Rationale
Walter Dean Myers’ Monster is a book that captivates the attention of young
readers. It discusses issues such as the American justice system, peer pressure,
decision making and consequences, age discrimination, journal writing, the power of film
and nature versus nurture. This book is designed to get the readers thinking about many
issues that plague America and teenagers.
The reading level is appropriate for eighth graders, though because of the subject
matter, it could be used at a higher level. As a more modern young adult novel, many of
the subjects and issues presented may be considered questionable. Some of the issues
addressed or alluded to in the novel include: murder, sexual abuse, and the jail system in
general.
Written as a screenplay, this book allows students to take a part in reading the
novel. Monster is an effective novel in getting students to think critically about the
issues discussed, predict what the outcome of the novel will be, and express their own
feelings after the manner patterned for them in the novel.
Language Arts
Name:_________________________________________________________
Using the websites listed at the bottom of the page, answer the following questions
about juvenile delinquency and the law. All of these questions can be answered by looking
on those sites. Write the answers on a separate sheet of paper in complete sentences.
1.)
2.)
3.)
4.)
5.)
6.)
7.)
8.)
9.)
Can 16-year-olds go to jail?
Describe what a juvenile trial is like.
What other options are there besides jail for 16-year-olds that commit a crime?
What is the "parens patriae?”
Discuss at least two ways to prevent juvenile delinquency.
What is the 5th Amendment?
Can 16-year-olds get the death penalty?
How many juveniles got the death penalty?
Do you think race plays a role in who gets the death penalty? Why or
why not?
10.) Does Florida have the death penalty?
Death Penalty Info
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/student-resource-center
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/node/5623/4
Juvenile Center Information
https://www.ncjrs.gov/app/topics/Topic.aspx?TopicID=122
Juvenile Crime and the Law
http://www.djj.state.fl.us/
http://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/ezapop/
https://www.ncjrs.gov/app/topics/Topic.aspx?TopicID=122
Monday, July 6 1-44
Setting:
How does the jail setting affect tone? Mood? Theme?
How does the author show the tone of the the jail cell at night?
Characterization:
Describe Steve Harmon. What kind of a person is he?
Describe how the setting of the jail cell affects Steve Harmon.
How does Petrocelli discredit Mr. Sawicki’s testimony?
What kind of defense attorneys are Kathy O’Brien? Asa Briggs? How does the
author characterize these two attorneys? What is he saying about defense
attorneys in the legal system?
Inference: What do people think of Steven? How do you know? (pp 20-21)
Main Idea and Theme:
What is the main idea of the prosecutor's opening statement? The defense
attorney’s opening statement?
How does O’Brien discredit Zinzi?
How does the author develop the theme of separation? Victimization? The search
for self-esteem? Impact of crime on individuals/neighborhoods/society?
Conflict:
Discuss the internal conflict that Steve deals with in the jail.
What causes Steve to cry at night?
Discuss the internal conflict that Steve deals with in the courtroom.
Symbolism:
What does the blanket Steve hides his head under symbolize?
Tuesday, July 7 and Wednesday, July 8
(45-88)
Setting:
How does setting affect the characters? Think of how Osvaldo acts differently in
different
settings.
How does Steve’s daydream about the death sentence affect the tone of this
section?
Characterization:
What does a character’s diction (choice of words) reveal about the characters?
How does Bobo affect the other characters?
How does Steve react to the visit from the preacher? What does this tell the
reader about Steve?
What do the flashbacks reveal about Steve?
Why does Steve see King in a different way now?
Compare how Osvaldo acts on the streets to how he acts in court. What does this
say about him?
Main Idea and Theme:
How does Briggs discredit Bolden?
How does Myers develop the theme of the Impact of friends a person chooses?
Peaches says “You can’t even hardly make it these days. They talking about cutting
welfare, cutting Social Security, and anything else that makes life a little easy. They
might as well bring back slavery times if you ask me” (50). Is Peaches whining? Or does
she have a legitimate observation?
