We watched 12 Years A Slave together in E116. After the film you gathered some of your thoughts in response to this powerful film. We will continue to refer to it throughout the next units, including looking back at the film clips and audio recordings we used last week.
For our opening look at The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn we discussed Huck, Pap, and Jim. For Huck we noted how he wanted to avoid being "sivilized" and decided to do something about it: "I lit out." In terms of Pap, his abusive and alcoholic father, Huck's decision to escape took on another shade of meaning. His escape, which included making an elaborate scene that appeared to be his own murder, also reflected his imagination and the ways in which he wants to impress his friend Tom, and have his life mirror what he read in books. As for Jim, we read the same words, "I lit out," to describe his escape, but for him it was for a different reason: he heard the might be sold down the river to New Orleans.
This threat paralleled not only ideas from the film, but also the description you read last night.
In class today we talked about compromise in terms of new states entering the country as slave or free. We used Chromebooks to look at other examples of the changing laws about slavery.
