Discussion 1 : Thursday December 16th, 2010

 Today we started to work on our project.  It was a hassle to decide unanimously which book we wanted to choose for our assignment. We narrowed our pile to three Dr. Seuss books: Bartholomew and the Oobleck, The Cat in the Cat Comes back, and Why am I scared? Fea and Asha originally wanted to use the Cat and the Hat comes back, but eventually we sided with Amberly and chose Bartholomew and the Oobleck since it had the most interesting connections with current and/or past events. Bartholomew and the Oobleck is a tale of a greedy king, who wants something new to fall from the sky. He is too prideful, and even when sticky ooze falls from the sky and engulfs his kingdom, he couldn’t swallow his pride and say sorry. Eventually the king apologizes for his foolhardiness and everything went back to normal in the Kingdom. This could easily relate to a number of things during the Second World War, that we learned in history class because as we know, many countries were greedy and haughty. Bartholomew and the Oobleck was written shortly after the Second World War, in 1949, which means that Dr. Seuss probably got some of his inspiration from events during the war. Amberly read that he got his inspirations from a fellow soldier in Belgium, who wanted something other than rain to fall from the sky. Theodore Geisel got his inspiration for King Derwin of Didd from the haughty leaders. In the Second World War Hitler was hungry to take over Europe, insisting that Germany was the best and most pure country. As the Allied forces began to beat down on the Germans, making the German citizens hungry, sinking their U-Boats and killing their shoulders, Hitler did nothing to stop the fight. He continued to fight with adolescents and seniors as soldiers because most of his soldiers were dead. He never said sorry for his inhuman actions nor took the responsibility for the damage he caused, and the Germans are still paying for his actions today. In addition to this we discovered other possible connections to the story:

·         The war in Afghanistan: The Americans gave arms to the Taliban so that they could defend against the Soviets. Now, the Americans are fighting against their own weapons to defeat the Taliban.

·          The Cold War and the tensions between the Democratic countries and the Soviet Union

·         More specifically The Cuban Missile Crisis: The Cubans forcibly took ownership of all American companies on the island and were holding nuclear missiles from the Soviet Union on their island. They wanted to express their ideas of communism to other Latin American countries. The Cubans lost their commerce with America, which drastically halted their economy. When the Americans put up a blockade, the Cubans went hungry and had no protection from the Soviet Union, so Cuba’s plan to spread communist ideas backfired. All three of these countries were greedy, and there are still tensions between the countries.

There are many things we could discuss in our essay. We could talk about the river of toxic sludge that devastated people and the environment in Hungary, a couple of months ago.  Nevertheless, the group did not come to a decision during our first meeting, because we were did not have access to computers to do additional research and we didn’t want to make a decision using that small amount of basic information we learned in history class. We plan to meet soon to discuss this further and come to a decision. Until then, we will research.