We're spending two weeks on retelling Neil Gaiman's horror story 'Babycakes' through a collection of different media - basically we're making lots of non-fiction-style documents that act like clues to retell our fictional story (like in the story we read called 'Before I Wake'.)
So far we have created the front page of a newspaper for the day that the animals all vanished. We've also created some emails to demonstrate how people react to this news - puzzled and panic-stricken, thinking maybe it's the end of the world.
Your homework this week is to create a Blog Post for a nonexistant blogger called Swifty. Swifty's blog post will be an essay entitled 'A Modest Proposal' which sets out the reasons why he thinks we should start using poor people's babies in place of animals, now that all the animals have vanished.
You need to pretend to be Swifty and write your blog post addressing the general public and telling them why your idea is awesome. You've all worked on PERSUASIVE WRITING before now - that's the kind of thing you need to do here.
If you aren't sure how to start, it might be a good idea to set it out this way:
PARAGRAPH 1: Introduction. Explain what your blog post will be about and persuade your readers to stick with you and read the whole thing.
PARAGRAPH 2: Talk about how much poverty there is in the world - poor people begging on the street with their babies, orphans stuck in orphanages etc. Explain how your great idea can help solve these problems.
PARAGRAPH 3: Talk about how much medical research needs test subjects, now that all the animals have vanished. Talk about the need to find a cure for cancer and for AIDS and other serious illnesses.
PARAGRAPH 4: Talk about how one body can be used for many purposes - not only meat, but also to make leather from the skin and perhaps other uses for bones and hair and things.
PARAGRAPH 5: Concluding paragraph. Recap your ideas and wrap it all up neatly.
I've written an example here:
http://unlockaflockofwords.blogspot.com/2011/10/modest-proposal.html
I've only done the opening paragraph and the first paragraph, though - this is just the beginning of an essay, not a whole finished essay.
(SURPRISING TRUE FACT: The real Jonathan Swift, author of 'Gulliver's Travels', wrote his own mega-sarcastic essay 'A Modest Proposal' in 1729, doing just what we're doing for homework. He wasn't SERIOUSLY suggesting that rich Englishmen should start eating poor Irish babies, though. He was basically trolling; he knew that the reason people were hungry and poor in Ireland was because they were being exploited by the rich people in England and in Ireland. He was trying to shock the rich people into thinking about their own selfish behaviour.)
If you're a VERY confident reader, you could check out Jonathan Swift's original essay 'A Modest Proposal' which you can find here: http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html (It was written around 300 years ago, so it's not as tricky as Shakespeare but it's pretty hard to read.)
Neil Gaiman's short story isn't satyrical (this means mega-sarcastic), but just like Swift, he's trying to shock his readers and make them think about the real world they live in. With 'Babycakes', Gaiman is making his readers think about man's inhumanity to man - about the scary ways that we break the world up into 'us' and 'them', and accept terrible things being done to people we've decided are 'them' rather than 'us'. When we discussed this in class, you guys picked out the point about World War II and the Nazis' treatment of the Jews - it probably won't surprise you to know that Neil Gaiman's family were Jewish, so the thought of people being categorised unhuman and processed like animals and products will have been particularly meaningful for him, because that must have happened to people in his family.
http://ljconstantine.com/babycakes/
