John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902. Steinbeck was an American writer. He grew up in the Salinas Valley region of California. In his early life he worked his way through college at Stanford University but never graduated. One of the novels he has written is Of Mice and Men (1937), another well known work is the novel The Grapes og Wrath (1939). In 1962 Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature. John Steinbeck died of heart attack in New York on December 20, 1968.

Stereotyping

National stereotyping is a problem. We place people in categories without knowing them. We take a group of people, and say that they are all the same. For example, we in Norway think that all the Swedish people are stupid, and we make up funny jokes about them. It’s easy for us to place people into categories, because we don’t have enough information about them, and that is probably the reason why we do it. When we place a person in to a stereotype, we give the person more information than we have the ability to access.

Multi modal poetry presentation

To work with poetry in the way of performing it with a multimodal presentation, was actually quite fun. I worked with Christine, and we introduced the poem “the white man drew a small circle” of Carl Sandburg. It was fun to see that the classmates chose different poems, and that they have different ways to look at the message to the poem. A poem can be interpreted in different ways. We get some freedom when we get this assessment, we got to choose what kind of poem we wanted to perform, and that I think was great. I hope we can do something like this later on; it was a great way to work.