Conflict:
Why does Steve stay quiet while his neighbors are making plans to steal money?
How does Steve use flashbacks to deal with the conflict in the jail?
Symbolism:
Why does Myers choose to present Steve’s story through a screenplay? What does
the screenplay symbolize?
Thursday, July 9 and Friday, July 10
(89-136)
Setting:
Describe the visitation room.
How does Steve’s environment lead to his incarceration? What is the author saying
about living environments?
How do the photos influence the story?
Characterization:
Why is Lorelle Henry considered a star witness?
Inference: On pg 53, Steve says he does not feel he is involved in his own trial.
Why?
Inference: What is the hardest part for Steve as he watches his father cry?
Main Idea and Theme:
How does the author develop the theme of Victimization?
What does O’Brien mean when she says, “You’re young, you’re Black, and you’re on
trial?” Do you agree with this?
How does the author develop the theme of separation?
Conflict:
Internal Conflict: Steve’s mother believes he is innocent. Why does Steve think he
is fooling himself into thinking he is innocent?
Symbolism:
What does the basketball in the gutter on pg 92 mean?
Saturday, July 11 through Tuesday, July 13 (137-200)
Setting:
How does the author show the tone of the courtroom?
How does the courtroom contrast with the jail?
Characterization:
How has Steve’s life changed because of his experience in prison and the trial?
Main Idea and Theme:
What does Steve learn about making poor choices?
Steve says that the trial isn’t about race (146). Do you agree or disagree? Doesn’t
race always play a role in our society?
Reread what Steve wrote in his diary on page 91. His testimony on page 165 seems
to be a lie. Why does Steve lie in court?
Conflict:
How have previous conflicts affected Steve Harmon’s life.
Symbolism:
What does the Bible symbolize to Steve?
Tuesday, July 14 and Tuesday, July 17 (201-281)
Setting:
How does the setting impact the story?
Characterization:
How is Steve different from Bobo and James King?
How has Steve changed because of the trial?
Inference: Why does O’Brien turn away at the end of the novel (276, 281)?
On page 207, O’Brien is not friendly to Steve when the trial is over even though he
is found innocent. Why not?
Main Idea and Theme:
What is the main idea of the prosecutor’s closing statement? The defense
attorney’s closing statement?
If you had been on the jury…how would you have voted?
Discuss the role of race in the text. For example, does it matter what the race of
the judge, attorneys, and defendants is? What about Mr. Nesbitt's race? How
would the story change if Steve were European American?
What about issues of class? Would the story be different if Steve's parents were
wealthy?
Conflict:
What does this coming to knowledge cost Steve?
Explain the conflict between Steve and his father.
Symbolism:
Why is the novel titled Monster? What does the monster symbolize?
Monster Project Ideas
1. Design murals or tapestry that illustrate the contrasting settings in the novel. Create
images that depict the tone and mood of each setting. Include page numbers from the
book where the setting is described.
2. Create a website that demonstrates the themes in the novel such as effects of
incarceration/isolation, choosing the wrong friends, and/or finding self-esteem.
3. Newspaper articles (min of 4) that chronicle the main ideas and events of the trial of
Steve Harmon. Use publisher to create a newsletter.
4. Dramatic reading including sound effects of a section of the novel (via podcast).
Dramatic reading should demonstrate the tone and the mood of the section.
5. Create a poster and a pamphlet on the effects of conflicts like physical
endangerment, rough neighborhoods, local crime, jailing, and exposure to youthful
offenders on teens like Steve Harmon. Support opinions with facts.
6. Create puppets and write a puppet show that reenacts the end of the trial. Show
should demonstrate character traits of Steve, the attorneys, and witnesses. Present
show and turn in the script. Characterization.
7. Create a slide show or a website on which you present researched information on
causes, symptoms, and prevention of suicide, emphasize modern methods of preventing
prisoners from killing themselves, including limiting the types of clothes and shoes they
wear and the furnishing of their jail cells, in house cameras, group therapy, and
counseling. Theme.
