Quarter 1, Week 7 Agenda

Monday
In Class: Enclosures.
Homework: Life of Pi, ch. 6-13, pp. 24-44 (21)

Day 2
In Class: More on zoos (science) and religion.
Homework (for Friday): Pi, ch. 14-22, pp. 44-64 (21)

Day 3
In class: Field trip to Masjid An-Nur mosque.
Homework: Same as above.

Friday
In class: Stories--with a capital S.
Homework: Address the questions below. Each answer should be a solid paragraph.

1. What is the role of religious stories in your reading for today?
2. What affect do they have on Pi? (What does Hinduism / Christianity / Islam provide for him?) Consider the following quotations: “With its notion in mind I see my place in the universe” (49), “The answer was always the same” (56), and “Why Islam is nothing but an easy sort of exercise” (60).
3. What, then, might Pi mean when he suggests that an agnostic on his deathbed, “beholden to dry yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying, ‘Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain,’ and to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story” (64)? What’s bread without yeast? (Inhabit the metaphor.) What’s a story without “that spark that brings [it] to life” (VIII)?
4. Revisit the Author's Note: "I have a story that will make you believe in God" (X). Wait up, though. Blake is a non-religious school, right? So it wouldn't make sense that an English class would be trying to convert you to any one (or three) religion(s). And it wouldn't make sense that an English class would get too caught up in science, either. (I have a story that will make you believe in science? No, that doesn't work.) So what's the point then? "I have a story that will make you believe in what?" Make an assertion based on what you know of the book so far.