Meghan Stackhouse Blog 01-30-20

01-30-20

Meghan Stackhouse, Pd. 5

Aim: How does the theme of "anonymity" affect the mood and tone of 12 Angry Men?

For the Do Now, we all guessed as to what race we presumed the defendant was. Majority of the class answered African American, despite the deomgraphic statistics about Italians, Irish, and Jewish making up the majority of the "slums" in the 50's, or what we know as the Lower East Side. 

We revisited the fallacy of false equivolance that we learned yesterday, as well as familiarizing ourselves with the rest f the fallacies listed on the chart posted on the syllabus-

- most particulalry hasty generalization. To make a hasty generalization is "to make a sweeping idea over a brief moment". Another important thing to remember about these fallacies is that for Moral Equivolance, the exaggerationns are felt literally, unlike their use in a hyperbole, where the exaggerations are present to further accentuate a point.

What did we learn?

Through discussion, we learned that the relevance of anonymity in the story is the essence of power that comes with it. When you remain anonymous, the fear of the consequences of your actions is muh less inflicting. 

Why did we learn it?

By creating a bridge between a concept that is prevalent in our lives, especially as teenagers with our level of access to the internet and how we choose to utilize it, learning the relevance of anonymity in a story becomes much more straightforward. We become more self aware of how this applies to us, therefore making it easier to understand in several other scenarios presented to us such as in the story.

How will we use what we learned?

We can use this knowledge to increase our mindfulness in the ways it applies to us, as well as keeping this in mind for the rest of the story as well as other stories we may find similarities to this in. We can pay attention to how vulnerable and suspicious the other jurors become when someone has anonymously disagreed, which is also a great example of human nature we ourselves undergo.

Additional Notes:

The Do Now instructions, as seen in the capture of the slide, was to create an assumption about the race of the boy being put on trial. Majoriy of the class aswered African-American, even in spite of the racial demographic of what would be referred to as the "slums" in the 1950s. This is an iportant example of Hasty Generalizations.