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"A Single Lucid Moment" Lesson

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Students will wrestle with resolving contrasting values between cultures.

Supporting resources

John Young 1

A Single Lucid Moment

A personal essay about a Peace Corps Volunteer and their experience

Former Peace Corps Volunteer Robert Soderstrom and his wife, Kerry, were the first Peace Corps Volunteers to serve in the remote village of Maimafu in the Eastern Highlands province of Papua New Guinea.

This selection should speak strongly to students on different levels—emotionally and intellectually. "A Single Lucid Moment" deals with a sudden and profound change in worldview that occurs when individuals from an individualistic culture encounter individuals from a collectivist culture. It raises questions about the meaning of individualism and community and about the values of generosity versus self-sufficiency.

About the setting

Maimafu is a remote village of about 800 people in Papua New Guinea. A country about the size of California, Papua New Guinea, just below the Equator in the southwest Pacific, makes up the eastern half of the island of New Guinea. The majority of the people live in rural areas—often without access to electricity and plumbing—and are dependent on subsistence agriculture for their living.

Papua New Guinea is a diverse country of 4 million people and 800 languages. It is home to more than 200 cultures, each with its own traditions. Because 85 percent of Papua New Guinea consists of dense rain forest—and because of its rough, mountainous terrain—many of its numerous tribes seldom have contact with each other, and rarely with the outside world. For most people living in rural villages in Papua New Guinea, life goes on without change year after year. Traditions and customs remain the same from one generation to the next. The tribal cultures are primarily communal ones in which each member of the community can count on being cared for in some way within a circle of family, community, and friends.

More than 700 Peace Corps Volunteers have worked in Papua New Guinea since the first group arrived in September 1981. Their focus has been on education, agriculture, health, and natural resources management.

Objectives

  • To introduce students to the story and its setting.
  • To encourage students to find personal meaning in the text.
  • To have students probe the deeper meanings of the story and the questions it raises.
  • To highlight the difference between individualistic and collectivist cultures.
  • To inspire student empathy.

Vocabulary

  • Entourage: A group that follows along—in this case, the Maimafu villagers who accompanied the Peace Corps Volunteers to their village
  • Subsistence living: Living only on what is absolutely necessary to survive, and no more
  • Communal living: Group living, in which each member of the group is cared for by the other members of the group 

Procedure

Introduction:

  1. Begin this lesson by suggesting to students that "A Single Lucid Moment" will have more meaning for them if they take time to explore the meaning of the title and some information about the story's setting. Begin with the title. In the context of this story, lucid means "extremely clear." The lucid moment in the story is one in which a basic way of looking at life is brought clearly into focus, challenging worldview and personal values.
  2. Ask students if they've ever experienced a moment when they suddenly realized that something they accepted and took for granted was not accepted or taken for granted by others. Examples of things we might take for granted: When people are sick, they can go to the emergency room. When people need a loaf of bread, they can go to the store to buy one. When people see violence in movies or cartoons, they know it's just make-believe. Or new realizations can take place if you are
    • Traveling to another place and seeing that people there see the world and behave unlike people where you live.
    • Spending the night or a weekend at a friend's home and noticing that your friend's family has customs, traditions, and ways of interacting completely different from your family's.
    • Seeing a movie in which you are strongly affected by the way the main character sees the world, even though that person is very different from you and sees the world in a completely different way.
    • Becoming friends with someone who sees the world differently from the way you do.

3. Ask students to pair up with a partner and share their reactions to the scenarios presented above. Ask partners to think, in particular, about this question: How have you felt when you've suddenly realized that the things you've accepted as true for yourself and for everyone are true only for yourself, and not true for everyone?

4. Point out to students that the moment when we realize our view of the world is not the only view can become a "single lucid moment" for us.

5. Provide students with the information from the background section.

Reading:

  1. Ask students to read "A Single Lucid Moment." Suggest to them that as they read, they jot down notes in the margin—or highlight sentences that evoke a strong reaction. They should pay particular attention to points where the story makes them feel happy, peaceful, sad, frustrated, angry, or confused. At those points in their reading, they can try "talking to the text"—i.e., writing notes in the margin about what those particular passages mean, as if they were asking: "Story, what is your message?"
  2. As students finish reading the story, ask them to look back over the sentences they have highlighted and select one or two that evoked the strongest response.
  3. Then call on volunteers to read those sentences that evoked the most powerful response and explain why they chose them. After each comment, ask if anyone highlighted the same sentence. Was it for the same reason, or a different one? Elicit a number of different responses.

Discussion:

  1. Ask students to form groups of four and discuss the following questions:
    • Why—when the Maimafu village council proposed to bring the men without housing to Papua New Guinea—was this "a single lucid moment" for the Peace Corps Volunteer?
    • How did the Maimafu villagers' request turn the Volunteer's worldview upside down and leave him speechless?
    • How might it have made him see the world in a way he had never seen it before?
    • Do you think he would ever be able to look at the photographs of the two men in Chicago in the same way as he had before?
    • Why was the memory of this moment so strong that it caused one of the Volunteers to write a story titled "A Single Lucid Moment"?

2. Conduct a class discussion addressing these questions.

Homework:

  1. For homework, ask students to tell the story of "A Single Lucid Moment" to another person (adult, child, or teen), then interview that person on their reaction to the story, and how he or she might have responded to the Maimafu village council's questions about houselessness.
  2. Ask students to summarize the interview response and their thoughts about it in their Reading Journals.

Extension

Have students write a script for a dramatization of the story "A Single Lucid Moment." Students can elaborate on the story by adding new dialogue of their own. Ask students, as they are writing the script, to try to see the world from two points of view—that of the Peace Corps Volunteers and that of the Maimafu villagers.

  • Ask students to share their scripts in small groups. Then ask for volunteers to conduct the dramatization.
  • One way to conduct the dramatization to increase student involvement: When one of the student volunteers runs out of ideas for things to say during the dramatization, another student can take that person's place, adding his or her own dialogue.

Frameworks and standards

Enduring understandings

  • In some cultures, people believe the group is responsible for the well-being of each individual. In other cultures, people believe individuals are primarily responsible for themselves.
  • Life can raise questions with no easy answers.
  • A "single lucid moment" can challenge and change our worldview.

Essential questions

  • When is taking care of the individual more important than taking care of the group? When is taking care of the group more important than taking care of the individual?
  • What is a "single lucid moment" and how can it challenge and change our worldview?

Standards

National Council of Teachers of English/International Reading Association
Standard 1: Students read a wide range of print and nonprint texts to build an understanding of texts, of themselves, and of the cultures of the United States and the world.
Standard 2: Students read a wide range of literature from many periods in many genres to build an understanding of the many dimensions of human experience.
Standard 3: Students apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate texts.
Standard 5: Students employ a wide range of strategies as they write and use different writing process elements appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes.

National Council for the Social Studies
Theme 1: Culture. Social studies programs should provide for the study of culture and cultural diversity so that the learner can explain how information and experiences may be interpreted by people from diverse cultural perspectives and frames of reference.