Fea's Research: Monday, December 27th, 2010

Today Fea found a documentary on youtube about the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was produced by the Discovery Channel, titled DEFCON 2. The documentary was somewhat helpful, as it provided Fea with a better understanding of the timeline of events during the crisis. However, a good chunk of the documentary focused on the tinier details (the photography which revealed the Soviet missiles, the mechanics behind all of the technology used in the crisis, etc.) rather than discussing the actual reasons why each country and its leaders acted as they did. After watching the documentary, Fea also searched for clips of President John F. Kennedy of the United States as well as clips of President Nikita Khrushev of the URSS recorded during the crisis. Fea found a couple of videos of John F. Kennedy addressing the nation about the Cuban Missile Crisis, however, the video clips were not all that helpful, as they gave practically the same factual information that the documentary had already provided.

Amberly's Research: Monday, December 27th, 2010

            Today Amberly looked up "Cuban Missile Crisis" on Wikipedia and searched the references listed at the bottom of the Wikipedia page for credible sources. A lot of the references were books, which were not useful to Amberly, because she was focussing on trying to find websites about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Other references were either on some minor detail of the Cuban Missile Crisis, or seemed unreliable and slightly sketchy (or both). There was two sources that Amberly found that might have been useful. One was a George Washington University site. Amberly decided against using it as a source for our essay because it contained so much information that it would have taken forever to find the information we actually needed. The other was a newspaper article from the Sunday Times. It may prove to be useful, but does not have much information on the Cuban Missile Crisis as a whole. The article is the result of an interview with a major figure from the Cuban Missile Crisis, Che Guevara.

Amberly's Research: Sunday, December 26th, 2010

            Today Amberly received the four books on the Cuban Missile Crisis from the library. One of them, The Cuban Missile Crisis: To the Brink of World War III, appears to be a quick overview of the whole Cuban Missile Crisis, which would be good because the book won't be as boring as a longer book on the same subject, but this book is the only one of the four which doesn't have some sort of bibliography of references, so Amberly didn't think it would be the best book to use as a source for our essay. The other books are quite a bit longer. The Cuban Missile Crisis: To the Brink of World War III has only 29 pages with nice large print and pictures, whereas the others have 88 pages, 102 pages and 118 pages respectively. The longest of the three books, Thirteen Days/Ninety Miles: The Cuban Missile Crisis, seems to be the most interesting, written with a flair that makes it seem more like a novel that someone might actually read, as an example, here is an excerpt from the beginning of chapter 5: "Until the telephones began to ring that Monday, October 15, it was a typical early fall evening in Washington. Dean Rusk, the secretary of state, took his call in the butler's pantry next to the State Department's formal dining room. He was hosting an official dinner for West Germany's foreign minister. A few blocks away, the assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs, Edwin Mar­tin, was at the National Press Club addressing members of Sigma Delta Chi, the journalism society. As he told the assembled guests there was no threat from Cuba—'The military build up is basically defensive in nature'—the phone rang." This book is also quite long and Amberly isn't sure she'll have the time to read it all, but it looks like the most entertaining way to get information on the Cuban Missile Crisis. The other two books, The Cuban Missile Crisis and The Cuban Missile Crisis: To the Brink of War (wow, people were really unoriginal with their titles) are just (approximately) one hundred pages of "this happened, then that happened and at first everyone thought this, and nobody predicted that that would happen". So, they are pretty much hair-pulling boringness for one hundred pages. But they do all have a nice little timeline at the end that will probably be useful. Amberly plans on reading these books (or at least parts of them) to collect some more information on the Cuban Missile Crisis, as well as doing some research online.

Discussion 2: Monday, December the 20th, 2010

The group met again and we’ve decided to use the Cuban Missile Crisis as our event which we will relate to the story of Bartholomew and the Oobleck. We found a few books at the Ottawa Public Library and ordered them on Amberly’s library card. We wrote a rough thesis statement which is as follows: “The book Bartholomew and the Oobleck, by Dr. Seuss, is about the greedy and proud King Derwin who hires royal magicians to create a new weather element to fall from the sky. Oobleck falls from the sky causing a sticky mess which wrecks havoc on the Kingdom of Didd. The problem is finally resolved, when the king takes responsibility for the disaster and apologizes. The situation in this book is similar to the Cuban Missile Crisis, in many ways. ” We plan on doing more research during our winter break to determine in what “many ways” the Cuban Missile Crisis is similar to Bartholomew and the Oobleck.  And we are going to meet again to discuss our research findings and formulate an improved thesis statement in early January.

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.

Project Summary

***WARNING: This blog is part of an English project***

But don’t worry, it’s one of those cool English projects, I mean how often do you get to write a blog for an English project?

The purpose of this blog is to document our comparative research study of a Dr. Seuss story using a contemporary event/issue. So basically we have to pick a Dr. Seuss story find a contemporary event or issue that can be related to the story, then document our research and group discussions on the blog, write a 750-1000 word comparative essay with an annotated bibliography. We also have to create an editorial cartoon that expresses a sharp and decisive message about the contemporary event/issue.