Week 1 2/02/'10-02/05/2010

02/03/2010

Aim: What does the title mean to you?

Do Now:

1. Copy down two vocabulary word of the Day
2. Writing Prompt #1- Do you know people who are unusually gifted?  Are they also odd, or strange in any ways? Describe and explain. Can you think of examples of well-known people who seem both crazy and very talented?

Activities-

The word "proof" comes to us from an Indo-European root meaning "through" or "forward."  From this root comes one of the word's primary English meanings: a test or trial in which a person or object is put through an ordeal, or placed in a forward position in the face of danger.  Thus we say of someone, "He has been proven in battle," and we use phrases such as "bullet-proof" or "rust-proof," or "the proof of the pudding is in the eating." A second sense of "proof" means the deployment of evidence or reasoning to establish a fact or validate theory.  A "proof" in this sense is a demonstration that something is actually the case.

1. How does the meaning of "proof" in Proof  continually oscillate back and forth between these two senses, sometimes figuring as a test or ordeal--that is to say, an emotional trial--and at other times appearing as an exercise in logical demonstration?
2. How is Catherine's father, Robert, portrayed?
3. How would you describe the realationship between Robert and Catherine?
4. What is the setting of the play? How is it described? What details foreshadow that the house will become a focus of the conflict ?

HW#1 Make a sentence using "elicit" & "bouleversement" .

02/04

Aim: How is Catherine's father, Robert, portrayed?

Do Now:

1. WOD

2. "remunerate" \rih-MYOO-nuh-rate\ (transitive verb) - 1 : To pay an equivalent to for any service, loss, or expense; to recompense. 2 : To compensate for; to make payment for. Remunerate comes from Latin remunerari, "to reward," from re-, "back, again" + munerari, "to give, to present," from munus, "a gift."
• "She would remunerate me handsomely; since yesterday's pay scales seem quaint today, and today's are likely to seem quaint tomorrow, I'll put my remuneration in terms of purchasing power: the amount that she was willing to pay me each week would be equivalent to the price of dinner for two with drinks, tax, and tip at a modest restaurant in Manhattan." - Eric Kraft, 'Inflating a Dog'
3. Writing Prompt #2: Write the last lines( 2-5 sentences)to an unwritten novel that's so intriguing that others won't help but want to read the book.

Procedure:

After reading the play, discuss and answer -

1. How does the meaning of "proof" in Proof  continually oscillate back and forth between these two senses, sometimes figuring as a test or ordeal--that is to say, an emotional trial--and at other times appearing as an exercise in logical demonstration?
2. How is Catherine's father, Robert, portrayed?
3. How would you describe the realationship between Robert and Catherine?
4. What is the setting of the play? How is it described? What details foreshadow that the house will become a focus of the conflict ?

Respond to Scene 1-What may have caused Catherine to have a conversation with a dead man? Is it madness, day dreaming, as we all do, about a loved one who has passed on or a waking fantasy?

While Catherine is nearly paralyzed with anxiety over the possibility of her impending breakdown, her father tries to reassure her that she is demonstrably sane.  After all, he reasons, she is asking herself whether she is losing her mind.  By contrast, "A very good sign that you're crazy is an inability to ask the question, 'Am I crazy?'"  Ever the logician, his daughter catches him up on the flaw in his argument.  If, as everyone knows, Robert is crazy, and if he also questions his sanity, then merely asking the am-I-crazy question proves nothing.  (This bit of reasoning is, in fact, the first "proof" in the play.)  But Robert trumps his daughter with an irrefutable rejoinder.  The reason he can admit he's crazy is not because he is sane, but because he is dead, and has been for a week.

02/05/2010

Aim: How will you describe Hal? How does Catherine feel toward him? Why?

Do Now:

1. WOD
2. parley \PAR-lee\ (noun) - A conference or discussion, especially with an enemy, as with regard to a truce or other matters.
   
   "When Diabolus had thus done, he commanded that his drummer should every night approach the walls of the town of Mansoul, and so to beat a parley; the command was for him to do it at nights, for in the daytime they annoyed him with their slings..." -- John Bunyan, 'The Holy War'
   
   Parley comes from Old French parlée, from parler, "to speak," from Medieval Latin parabolare, from Late Latin parabola, "a proverb, a parable, a similitude," from Greek parabole, "a comparison, a placing beside," from paraballein, "to throw beside, hence to compare," from para-, "beside" + ballein, "to throw."
3. Writing Prompt #3 You wake up one day with an unusual super power that seems pretty worthless—until you are caught in a situation that requires that specific "talent."
4. Age of the Moon March 2 at 2:00
   

Procedures:

Before Robert disappears, we learn that his funeral is to be the next day, and that his other daughter, Claire, is flying in from New York to join her sister for the ceremony.  That Catherine's birthday coincides with her father's funeral is fraught with ominous possibilities.

1. Does it suggest that her father is putting a curse on her, bequeathing her his madness with her birth?  Or does it mean that Catherine is about to make a fresh start, passing from under her father's shadow into a new life of her own? 
2. Robert's parting words are not reassuring.  "For you, Catherine," he says, the fact that she has been conversing with a ghost, "could be a bad sign."  And with those disturbing words, he departs. How could the remark impact Catherine? How might she repond to it?
3. Why is Catherine skeptical of the attentio Hal gave her?  She has no desire to have a stranger rooting around in her father's papers, especially not a worshipful ex-student who knows nothing about the grim facts of Robert's madness and her thralldom to it. Moreover, she suspects that what Hal really wants is to find an undiscovered idea which he can filch and pass off as his own in order to further his academic career. 
4.    In fact, she is so distrustful of Hal's motives that she insists on searching his belongings before he leaves to assure herself that he is not stealing one of Robert's notebooks.  Perhaps, she thinks, he has found some bit of legitimate work produced in one of her father's rare moments of sanity.  If you were in Hal's sposition, how would you have reacted to the distrust?

HW#3 Respond to the followowing question in a paragraph or two-

Can you think of children who have inherited the talent, or the problems, of a parent? Can you see resemblances between parents and children in your family?  Among your friends?  In the world at large? Why do you think the playwright chose to write about a mathematician and his daughter, rather than, say, a biologist or an economist?