8. Create a symbol for each of the characters in the novel: Steve Harmon, Steve’s mom,
O’Brien, Petrocelli, Briggs, Bobo, King, and Lorelle Henry. Make a poster that has the
character names, symbols, and explanation of the symbols.
Science
Can a Butterfly in Brazil Really Cause a Tornado in Texas?
by Natalie Wolchover | December 13, 2011 04:22pm ET
Morpho butterfly overlayed over one of two trajectories of
the Lorenz attractor. The starting point of the two
trajectories differ by one-100,000th of a unit, and their
paths start to diverge after 23 time steps.
Credit: Creative Commons | Asturnut (butterfly), Creative
Commons | Hellisp (attractors)
It's poetic, the notion that the flap of a butterfly's wing in Brazil can set off a cascade
of atmospheric events that, weeks later, spurs the formation of a tornado in Texas. This
so-called "butterfly effect" is used to explain why chaotic systems like the weather can't
be predicted more than a few days in advance. One can't know every little factor
affecting the atmosphere — every flutter of every butterfly in Brazil — so there's little
hope of foreseeing the exact time and place a storm will touch down weeks later.
The butterfly effect is all the more pleasing because the computer model that led to its
discovery resembles a butterfly. The mathematician Edward Lorenz created the model,
called a strange attractor, in the 1960s; it's a line that alternately spirals around two
adjacent ovals, mapping out the chaotic solution to a set of interrelated equations. Lorenz
found that the shape of the attractor was extremely sensitive to initial conditions.
Moving its starting point just a wing's scale in any direction caused the line to draw a
completely different butterfly.
The strange attractor led scientists to conclude that many real-world systems — the
stock market, the Texas tornado season — must be similarly unpredictable, and the
butterfly effect has continued to be invoked as an explanation of chaos ever since.
However, this is in spite of the fact that it's actually false: A butterfly in Brazil can
flutter as hard as it likes, but it still can't whip up a tornado in Texas.
"If a butterfly flaps its wings the effect really just gets damped out," the mathematician
and writer David Orrell told Life's Little Mysteries.
Trivial flapping
Each flap of a butterfly's wings exerts a pressure on surrounding air molecules in order
to thrust the insect upward. Each flap causes a tiny change in the air pressure around the
butterfly, but this fluctuation is insignificant compared to the air's total pressure, which
is about 100,000 times larger. Changes in air pressure are one of the key factors involved
in changing the weather, but in the case of the butterfly, the air molecules easily absorb
the blow of a wing flap, so that a few inches away from a butterfly, the turbulence it
causes will have died down. [Explained: The Physics-Defying Flight of the Bumblebee]
Orrell, who has a doctorate in prediction of nonlinear systems from the University of
Oxford, writes about prediction-making in fields such as meteorology, biology and
economics for both scientific and lay audiences. His best-selling book "The Future of
Everything: The Science of Prediction" (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2006) describes the
extreme difficulty meteorologists face in forecasting the weather, which is so sensitive
to changes in atmospheric conditions like pressure and temperature that it cannot be
accurately projected more than a few days in advance. An estimation of the temperature
that is off by just a fraction of a degree-Celsius leads to a cascade of errors later,
making predictions that look out beyond a few days, but less than a few weeks,
particularly challenging.
However, "the changes that make a difference are far bigger than a butterfly flapping
its wings," Orrell said.
"I think mathematically, the Lorenz attractor was a very important discovery," he said.
"But then it kind of got taken over as a bit of an excuse. People started applying chaos
theory to a lot of systems and saying, 'Well, this property is sensitive to initial
conditions, so we can't make accurate predictions.'"
In fact, according to Orrell, only in greatly simplified models of chaos like the strange
attractor do microscopic changes have huge consequences, escalating and ultimately
causing the attractor to diverge from the path it otherwise would have taken. More
complex computer models like those used by meteorologists are much more robust. As
Orrell and a team of several other mathematicians demonstrated in 2001, inputting
butterfly-flapping-scale disturbances into these weather models don't cause the
outcomes of the models to diverge. If other factors in the weather system, such as warm
Atlantic Ocean temperatures, high humidity and westerly winds with low wind shear, are
joining forces to drive the formation of a hurricane, the flap of a wing, or lack thereof,
won't stop them.
