The Re-education of Huckleberry Finn

   "Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned."

(Mark Twain)

   The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, written in 1884 by Mark Twain, is considered by some to be the first piece of true American literature because it had all American themes, characters, regional dialects, and settings.  The book is about an "unsivilized" boy named Huck Fin who is going down the Mississippi River.  He becomes friends with an escaped slave named Jim and ends up wrestling with his conscience about whether or not to turn him in.  Society tells Huck that slavery is acceptable and as he goes down the river, he encounters educated and so called "civilized" people who kill, harm, and manipulate each other.  Jim, on the other hand, is kind, intelligent, and caring.  Huck begins to see Jim as an equal and far different than all the other people he meets, so he decides to help Jim escape slavery.

   In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huck and his friend Tom find $12,000 and they split the money. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn starts after Huck is adopted by the Widow Douglass and her sister Ms Watson. They try to teach Huck religion, get him an education, and teach him right from wrong. Suddenly, one day Huck's drunk and abusive Pap shows up asking for money.  Huck refuses to give him the money and Pap abducts him and takes him to a secluded cabin in the woods.  Huck manages to escape to a nearby place called Jackson's Island. There Huck meets a runaway slave named Jim.  Huck and Jim escape together on a raft down river.

   After a number of adventures, a horrible incident occurs, separating them:  a steamboat collides with their raft. Huck fears that Jim was killed and Huck swims to shore and to safety. There he encounters two educated and "civilized" families feuding over something they can't even remember.  They shoot and kill each other and wipe out an entire family over it. Thankfully, Huck finds Jim and they get away on the raft.

   After reuniting, Huck and Jim meet two people who say they are a duke and a dauphin. They are con-men and try to jip all sorts of people out of their money. Not only do the Duke and Dauphin pretend to be royalty, but they also pretend to be great actors. They stop at the next town where they stage a play called The Royal Nonesuch.  The whole thing is just the Dauphin romping around the stage naked and striped like a wild animal. After these devious hucksters swindle the townspeople out of their money, they drift away on their raft with Huck and Jim.

   Next they come to a town where the Duke and Dauphin pretend to be uncles coming from England to attend a funeral for their brother.  The dead man's will gave the uncles $6,000, so naturally these greedy men want the money for themselves.  Huck is disgusted by what the Duke and the Dauphin are doing, so he takes the money and hides it in the dead man's coffin.  The Duke and the Dauphin are found to be frauds, and later they and Huck slip away and escape.

   The Duke and Dauphin now have no money and decide to stage The Royal Nonesuch again in another town.  They leave Jim at the raft and head into town to begin advertising their show, but they decide to turn Jim in as a runaway slave for the money.  The Duke and Dauphin sell Jim and don't tell Huck.  News gets out about the Royal Nonesuch, and the townspeople tar and feather the Duke and Dauphin.  Meanwhile, Huck decides to help Jim escape, even though it means he might have to sell his soul to the devil. 

   Huck finds out that Jim was sold to a farm owned by the Phelps, a local family.  Huck arrives at the farm and is greeted by a woman running toward him, who mistakes him for his friend back in St. Petersburg, Tom Sawyer.  Huck feels very lucky because he knows everything about Tom and this will help him further his plan to save Jim.  He leaves the house and pretends he has has to go get his bags in town, but he really wanted to make sure the real Tom doesn't show up.  He gets half-way to the next steam boat when the real Tom pulls up in a coach.  Huck explains the situation to Tom and says that he is going to steal Jim.  To Huck's surprise, Tom agrees to help Huck. Tom is very well-known, has a family, and has pride, and if he helps free Jim, he might be looked down upon and bring disgrace to his family.  Huck, on the other hand, has nothing to lose, only something to gain:  Jim's freedom.

  Tom starts to formulate a plan.  First he pretends to be his cousin Sid, and then they begin digging a hole into the cabin to free Jim.  Tom has these crazy ideas that everything has to be done by the book, which means that everything has to be done the way prison escapes are portrayed in action books.   Tom comes up with all sorts of flapdoodle (nonsense) of how to help Jim escape. The boys even go so far as to get snakes, rats, and spiders for Jim to tame and train them as his prison companions.   Before they tried to save Jim, he was kind of comfortable in the slave cabin, but after Huck and Tom started "helping" him escape, he was pretty miserable.  Eventually, it was time to really free Jim.

   Tom decides that they need to write "nonamous" letters that state that slave stealers are coming to get Jim. The Phelps family reads the letters, and get all the farmers from around to catch the slave stealers and shoot them.  By the time the farmers reached the cabin, Huck, Tom, and Jim had scurried silently down to the fence.  Huck and Jim scrambled over, but Tom got his britches snagged on a splinter of wood.  The farmers charged toward them thinking they were the slave stealers.  As quick as a flash, Huck, Tom, and Jim were in their canoe paddling toward an island when Tom excitedly announced that he had a bullet in his calf.

