I'm no John Kimble.

a) Question topics for Gulliver's Travels
-Why did Swift put a communication barrier between Gulliver and the Lilliputians? How might this be significant to the story?
-What was the purpose of size difference between Gulliver and the Lilliputians? Might this be the reason of the barrier of communication?
-Why did the Lilliputians bound and keep Gulliver? Did they know what they were going to do with him all along?
-In this excerpt, it is not mentioned how Gulliver and the Lilliputians overcome the communication barrier. How do you think they overcame it?

*Excerpts:
(Pg 653) "But the creatures ran off a second time, before I could seize them; whereupon there was a great shout in a very shrill accent, and after it ceased, I heard one of them cry aloud, Tolgo phonac; when in an instant I felt above an hundred arrows discharged on my left hand, which pricked me like so many needles; and besides, they shot another flight into the air, as we do bombs in Europe, whereof many, I suppose, fell on my body (though I felt them not), and some on my face, which I immediately covered with my left hand. When this shower of arrows was over, I fell a-groaning with grief and pain, and then striving again to get loose, they discharged another volley larger than the first, and some of them attempted with spears to stick me in the sides; but, by good luck, I had on me a buff jerkin,4 which they could not pierce. I thought it the most prudent method to lie still, and my design was to continue so till night, when, my left hand being already loose, I could easily free myself: And as for the inhabitants, I had reason to believe I might be a match for the greatest armies they could bring against me, if they were all of the same size with him that I saw. But fortune disposed otherwise of me."

I chose this excerpt because it made me raise some questions: Could Gulliver free himself and fight the army of Lilliputians? Did he just cooperate to find out what was going on? Did the Lilliputians know that the arrows wouldn't really hurt him but just to discipline him? This led me to predict that because they didn't just kill Gulliver that they had something in store for him. If the Lilliputians really thought Gulliver was a threat, then they would've just killed him.


b) It's nice to get in a group to talk about what we all read and to get some help from your peers. It's interesting to know what other people think and it makes me think differently about the different things I read. My group had a hard time figuring out what questions to put down to ask the class. Trying to agree on a question and how to phrase it to get the best answer took up a lot of time.

c) I think after my group members do this blog and come up with separate questions we will all know where we stand and try to put our questions together. So I think after the blog and evaluating the text this way my group will try to approach the teaching assignment differently. We haven't been able to develop a vision to teach the excerpt, but I suppose the way to teach the class is to use quotes use our own interpretations and predictions.