Option #1:
In one page, define the radical idea of the curse in the novel Holes. Explain how the idea of a curse in the novel is different than the conventional idea of a curse. Then in two pages analyze the novel’s prescription for removing the curse. This prescription will be your thesis section. Finally, in another 2 pages, describe a personal struggle you had with a curse, as defined in the novel, and explain your success, or failure, with removing the shackles of this affliction or curse.
Be sure to include 3 research sources in your paper. You can include material posted on this blog as research material.
Option #2:
In a 4 or 5-page research paper, explain how the novel illuminates these two psychological processes described by Erich Fromm in his book Escape from Freedom (181-182):
It would seem that the amount of destructiveness to be found in individuals is proportionate to the amount to which expansiveness of life is curtailed. By this we do not refer to individual frustrations of this or that instinctive desire but to the thwarting of the whole life, the blockage of spontaneity of the growth and expression of man's sensuous, emotional, and intellectual capacities. Life has an inner dynamism of its own; it tends to grow, to be expressed, to be lived. It seems that if this tendency is thwarted the energy directed toward life undergoes a process of decomposition and changes into energies directed toward destruction. In other words: the drive for life and the drive for destruction are not mutually independent factors but are in a reversed interdependence. The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life. Those individual and social conditions that make for suppression of life produce the passion for destruction that forms, so to speak, the reservoir from which the particular hostile tendencies--either against others or against oneself--are nourished.
Be sure to include 3 research sources in your paper. You can include material posted on this blog as research material.
Option #3:
Write a 4-page research paper that analyzes the 4 major causes that help transform Stanley from a frightened soul languishing in learned helplessness and nihilism to a magnanimous soul full of self-reliance, hope, and redemption.
Be sure to include 3 research sources in your paper. You can include material posted on this blog as research material.
Option #4:
Write a 4-page essay in which you explore the different meanings of the novel's title Holes. Be sure to support your assertions with examples from the novel.
May 27, 2009
Reversing the Curse in Holes
1. Replace self-pity with empathy and duty to another human being the way Stanley helps Zero.
2. Don't try to accomplish the seemingly impossible in one big swoop. Rather, take baby steps and gradually improve your situation. For example, Stanley does not get strong and tough overnight. He gradually strengthens.
3. Fulfill your promises. For example, Stanley writes letters to his mother no matter how exhausted he is.
4. Have a strong vision of hope, like God's thumb in the sky, to give the tenacity and fortitude to achieve your goals.
5. Find strength and comfort from the knowledge that in life evil and poison are counteracted by greater forces of good. Similarly, the lizard's poison is counteracted by the power of onions, which represent love and healing.
Posted at 05:06 PM in 1A Class Notes | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 26, 2009
1A Lesson Plan #2 for Holes
Writing Option #1:
In one or two pages, profile someone who has been cursed, which is to say write about someone who suffered misfortune, betrayal, or some other bad turn events and made their situation worse by succumbing to learned helplessness, bitterness, and despair. Then in a page show a similar curse in the novel Holes. Explain how the idea of a curse in the novel is different than the conventional idea of a curse. Then in two pages analyze the novel’s prescription for removing the curse.
Be sure to include 3 research sources in your paper. You can include material posted on this blog as research material.
Writing Option #2:
Analyze the novel’s title Holes as a metaphor that informs the novel’s major themes.
Two. Class Activity
On a piece of paper write about a personal encounter, with yourself or someone you know, who was cursed and explain the outcome of that curse.
Three. Example of an Essay Introduction in Which You Profile a Person Afflicted with a Curse
Her name was Frankita Perez, a retired high school English teacher who had spent twenty-five years teaching “high-risk” students. In her mid-fifties, weighing over three hundred pounds and wearing nothing but white, freshly laundered muumuus, Frankita had a defiant chin and large dark brown eyes behind thick, black-framed glasses. Her hair was short, a black feathery bathing cap. She had a strained, raspy way of breathing. Most noticeable, she had no breasts, the result of a double mastectomy. She had never had cancer, however. Later, when I would become her boarder, she would explain that she had undergone the surgery so that she wouldn’t have to worry about the threat of breast cancer, even though there was no history of breast cancer in her family.
Her dubious decision to have her breasts surgically removed should have been a clear warning sign that she had some sort of affliction, a curse brought upon by her own sense of victimization.
I became aware of the precise nature of her curse one afternoon while I was doing my schoolwork inside her office. She let me use her oversized desk inside an office that was less functional and more of a storage room for all the junk that she had accumulated over the years. You could barely walk inside the office because there were stacked boxes of her teaching files, student papers, grade reports, letters from parents. She kept all of this paper work even though she had stopped teaching over five years ago.
