Welcome to Senior IB English!
Welcome back to Willamette High School and to your senior year! My name is Joshua Varani-Edwards, but you may call me Mr. Edwards, or Mr. E. for short. As you’ll soon find out, I’m a very inquisitive and curious person, and so I would like to spark your bright mind with a challenging and potentially explosive question: “What is the one thing that makes humans special?” Although we could come up with thousands of answers, the most persuasive answer that I’ve ever heard was told to me by Dr. Art Pearl, Professor Emeritus of the University of Santa Clara, who said, “The one thing that makes humans special, is that every generation of people changes their environment.” How, you might ask, have people changed our world?
To illustrate some of the powerful ways we’ve changed our world, consider the following facts: 200 years ago it took the pioneers 6 months to get to Oregon by wagon from New York, 100 years ago it took 3 ½ days by railroad, and today, it only takes 5 ½ hours by jet1. Additionally, the number of people and the lives we live has drastically changed: 200 years ago, there were 5.3 million Americans, and 75% of the people who worked were farmers; the largest city was New York, with 60,515 people; women, people of color, and most adults could not vote and had few rights. In 2021, by contrast, less than 2% of Americans work on farms to feed the 335 million people in our country2. New York, still the largest city in America, has more people than our entire country had 200 years ago (8.4 million people live in New York today). Additionally, minorities and women have full rights, and there are members of congress who are female, people of color, transgender and atheist. Looking back, our world’s changed drastically!
Since we humans are capable of changing our world so quickly, then we must love learning, right?! Yes! We unquestionably do. Just ask some of the adults in our community who go to night school after working 12 hours a day in order to practice their English or master a third language. Walking home, you might pause and watch how the children across the way at Clear Lake teach each other to play wall ball, tether ball, and other games. For a real challenge, try googling “the God Particle” after school. If you do, you’ll read about a discovery by a group of scientist, including a few at the UO, who worked their whole lives to answer one question with an experiment that was so powerful, some people were afraid it might create a black hole in their laboratories that would devour the entire earth. (Relax! It didn’t –we’re still here…).
Right now, as kids all across America learn and practice new songs to become the next American Idol, we should ask, if we love to learn…. then why isn’t school more popular and fun?
In fact, famous and wildly successful people have asked this same question: the world-renowned playwright, George Bernard Shaw said, “The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school;” or, as Mark Twain put it, “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” Coming back to the original question though, why is that we all love learning, but not all of us love school? When I’ve asked students this question, I’ve often heard the retort that, “School doesn’t feel relevant to my life.” I sympathize with this critique. Even amongst us bibliophiles (book lovers), there is a yawning gap dividing the stories we read for pleasure from the books we’re often assigned as reading in school.
One of the many reasons I love our IB curriculum, however, is that it bridges this gap by including media and texts that people love to read and are highly relevant to our contemporary global issues. Whether it’s the haunting prose of Margaret Atwood -or the sardonic cartoons of Liza Donnelly, our class will include art that reflects both popular interests and has illustrious commentary about of our changing world. Can popular media that we love, like cartoons, change the world? Can laughter and comedy help to promote positive social change? How do artist use techniques to affect their audience and make the world better?
These are BIG questions. We will address them throughout the year as we prepare you for college life and beyond. To start with, though, we will begin by examining the first one: Can cartoons change the world? In order to answer that question, we will look at some hilarious and brilliant artwork by the political cartoonist, Liza Donnelly. Once we’ve learned to deconstruct some of Donnelly’s art, you’ll lead a graded class discussion and engage in your first analysis writing this year. At the end of this unit, you’ll have completed your first body of work for senior year and made big strides toward our individual oral exams this February.
My vision for our year together, is that by June we will have created a class community where everyone is equally encouraged and you feel prepared for both college and becoming an active citizen in our democratic society. I am excited to get to know you as a student, to help you grow as an individual learner, and to build a community that we can all feel proud of. Thank you for being here today and for bringing your excitement and enthusiasm to our classroom. Together, I know we can make this school year one filled with accomplishments and marked by extraordinary growth.
Sincerely, your Senior IB English teacher,
Joshua Edwards
Citations:
- Figures on travel times can be found at:, http://www.museum.state.il.us/ismdepts/art/sadorus/Sadorus_Farm.html
- Demographic facts can be found at: https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/tab03.txt
