a [|quiz]on trust in their relationships. It is about a two-minute quiz. We will analyze whether you are too trusting or not trusting enough with the relationships in their lives.
 * __MIDDLE:__**
 * [[image:http://1984theplay.com/The%20Apartment%20lo%20res.jpg width="349" height="251" align="right"]]Taking the quiz will lead us into the discussion of whether Winston was too trusting of both Charrington and O’Brien or he just did not know better.
 * We will discuss whether if in Winston’s situation, the students would be able to trust anyone or no one.
 * The students will go to the article on my wikispace about the parents not trusting their children. Although not the same, parents are a huge part of the student’s lives and someone they feel connected to similarly to the way Winston felt connected to O’Brien.
 * __ENDING:__**
 * Each student in the group will take a piece of paper and write two truths, and two lies. They will then proceed to read them out loud to the rest of the group. The other members will decide if they are telling the truth or not. Based on the facial expressions and actions of the reader, the others will determine if they are telling the truth or not.
 * BY RON FERGUSON**
 * __ STANDARD: __ ** __ Media Literacy 3.C.3 - Recognize that creators of media use a number of forms, techniques, and technologies to convey their messages.  __ 
 * __ EXPECTATIONS: __<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> **
 * <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Students will establish understanding of the definition of indifference, and analyze a quote from the book and what it means in relation to the characters and time.
 * <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Students will show understanding of article and compare the ideals of Hitler’s times to both 1984 and today.
 * <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Students will show understanding of computer programs by creating an advertisement <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
 * __ <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">MATERIALS: __** <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
 * <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Laptop with internet connection
 * <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">News article on wikispace <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
 * <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Pages, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
 * __ <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">OPENING: __** <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
 * <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">The group will read the quote on the worksheet, and discuss the context of the quote in the novel, and discuss any connections with the quote and either current events or history. <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
 * __ <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">MIDDLE: <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">  __**
 * <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Students will read [|article] about Hitler and what would happen if he won the war. We will discuss whether or not we believe what the article says, and share our opinions. <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
 * <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">We will connect the article about Hitler and 1984 in discussion. <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
 * <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">The students will create an advertisement on Pages, Microsoft Word, or PowerPoint to help tell people not experiencing Big Brother government or World War II what is going on. <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
 * __ <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">ENDING: <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">  __**
 * <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">The students will present their advertisements, and explain why they chose the techniques they did, and what the advertisement means.
 * <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">We will then discuss how these advertisements could have been useful in either 1984 or World War II.