My map of the Phelps's farm and the Big Escape

   Huck and Jim decided to go get a doctor to help Tom, and Huck went back to the Phelps's farm. Two days later Tom was carried by the doctor back to the Phelps's.  The Doctor explained how Tom was shot in the leg and that Jim risked his freedom to help him remove the bullet.  Jim is put back in his cabin this time with chains on his hands and feet.  The doctor tells the guards not to be too rough on him because he helped Tom.  Tom meanwhile is sick in bed recovering with Huck near him.  When Ms. Phelps enters the room he tells her that he and Huck freed Jim.  Ms. Phelps doesn't believe this but Tom reassures her it did happen.  Then to everyone's surprise, Tom's guardian, Aunt Polly, all the way from St. Petersburg, enters the room.  She says she got worried after Ms. Phelps sent her a letter saying that Tom and Sid came to the farm.  She only sent Tom.  She says Huck is not Tom but really Huckleberry Finn and Tom is not Sid but Tom Sawyer.  

   Huck is surprised to learn from Tom that Jim had been a free man the whole time.  Miss Watson, Jim's owner, passed away and in her will she freed him.  There was no need to help him escape after all.  Tom created this whole thing just for the adventure of it.  In the end, Jim celebrates his freedom and Tom pays him forty dollars for playing prisoner.  Huck is adopted by the Phelps and to keep from being civilized again, he decides he wants to  head out to Indian Territory with Tom and Jim. 

  There is an expression my mom uses:  "You can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar."  By using humor to explain important social topics, Mark Twain gets his readers to rethink their beliefs and reeducate themselves.  He thinks critically about slavery and the negative traits of society (people are greedy and easily manipulated, and they profess to be cultured and civilized, but may be anything but).  On the raft, life for Huck and Jim is peaceful, easy, friendly, and simple, whereas life on shore is a complete contrast. Because of the friendship he develops with Jim, he faces big moral changes about the true meaning of brotherhood and humanity, unlearning everything he has learned about African-Americans.

My visit with Picasso

Yesterday I went to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (the VMFA) here in Richmond.  My mom and I went to see the Picasso exhibit from the Musee National Picasso in Paris.  Picasso lived in Spain and France most of his life.  He was told to paint in the classical style, but he liked to paint in his own way.  Picasso invented cubism, modern art, and created collages.  

Picasso didn't stay with one style of painting for long.  In one year, he might do at least three different styles of painting.  His first period, the Blue Period, came after the death of his friend.  He depicted sad and depressing scenes, usually in blue.  After the Blue Period he entered his Rose Period, and he depicted scenes of circus performers and other serene images.  

From there, Picasso's paintings and sculptures became more abstract.  Picasso was heavily influenced by African art, and began to incorporate African designs into his own pieces. He once said, "Bad artists copy.  Good artists steal."  In his work, you begin to see mask-like features that look chiseled and  lots of jagged strokes that look like carved sculpture.  His most radical painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was created in 1907 and it showed five women in a brothel - two of the women in the center have mask-like features, while the other three look like they have actual masks on.  Even though this work was not in the VMFA show, there were many other paintings and sketches that demonstrate this new style.  

Some of his art work conveys different meanings if you look at them from multiple perspectives.  It was astonishing to actually see these amazing pieces done by Picasso.  My favorite pieces included the goat sculpture (as you can see at the top of this post) made out of recycled materials and the portrait of Dora Maar in which Picasso used lots of brilliant colors on her face.  "Colors, just like features, follow the changes of emotions," Picasso said, and in looking at this picture, her expression seems calm, but the colors are very vibrant and exciting.  She looks very self-assured and the colors hint at her artistic energy.  As Picasso said, "Are we to paint what's on the face, what's inside the face, or what's behind it?"  Here, he paints her emotions and spirit. 

If you have no background knowledge about Picasso, you might be confused by what you're looking at.  It was helpful to read about him first.  My mom taught me a lot about his life and work, which helped me understand him better.  We also watched a great BBC show on You Tube:  Modern Masters:  Picasso, and I read the book Pablo Picasso:  Breaking the Rules by True Kelley.  All this helped me really understand and enjoy his work.  If you go to see the Picasso exhibit, be prepared to be blown away by his awe-inspiring works of art!

Happy Pi Day!

  Today is March 14th.  To most people, it is just an ordinary day...but to the geeky among us (like me), it's PI DAY (3/14)!  (Coincidentally, it's also Albert Einstein's birthday!)  Yes, this annual celebration was established twenty-two years ago at the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco in honor of the never-ending number pi.  Pi got its name from the Greek word for perimeter.  Pi is an irrational number, meaning its value cannot be expressed as a fraction, and its decimal form is a never ending number that never repeats.  Most of us know it is used in geometry, mathematics, science and engineering, and only know it to a few numbers:  3.14159265.  The first person ever to find the 3.14 number for pi was Archimedes in 250 B.C.  The farthest that pi has ever been expanded has been out to the five trillionth digit!  In honor of Pi Day, we made a pizza pie with a pi symbol made out of pepperoni.  Yum!  Tasty pi! 