The desk itself almost had no room for me to do my college work. Stacked on her desk were stuffed animals and old photo albums, the leather covers worn and covered with mold.
One afternoon, I could not focus on my studies. I kept looking at the photo albums aware that they might contain clues to Frankita’s past, clues that would explain how she had turned out to be the lonely, grotesque woman she was today. Maybe even Frankita had planted the photo albums and wanted me to open them and see for myself what had happened to her. Perhaps she desperately needed someone to understand the real her. And there it was before me. The story of her life in pictures. I opened the album. The photographs showed Frankita from infancy to the age of nineteen, showing her at her farm near Fresno. She was a beautiful young woman, her face glowing, her eyes wide with hope and wonder. With no blubber to obscure her delicate features, she was a stunning, slender girl, her eyes deep and soulful. Her hair was long and flowing past her back. Many of the photos, shot in the California central valley, showed orchards of plum and almond trees in the background, a veritable garden of Eden, which eventually Frankita would be expelled from.
More photos revealed the culprit of Frankita’s demise. A man. What I first noticed about him was his strapping physique. Well-shaped muscles bulging out of his shirts. His chin always up in a pugilistic swagger. Some photos showed him engaging in “strong man” performances. One showed him lifting a jolly-faced three-hundred-pound man over his head. Another showed him picking up the back of a car from its rear fender while Frankita, sitting in the driver’s seat, appeared to be laughing hysterically.
Then there were several close-up “sweetheart photos” of Frankita and this dark-haired man with sultry, assured eyes and an impish grin.
Where was he today? Why hadn’t she married him? Why was she now unrecognizable? These questions weren’t answered just yet. But shortly after, during one of my snooping sessions, Frankita crept up behind me and gave me quite a scare. I thought she was going to reprimand me for going into her private things, but instead she sat down and told me the story about the man, Carlos, who had stolen her heart many years ago. He walked with a limp from a bullet wound he suffered after beating a man twice his size in an arm wrestling match, which took place late on night in a bar in Visalia. The man, the son of a rich pistachio farmer, was never even charged with the shooting and Carlos was banished from Visalia forever. It seems he tried to make up for his limp by becoming a man of great schemes and accomplishments. He had started a car repair shop, managed a cleaning and maid service, and had opened a profitable restaurant. Now with his savings, he was going to buy an orchard of orange trees and marry his childhood sweetheart Frankita. But near the wedding day it was revealed that Frankita was not the only love of his life. One evening when Carlos didn’t show up for a family dinner, Frankita searched for him and, on the tip of a friend, eventually found him on the edge of town inside a small shack. He was with a fifteen-year-old, a tiny elf of a girl.
The scandal brought shame to Carlos and the girl who were forced to flee the community. They moved to Mexico in a house owned by some of Carlos’ distant relatives.
Less than a week before her wedding with dreams of living with Carlos on an orange orchard, Frankita found herself alone, without any plan for her future. She had no education, no identity. She became full of rage and blamed not only Carlos and his family but her own family as well. They seemed content for Frankita to accept her fate and live the life of a lonely old maid, cooking their meals, caring for her nieces and nephews and relegating herself to the bottom of the family’s social rank. She would have none of it. She left town, got a job waiting tables in a large city, got her high school equivalency and eventually her college degrees so she could teach high school.
As an award-winning high school teacher who specialized in “high-risk” children, Frankita became a prominent member of the community and seemed to enjoy how much she shocked her family who believed she would never amount to anything. That’s why she bought a new Cadillac every four years, to remind her family that she had made it, that she was in fact better than them. And when they called her crying about their financial problems, more often than not she received their requests with icy refusal.
As she told me her rags to riches story, I kept looking at the beautiful nineteen-year-old just weeks before her scheduled wedding and it was painful to sit in the presence of Frankita’s current incarnation, a rasping, morbidly obese lady with no breasts, a cursed hag who rented out rooms to college-age bodybuilders who reminded her of the man who had betrayed her many, many years ago.
Such a profound curse, resulting in learned helplessness, is evident in the novel Holes . . .
Four. The Underlying Psychological Curse in Holes is Learned Helplessness
Definition: Learned helplessness is the paralysis that results when you convince yourself that you are helpless to overcome a predicament when in fact, objectively speaking, you have the means to solve your problem. For example, the baby elephant grows up chained to a pole and its owner eventually removes the chain but the elephant, as an adult, never leaves the pole because he’s convinced that he’s chained to it.
