Sebastian Lee and Annie Lu

Annie and I both thought that the class discussion went well. We initially created a surplus of slides on our PowerPoint presentation, with various questions that we had about the book and the war, as well as passages and quotes we found interesting. In particular, we had many questions centered on the politics of the civil war.

Ultimately, the slides were sufficient in provoking discussion for most of the class period, and there were very interesting points brought up by our classmates throughout.

Topics that frequently came up in discussion included Orwell’s motivations for writing the book (as a form of “propaganda”), Anarchist, Communist and Socialist policies, and what made foreigners want to participate in the war.

I felt that we presented some decent ideas, but to improve for next time, we could phrase the questions differently in order to make it easier for our classmates to respond. For a book discussion, I would make the questions more answerable by (and more specific to) the contents of the book itself, rather than more general questions about the civil war.

Also, the digressions from the planned topics of interest were quite entertaining and informative (e.g. the Cricket test matches), but as regulators we could keep the discussions a little more focused.

Overall, we felt that we asked significant questions, questions that went deeper than the superficial layers, and that the class generated good dialogue about the book.