   Check out these cool pi videos!

Sound Sketches

  Starting this week, I'm beginning to learn about sound for my science class.  Sounds are made by vibrations.  The amount of time between vibrations determines how high or how low the sound's pitch is and what the sound "sounds" like.  Sounds also differ between pleasant and unpleasant noises.  Jackhammers make an unpleasant noise and classical music makes a pleasant noise. On Tuesday, my mom and I went around to a few locations here in Richmond to see how their sound environments differed.   To grade the four locations we visited on how loud or quiet they were, we used a scale from zero to five.  Zero was absolute silence and five was harmful to hearing.

   First we went to the Richmond International Airport.  It was full of noises like buzzers, telephones, and people talking.  I gave it a four to five on our sound scale.  It could have been louder if it had been a holiday when lots of people travel or if it was summertime and everyone was taking a vacation.

A quiet day at the Richmond Int'l Airport

   Our next destination was Belle Isle where the rapids in the James River were loud and the current was strong.  It had rained the day before so there was a lot more water in the river.  We gave this destination a three to four rating because the river was so loud.

Looking out over the James River

 

Chillin' and enjoying the quiet at Chimborazo

Then we went to Chimborazo Park in Church Hill where there was some traffic noise but there was a lot of quiet natural noise.  It was so quiet that I was able to locate a woodpecker.  Chimborazo was our quietest site and I gave it a one to two rating.














   My final site was my own backyard which had some car noise from the street and the sound of people talking as they walked by the house.  I gave it a two rating even though it would be much louder in the summer when more people and more animals would be out and about.  Here's a video clip of how my yard sounds in the fall:

Looking at my patio and the brick wall next door

   In doing this sound project, I learned that there are lots of different sounds that occur during different times of day and throughout the year.  Earlier in the school year, I conducted a biodiversity project and discovered that the more biodiversity there is in an environment, the more natural sounds there are (like birds chirping or squirrels chattering).  In that project we visited nature parks, urban gardens, and corporate parks in the city. I learned how important it is to incorporate green spaces in metropolitan areas in order to beautify the city, provide living places for animals, and to give people quiet space to relax, have fun, and connect with nature.  The sounds in an environment affect how people feel about that environment.  If there is a lot of man-made noise, people and animals will like the environment less.  If there is a lot of natural sound, people and animals are more likely to want to go there.  Animals are more likely to live in biodiverse areas that are relatively quiet, and this has a positive affect on the people who enjoy the quiet of these natural habitats.

Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer

"There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable." (Mark Twain)

 

   The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a book by Mark Twain written in 1875 about a boy who loves to do what he is told not to do.   That naturally makes him a trouble maker who is always getting punished.  Once he was told to paint a big fence and, using trickery, got his friends to do it for him.  Tom's best friend is an outcast who has no parents and doesn't follow any rules.  He is named Huckleberry Finn.  All the kids' parents forbid their children to play with him. This made Tom want to play with him every chance he got.  Tom's life was all about having fun until one of his adventures gave him an unexpected surprise.  

   One night Tom and Huck went to the graveyard to test a superstition that if you throw a dead cat into the graveyard at midnight, the devil will take it and the cat will take away your warts.  When they entered the graveyard, they saw three men digging up a grave -- a doctor, Injun Joe, and Muff Potter.  Injun Joe demanded more pay than he was getting for digging the grave.  The doctor refused and started to fight Injun Joe in protest.  The doctor accidentally knocked out Muff Potter in the struggle.  Injun Joe then took Potter's knife and stabbed the doctor, killing him while Potter was unconscious.

   From this point onward, Tom begins to make a number of grown-up decisions.  When Muff Potter is tried for the doctor's murder, Tom speaks up and says that Injun Joe stabbed the doctor.  Tom and Huck had sworn not to tell anyone what they had seen, but Tom broke that oath to keep innocent Muff Potter out of jail.  Right after Tom spoke out in court, Injun Joe fled from town.

   Tom soon returned to being his crazy boy self, even though he he feared Injun Joe would kill him for testifying in court.  Tom decided to go looking for treasure one day in a haunted house near his town.  He and Huck went to the house and left their tools by the door while they went upstairs to explore.   They had just reached the second floor when Injun Joe entered the house with a bag of money.  As he started to bury it, there was a ping, and Joe picked up a chest of gold he had uncovered.  Joe decided to take the money and the gold to a new location because he felt like someone was watching him. 