Two. Characteristics of Learned Helplessness
- A lack of belonging and feeling marginalized to the point of feeling like a “misfit.”
- A habit of repeated failure that reinforces your feelings of impotence.
- A defeatist, pessimistic attitude that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- A fear of maturing and defining yourself without the dependence on others.
- An unconscious determination to fail because you’re afraid of success, which will force you to grow up and assume adult responsibilities.
- A determination to see yourself as a victim who has no control of what happens to you.
- A fearfulness of life that compels you to hide in the psychological womb of self-pity.
- Stupid enough to be weak but smart enough to manipulate others to bail you out every time.
- Even when you know the right steps and can do something on your own, you wear out people so that they carry your weight up the mountain. They decide it’s easy to carry you on their shoulders than it is to help you because you resist being helped.
- You procrastinate long enough so that you always need an excuse or an extension, reinforcing your self-image as a flake, a slouch, and lazy bum.
- You create drama and crises out of nothing and enjoy watching other people put your fires out.
Five. What does the novel tell us about a cure for the curse that afflicts Stanley Yelnats and his family?
- We cannot overcome the curse instantly or overnight. To the contrary, ridding the curse is a gradual process. Stanley’s change is gradual. As he digs holes he gets stronger and stronger. Just like his great-great grandfather was getting stronger and stronger as he carried the piglet up the mountain. In other words, we have to take baby steps to remove a curse.
- We have to identify the problem. If we can’t see the problem, then we are beholden to it. Or if we refuse to identify the problem because such an identification hurts our ego, we remain enslaved to the problem.
- We have to embrace the fear of change over the stability of our personal hell. Some people prefer their private hell because they’re comforted by its familiarity and are more terrified by the prospect of change. I can’t emphasize this enough: Most people prefer their familiar hell to the fear of the unknown, even if the unknown contains the possibility and hope of change for a better life.
- Often a curse is reversed more by our character than it is by our actions. For example, even though Stanley is exhausted from digging holes, he fulfills his promise to his mother to write her letters and he fulfills his promise to help Zero learn to read. His actions reveal his character, which is based on loyalty, commitment, and fortitude (strength to endure).
Part I. McMahon Commentary on the Meaning of Holes
The novel’s title is fecund with meaning. Holes refers to the wasted struggle people engage in when they’re pursuing false dreams or chimeras. Holes also refers to the wasted effort we expend on endeavors without having the proper knowledge or wisdom as a foundation. In a rush for instant results, we take what we think are short cuts and actually lose valuable time because any endeavor without the proper foundation is doomed to fail. Another meaning of Holes is the need to dig into the past and find missing pieces of a puzzle that make up our predicament so that we can get to the root of our problems and solve them. Digging holes is also symbolic of the journey into darkness in which we must go through the torment of hell before we can taste the delights of heaven. All of these meanings are evident in the novel.
Six. Holes as a metaphor for the wasted effort of “dumb work” instead of “smart work.”
Dumb work is working toward a goal that is disconnected from who we really are and what we really want. When you don’t know what you really want in life, you end up chasing chimeras, a word for false dreams or mirages.
Example:
A college friend had an older sister who got her medical degree and he was under pressure to impress his family. He became an accountant not understanding that he didn’t have the personality for corporate culture. Now he’s an alcoholic truck driver for Frito Lay. His accounting degree is toilet paper.
A couple spends all their money on new clothes for the clubs and having “Chanel No. 5 Moments” together but behind closed doors they hate each others’ guts. Their lives are reduced to stringing along a bunch of Chanel No. 5 Moments.
A couple doesn’t really want love; they like the idea of love. What they really want is their relationship to be a drama out of an MTV music video. As an example, my friend’s ex girlfriend chased him off a bus and pushed him into bushes and they both enjoyed it. They loved the drama, but they didn’t see that what they were doing is childish and lame.
A couple gets married, not because they love each other, but because all their friends got married and they feel left out, they want wedding presents, and they want the credibility and instant adulthood status that a wedding provides them.
Bling is a chimera or a false dream because it leaves a bigger and bigger hole. Every time you buy a bigger watch or car or house the emptiness gets bigger. Every time you shop for bling, you don’t sate your appetites, you actually stimulate them. This is called Feeding the Beast.
Majoring in something purely for money with no interest in it is a way of digging yourself into a hole.
Looking for a “perfect life”: perfect body, perfect partner, perfect health, perfect house, perfect car, and then being bored and disenchanted. George Bernard says there are two tragedies in life: not getting what we want and getting it.
