Monday in class, after you examined Ian Falconer’s New Yorker cover The Competition, you studied Tetsuya Ishida’s painting Seedlings (1998) and chose one of those two visual texts as the subject of a writing exercise: a paragraph of summary followed by a paragraph of analysis. That exercise served both as a departure from your study of written texts and as additional writing practice. The summary and analysis of Seedlings that I wrote as samples for you appear below.
Summary
Tetsuya Ishida’s painting Seedlings depicts a classroom of uniformed teenagers, all males, whose teacher, seen only from the shoulders down, holds a textbook in one hand. The teacher drapes his other hand on the head of one of the pupils, one of two students presented as microscopes with human faces.
Analysis
Although the subject at hand is biology, the study of living organisms, the student seedlings barely seem alive themselves as they stare blankly into the distance. The uniformity Ishida depicts, with their haircuts, crested blazers, striped neckties, and rows of desks, takes a surrealistic twist with the images of the two pupils who have transformed into microscopes. By placing the teacher’s hand on one of the students-turned-microscope, Ishida indicates that the instructor—himself objectified by the absence of his head—approves of the metamorphosis. For him, the goal of education seems to be that transformation: for the individual to be consumed by the device of study itself, to become a cold, metallic instrument.
As I noted in class yesterday, you will have the opportunity to revisit The Competition or Seedlings, or both, in the final reflection that you will compose next Monday.
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, the Merriam-Webster Scrabble Word Finder page, and review the blog posts devoted to Scrabble tips.
Jane Lucas 