Romantic/Rational/Modern Discussion 12/7/17

Today's class was really awesome, it was probably one of my favorites of this year, because today we had a discussion that took up most of the period and was really educational. The discussion was about how the weather in the Great Gatsby reflected the emotions of the characters in the chapter specifically how Gatsby and Daisy interacted with each other and whenever tension grew or it was awkward the rain would pick up, and when they got to know each other the rain started to stop. We intentionally planned for more than just the discussion but everybody had something to say and was so invested in the discussion that it ended up going on for such a long time, but was very productive. What we did was convert the room into a sort of "graph", one end of the room stood for romantic ideals, the other rational ideals, and the middle for modern ideals. We gave evidence as to why this weather was romantic or rational or modern, and we went into great detail by giving examples from the chapter and comparing it to the mindset of a romanticist or a rationalist. How this helps us learn something is that it helps us get an idea of the perception of each type of person, you could even say perception was the main idea of the whole thing, for example a rationalist would literally use science to explain the weather and ignore emotions, while rationalists will make a comparison between the two and say emotions had a part in the weather. It wasn't that you could only choose between the three, it was a metaphorical graph so you go in between the romantic section and the modernist section, you just had to give your thoughts and explain the reason why you chose to stand there. Tomorrow will look more into it by having a class harkness, before we have our next chapter harkness on Monday.