Seven. Holes is a metaphor for another kind of dumb work, the kind that results from not thinking ahead. In other words, technique and preparation save you time instead of going right into a project with tools that aren’t primed for the job or without knowing the correct techniques.
In 2002 I was caught up in a vicious cycle of overeating and overtraining, the two feeding each other. Little did I know, I was in a cycle of bingeing and purging.
Crash diets are hard and they don’t work. Over 98% of people who go on diets actually gain weight because they binge and mess up their metabolisms.
Marathon training vs. consistent moderate exercise.
Cramming the night before a test vs. studying moderately over a consistent period.
When I was six years old fishing for bass in Bass Lake, I didn’t know how to use a fishing reel. When a bass bit the hook, I ran up the hill. I almost lost the fish. My father told me to hold the reel and wind it clockwise.
If you saw or cut something with a dull blade because you’re too lazy to spend five minutes sharpening the blade, you end up spending 10 times as long cutting whatever it is you’re cutting or slicing or sawing.
You’re too lazy to get your pants hemmed at the dry cleaners so you roll up the bottom and crease the hem and all day you have to bend over and cinch up your pants because they keep falling down and dragging on the ground. You end up spending 100 times more rolling up your pants than the fifteen minute trip to the dry cleaners.
Daryl Gates went too far in his gang round-up in the early 1990s arresting a lot of innocent people during the sweeps. The LAPD lost the trust of the community and this created worse conditions for stopping crime. The LAPD was digging holes, as it were.
Eight. Holes is a metaphor for digging deep into the past to unearth the causes of your disconnections.
Stanley Yelnats discovers that carrying Hector Zeroni (Zero), the descendent of Madame Zeroni, up the hill ends the curse from his great-great grandfather’s failure to carry Madame Zeroni up the hill.
Sometimes we need to confront an issue from the past in order to forgive others, like the case of the missing cookies from my coat pocket in kindergarten.
The curse ended. Of course, we don’t talk about curses today. Instead we use a different language like “resolution” and “closure.”
Nine. Holes is a metaphor for going to deep into the darkness before you go find the light. In other words, we must go to hell before we can get to heaven.
You can die a slow death being addicted to shopping, unhealthy relationships, drugs, alcohol, your cell phone or you can find a way to beat the addiction. But to beat an addiction, you have to go through withdrawals and face the demons that you tried to run from during your addiction so that initially you’re going to have to go through hell.
Ten. Sample Thesis Statements
We all have to dig holes in life.
Not a thesis. This is more of an introductory sentence. It’s too general and has no mapping components.
Holes has many different meanings.
Again, this is too broad.
Holes is a rich metaphor that refers to ___________________________, _________________________, ________________________________, and ____________________________________.
This is better because we have a guide or a map for where we’re going in the essay.
Many of us think of the phrase “digging ourselves into a hole” as a bad thing. But the novel Holes shows the contrary, that the excruciating suffering of digging holes, metaphorically speaking, is an essential pathway to redemption. The hellish journey into the darkness of holes saves Stanley Yelnats and conversely ourselves because this journey has four positive outcomes, which include _____________________________, _______________________________, _________________________________, and ______________________________________.
We could talk about the gradual strength Stanley enjoys from digging holes. We could talk about the family history he unearths. We could talk about the criminality he exposes in the warden. We could talk about the heroic image he uncovers in himself, as opposed to the wimp and the victim that he has been all his life.
McMahon is fond of bloviating and rhapsodizing about the wonders of journeying into the darkness of holes, as if delving into our hellish past through whole-hearted introspection is some panacea that will save us from our cursed selves. But in fact, McMahon’s eagerness to have us unearth our dark secrets is both misguided and dangerous. For the type of introspection that results from the kind of “hole-digging” McMahon describes can often result in _________________________, _________________________, ___________________________, ________________________.
This contrarian student might argue that introspection can often inflate or exaggerate our idea of our problems so that we feel overwhelmed and paralyzed by our problems. Secondly, this student might point out that not all investigations into the past result in the happy endings of this young adult novel. Some family secrets, when exposed, result in shame and disgrace, not salvation. Thirdly, this type of introspection can make us turn too much inward, resulting in narcissistic naval-gazing.
Mr. Contrarian Student’s opposition to McMahon’s analysis of Holes collapses under the weight of a deliberate and malicious mischaracterization of McMahon’s definition of what it means to “journey into the darkness of holes.” For it is not narcissistic introspection, as Mr. Contrarian claims, but courageous exposure of unpleasant truths that are holding us back, that are keeping justice from being fulfilled, and that are impeding us from seeing ourselves unshackled by the lies we’ve been conditioned to tell ourselves.
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