The kids wrote another TDA today. I’ll be giving them feedback over the next couple of weeks regarding this as we near the final, actual TDA portion of the state-mandated year-end testing.

Since it was a testing schedule, we only had a few minutes in each class. As they’d already been writing for two hours in the morning, students got a chance to relax a bit and watch 20 minutes or so of the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird. I let them choose from a few scenes:

• Opening (Meeting Dill)
• Shooting the Mad Dog
• Sneaking a Peek at Boo
• The Attempted Lynching
• Bob Ewell’s Revenge
• Meeting Boo

Most classes chose “The Attempted Lynching” and “Bob Ewell’s Revenge.” Every class was surprised about the number of men there trying to lynch Tom Robinson.

“I thought there were only four or five,” one student said, to which almost everyone else nodded in agreement.

We talked for a while about the effect being in a mob has on human behavior. They all suggested good reasons (not getting caught, getting pulled into the emotion of it all, the sheer force and power of numbers), but no one really thought of the anonymity that a mob provides and the way people tend use that anonymity to cloak their on complicity and to hide their own guilt.

We touched on recent events: “I’m not really doing anything. It’s the mob. I just walked into this open building.”