And the idea that a wing flap really could have an exponentially increasing effect doesn't
make much physical sense, anyway, Orrell said. "If you imagine modeling a volume of air
and then perturbing it with the flap of a butterfly wing, you wouldn't expect to get an
exponentially larger wave coming out of the other end." Modeling the turbulence using
cellular automata, a method developed by the mathematician Stephen Wolfram and
explained in his famous book "A New Kind of Science" (Wolfram Media, 2002), also shows
that the energy from the wing will dissipate, rather than build. In short, butterflies
can't muster up storms. [5 Seriously Mind-Boggling Math Facts]
So what's the forecast?
If the butterfly effect isn't real, why, then, can't we humans accurately predict the
weather more than a few days in advance?
It turns out that the answer to that question is controversial. Based on his research,
Orrell believes errors in computer models themselves — for example, an
oversimplification of the way atmospheric pressure and humidity interact — affect the
outcome of weather systems much more drastically than do small perturbations. He
thinks that meteorologists ought to work on perfecting their models of the atmosphere,
rather than throwing their hands up because of chaos. "My take [is] that model error is a
more likely cause of our inability to make weather forecasts than chaos," Orrell said.
Other scientists disagree. Paul Roebber, a mathematician and meteorologist at the
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, argues that although butterfly-scale chaos does not
affect the success of weather prediction, larger perturbations nonetheless play a
significant role.
"I agree with [Orrell] that butterfly-scale effects would get damped out, but influences
that are still small-scale influences from a weather perspective, such as individual clouds
— those effects are much more likely to grow and be important," Roebber said. "So
butterflies: OK. Butindividual clouds: those can very dramatically influence the forecast
five to 10 days from now, and until we can resolve those, improvements in our models
won't lead to much improvement in our forecasts."
Tim Palmer, an Oxford professor and principal scientist at the European Centre for
Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, explained that limitations in our ability to observe the
conditions of the atmosphere (such as the locations of all clouds) using weather balloons,
surface and satellite measurements, means that we will never be able to input exactly the
right initial conditions into our computer models. This isn't always a deal-breaker, but
sometimes it is: "When the flow is particularly unstable, errors in initial conditions can
grow rapidly and destroy the quality of the forecast in a couple of days. On other
occasions, errors in initial conditions will grow more slowly and the forecast will remain
skillful for a week or more ahead," Palmer wrote in an email.
According to Roebber, atmospheric convection — the heating and rising of air — is a
prime example of a condition that can be inaccurately measured, and which can then give
rise to large-scale changes in the weather. For example, convection above the Gulf of
Mexico sometimes causes thunderstorms in the southeastern U.S., which then spark
snowstorms in the Northeast. [Is All the Wild Weather Connected?]
"To me, the role of atmospheric convection in affecting the large-scale weather and
subsequent atmospheric predictability says a lot more about the role of both model
errors and analysis errors than the hypothetical butterfly scenario of popular
imagination," he said.
This story was provided by Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience. Follow
Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover. Follow Life's Little Mysteries on Twitter
@llmysteries, then join us on Facebook.
Answer the following questions on a separate sheet of paper.
- What is your interpretation of the text? Support your rationale.
- Do you agree or disagree with the butterfly effect? Why do you feel this way?
- Do you believe that one mistake can lead to something bigger? Give an example.
6/3/2015 No. 652: The Butterfly Effect
No. 652:
THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT
by John H. Lienhard
Today, our notion of cause and effect changes forever. The University of Houston's
College
of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and
the
people whose ingenuity created them.
Author James Gleick tells about MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz. In 1960 Lorenz tried
to model the weather. He wrote simplified equations and solved them on a primitive
computer. Sure enough, his output did behave a lot like real weather. His colleagues
watched over his shoulder. They were fascinated.
