Lesson Plan created by: Lisa Ritchie
Four Rivers Charter Public School, Greenfield, Massachusetts NEH Summer Institute for Teachers 2009
Seventh Grade Humanities “Daily Life in Ancient Times: Archaeology in Israel and Jordan”
Why do we need the past?
Free-write & Discussion
Overview
The purpose of this lesson is to help students understand for themselves why studying history is important to our lives today. The lesson serves as an introduction to the year to answer the inevitable question all social studies teachers hear: Why do we have to study this? This lesson can be an opener or a full class period; it can be tweaked to be appropriate for different grade levels and reading abilities. Students can read the article first and then do the free-write, or the free-write could lead into reading the article.
Procedure
- Have students do a free-write (not graded) that answers the following question (here are three different ways of wording it):
- What important information do we get from knowing about our past?
- As humans, how would our lives be different if we were not able to know what had happened before we were born?
- Imagine that you live in a world where everyone is the same age. You have no way of knowing what the world was like before you were born. How would your life be different? What would you not know? What would you not have?
- Discuss free-writes, either in small groups or as a whole class.
- Have students either read about Clive Wearing, either full article or shortened article.
- Discuss: What if we, like Clive Wearing, had no idea of what had happened in our past? How would our lives be different? What would we not know? What would we not be able to do?
Summary of the article “The Abyss,” by Oliver Sacks
In 1985, Clive Wearing, a well-known English musician and musicologist in his mid-forties, was struck by a brain infection—encephalitis—affecting especially the parts of his brain concerned with memory. He was left with a memory span of only seconds—the most devastating case of amnesia ever recorded. New events and experiences were erased almost instantly. In addition to this inability to preserve new memories, Clive had a retrograde amnesia, a deletion of virtually his entire past.
It was as if every waking moment was the first waking moment. Clive was under the impression that he had just emerged from unconsciousness because he had no evidence in his own mind of ever being awake before.
Desperate to hold on to something, Clive started to keep a journal. But his journal entries consisted, essentially, of the statements “I am awake” or “I am conscious,” entered again and again every few minutes. He would write: “2:10 P.M: This time properly awake. . . . 2:14 P.M: this time finally awake. . . . 2:35 P.M: this time completely awake,” along with negations of these statements: “At 9:40 P.M. I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims.” This in turn was crossed out, followed by “I was fully conscious at 10:35 P.M., and awake for the first time in many, many weeks.” This in turn was cancelled out by the next entry.
The majority of people with amnesia, a psychological condition that results in memory loss are able to infer what has happened in one’s past: from the expressions on people’s faces when one has repeated something half a dozen times; when one looks down at one’s coffee cup and finds that it is empty; when one looks at one’s diary and sees entries in one’s own handwriting. Lacking memory, lacking direct experiential knowledge, amnesiacs have to make guesses, and they usually make realistic ones. They can figure out that they have been doing something, been somewhere, even though they cannot recollect what or where. Yet Clive, rather than making reasonable guesses, always came to the conclusion that he had just been “awakened,” that he had been “dead.”
One day, Clive’s wife saw him holding something in the palm of one hand, and repeatedly covering and uncovering it with the other hand as if he were a magician practicing a disappearing trick. He was holding a chocolate. He could feel the chocolate unmoving in his left palm, and yet every time he lifted his hand he believed it to be a brand new chocolate.
“Look!” he said. “It’s new!” He couldn’t take his eyes off it.
“It’s the same chocolate,” I said gently.
“No . . . look! It’s changed. It wasn’t like that before . . .” He covered and uncovered the chocolate every couple of seconds, lifting and looking.
“Look! It’s different again! How do they do it?”
Photo: Clive Wearing at the keyboard—his musical powers remain intact.