   Tom eventually found the location of the hidden treasure during a horrible accident in which he and his friend Becky Thatcher got lost in a cave.  Even though Tom was experiencing this terrible situation, he was determined to find a way out of the cave.  As he looked for exits, he was surprised to see Injun Joe hiding out in one of the tunnels.  Thankfully Joe didn't recognize him and Tom slowly backed away.  After he and Becky escaped, Tom came back to the cave with Huck.  Together they went to where Tom saw Injun Joe.  There they found the treasure stashed in a secret tunnel.

   When Tom and Huck get rich at the end of the book, people's opinions about the boys change.  They began to admire and revere the boys.  Almost everything Tom and Huck did seemed important.  Eventually everybody in their town and in neighboring towns knew who the boys were.  Huck was expected to act like other people now.  He went to live with the Widow Douglas and had to live under her roof.   He didn't like being rich because now he couldn't smoke, cuss, skip school, or get dirty.  He felt like his freedom was being taken away.

   What I enjoyed about the book Tom Sawyer is that even though it was written 136 years ago, it had me laughing like crazy!  The book sounded like it actually could have happened.  I found it interesting how Tom developed his moral conscience throughout the book.  Moral conscience is your inner voice that tells you right from wrong.  The right choice is not always easy, like testifying in court or finding your way out of a cave.  Boys will be boys, but eventually we all have to make good decisions that show who we really are.  I can't wait to read our next Mark Twain book:  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn!  

Science Biography: Mary Anning

   Have you ever heard the tongue twister "She sells sea shells by the sea shore?"  If you have, I'm pretty sure you didn't know it is about a girl who lived in the 1800s named Mary Anning.  Those "sea shells" in the tongue twister were actually fossils that Mary Anning sold in her fossil shop.  That "sea shore" is the rocky coastline of Lyme Regis, England, the town where Mary Anning was born and where she made many important scientific fossil discoveries. 

   Mary Anning's father was a carpenter who added to his income by fossil hunting along Lyme Regis' rocky cliffs and beaches.  When Mary was a few years old, she started going fossil hunting with him.  They found lots of ammonites and plant fossils from the Jurassic period.  Sadly, when Mary was eleven years old, tragedy struck her family.  Her father was out fossil hunting when he slipped and fell off a cliff to the bottom and died.  Mary then took up her father's fossil hunting job to make money for her family.

   A few months after she took on the job, Mary made an extraordinary scientific find - the fossilized remains of a strange creature that no one else had ever seen.  She named the creature ichthyosaur, a name she invented herself.  She sold it to a museum for enough money to feed her family for half a year.  Little did she know that this was only the first of her great finds.

   She bought a store where she could display and sell her fossils.  Mary soon made two more fascinating discoveries:  a plesisaur and a pterodactyl, both of which were new to science.  Because of Mary's amazing fossil finds, many famous scientists came on fossil hunts with her.  One of these people was the man who invented the word dinosaur.  

   Mary Anning would continue her paleontological searches into her forties until she got breast cancer and died.  She was a pioneering woman scientist.  Hardly any women were scientists in the 1800s.  At a time when most women weren't encouraged to get an education, Mary taught herself and helped to establish the field of paleontology.  Sadly, most of her finds ended up in museums and personal collections without Mary getting any of the credit for them, maybe because of her gender and social status.

   If you want to know more about her, I would recommend these books that I read:  Rare Treasure:  Mary Anning and Her Remarkable Discoveries by Don Brown, Mary Anning and the Sea Dragon by Jeannine Atkins, and Chapter Five in the book The Kid Who Named Pluto and the Stories of Other Extraordinary Young People in Science by Marc McCutcheon ("The Curious Girl Who Discovered Sea-Monster Skeletons").  On Google Earth, you can visit Sidmouth Beach near Lyme Regis where Mary Anning explored the rocks.  Here you can find The Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site. Even today, you can still find lots of ammonites and plant fossils on the cliffs and beaches.  Check out this video below!

Mysterious Mysteries!

 In my genre studies in December, I read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  It is about a detective named Sherlock Holmes who solves mysteries with his assistant Mr. Watson.  My favorite of the mysteries was the Case of the Six Napoleons, which was funny because a man was smashing plaster busts of Napoleon to find a stolen black pearl.  After I finished the book, my mom said my next project would be to try and write my own mystery story.  It took me the entire month of January!  In my mystery that follows, The Case of The Triangular Book, I used detectives, witnesses, a secret, a crime, and one red herring.  It is all about a detective named Alex Sampson, who is asked to find a stolen book.  He finds not only the book, but a surprising secret.  In the process of writing this, I developed a greater respect for the people who are professional mystery writers.  It is challenging to reconstruct a crime and tie up all the loose ends at the conclusion of a mystery!  Hope you enjoy my story! (And thanks to Mom for typing this story up for me!)