One day, Lorenz tried to continue a run he'd done the day before. He restarted it
halfway through. He put in a number from the first run. The output started out just the
way it had the day before. Then it began to diverge, crazily.
The equations were the same. The starting point was the same. But the results diverged.
Lorenz checked his computer. He checked his arithmetic. Nothing had changed. Same
equations, but on subsequent days the results diverged.
There was one difference, but how could it matter? Lorenz rounded off the fourth
decimal place of the starting number on the second day. So he stopped to consider. All
weather predictions do what his program just did. You can predict the weather for the
day after tomorrow. Stretch that to a week, and your prediction always departs from
reality.
The implication was staggering. We've always presumed that if you barely change a cause,
you'll barely change the effect. Suddenly, Lorenz saw that the weather would change
utterly if you started things out just a little differently.
No wonder real weather is so unpredictable! Weather obeys physical laws. But if you
change one breath of air, those laws will spin out in a wholly different story.
Meteorologists began talking about something they called the Butterfly Effect. The idea
was that if a butterfly chances to flap his wings in Beijing in March, then, by August,
hurricane patterns in the Atlantic will be completely different.
Not long after that day in 1960, the scientific world began changing. Perhaps all kinds of
nasty problems we can't solve are nasty just because we can never state them accurately
enough. Lorenz had taken the first step on the road to showing that our world is far more
chaotic than we dreamed. For generations engineers and scientists have been predicting
things. But we've only predicted those things that are predictable the breaking load on
beams the thrust of a rocket.
And weather, of course, is just one face of the larger thing we all want to know, but
which we never shall predict. Somewhere in the world, a butterfly will always flap its
wings and thwart our age old craving to predict our own future.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way
inventive minds work.
Answer the following questions on a separate sheet of paper.
“The idea was that if a butterfly chances to flap his wings in Beijing in March, then, by
August, hurricane patterns in the Atlantic will be completely different.”
- What is your interpretation of the text above?
- Do you agree or disagree with the text above? Support your decision.
Math
Name: _________________________________________
Paying for crime – Lesson Plan
Background
The number of people in prison in America has been rising steadily, resulting in
overcrowded prisons and a budget crisis. Contrary to popular belief, a rise in crime isn’t
the primary reason for the increase in prison populations. Studies have shown that
changes in laws and policies regarding imprisonment seem to be the major cause.
Objective
In four linked activities, students will apply their knowledge of ratios, proportions,
fractions, decimals, percents, scientific notation, mean, median, mode, range, and pie
graphs to interpret data and statistics regarding the U.S. government’s budget for
prisons and correctional services. Then students will synthesize what they have learned
and communicate it using diagrams and mathematical evidence.
Activity I
Mathematical Focus: proportions, decimals, percents, pie graphs



Students are to read Excerpt #1: Criminal Justice Policies.
Students need to use Student Worksheet 1 to calculate the numbers.
Students will use the numbers, protractor and template to create their own pie
graph.
Activity II
Mathematical Focus: fractions, decimals, percents



Students are to read Excerpt 2: Prison Population.
Students need to use Student Worksheet 2 to do calculations.
Use this fact from a different source:
o Three out of four people in correctional services aren’t in prison.
o Calculations:
¾ = 75% not in prison, which is close to the calculation of 69% not in prison.
o Write a paragraph that details whether or not this second source verifies or
contradicts your data.
Activity III
Mathematical Focus: fractions, decimals, percents, and pie graphs



Students will be creating a pie graph to represent what prison budget money is
spent on.
Use Table 1. State prisons: Total, operating, and capital expenditures, and
operating expenditures per inmate, fiscal year 1996 to fill in Worksheet 4:
Prison Budgets.
Use pie graph templates and protractors to create a pie graph of the data in the
table.
Activity IV - Extension Activities

Students are to investigate statistics on racial breakdown of prison populations.
Please choose 3 Florida State Prisons and give the statistics for racial breakdown
and then write a paragraph detailing some connections between what you read in
“Monster” and these racial statistics.