Katy Jain's CEP Blogs: How Do I Love Thee: Abstracting

Abstracting is the act of taking a complicated subject matter and stripping away all other details to focus on one important characteristic of that subject. In a way, it is asking someone to describe or represent a complicated issue or topic in a simple way. Abstracting can be very difficult. It is a process of looking for only the essential qualities of something as a way to define it or describe it. Try thinking about how to abstract something complicated like justice or beauty. There is an infinite number of ways to abstract justice or beauty. The wonderful part is that there is no wrong answer and no wrong representation. The key to abstraction and the benefit of abstract is the thinking that goes behind it and the learning that occurs as a result of it.

For this series of assignments, I have been focusing on rights. It has also been a topic that we have been discussing quite a bit the last week in my classes. We recently had a student bring a gun to school. As part of the discussion about the incident I had with my students, we talked a lot about rights and freedoms, the importance of those rights and freedoms, when you loose those rights and freedoms, and how those rights and those freedoms are maintained.

When you think about freedom, many ideas will pop into the mind. For Americans, it can be easily abstracted as symbols of freedom in the United States such as the national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner. The Star Spangled Banner actually started as a poem titled Defense of Fort McHenry written by Francis Scott Key, a witness to the British bombardment on Fort McHenry during the War of 1812.

From this famous poem we now have key principles like "land of the free" and "home of the brave". Once it was set to music, the first stanza of the poem became our national anthem, and when played, gives Americans the sense of freedom and pride in that freedom. Here it is played by The U.S. Army Band, under the direction of Colnel L. Bryan Shelburn:

http://www.thenationalanthemproject.org/sounds/Sing%20America%2001.mp3

Some might be interested in a vocal abstraction of the piece:

See more Audio at TeacherTube.com.

Or perhaps you might prefer the Jimi Hendrix abstraction:

Though, maybe fr some, the national anthem does not fully depict the essential aspects of freedom.One cannot fully understand freedom without understanding the lack of it. Therefore, we might think of freedom when we see images of chains and shackles broken and images representing release. All of these images below evoke the strong sense that now that freedom has been obtained, there is now the option of choice.

Freedom can also be abstracted in poetry. Below is an acrostic poem I wrote. I tried to include as many of the essential characteristics of freedom that I could think of. Disclaimer: I do not proclaim it to be good poetry.)

          Free to think, say, or do what we choose
          Rights that are protected by others
          Every person deserves it
          Equality for all
          Democracy for all
          Opportunities for all
          Many died to preserve it for us

Perhaps we can abstract freedom in another way by depicting another essential aspect of freedom: its importance. Freedom is so important to us that we celebrate those who serve us to protect that freedom and we lament the loss of those who die for that freedom. Below are pictures my husband, a police officer, took at another officer's funeral who had died in the line of duty. (I wrestled here with which pictures to use. There were some extremely heart wrenching ones that would have had a deeper impact, though I did not want to use them out of respect for this family.) These images and each funeral he has attended over the years reminds the two of us of how precious that freedom is that so many others are willing to risk their lives to protect it.

Finally, to end this on a lighter note, I would like to share one last thing: a video on freedom from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. This video is a spoof on "Freedom Packages" offered by the United States to other countries uses abstractions. The video itself is an abstraction of infomercials, keeping the key elements of an excited host or announcer with a headset on. Further along we see more abstractions. Notice that Sudan is represented by a bowl of sand; Egypt is represented by the bowl of sand with a pyramid on top; and Iraq is represented by the bowl of sand with oil on top. Not accurate representations, but commentary on how they believe the United States or perhaps Americans view these countries. Finally, the entire video represents the comedians' abstractions on American foreign policy. It strips away all of the complicated details related to foreign relations, revealing a simplistic view on how the United States deals with freedom and rights of citizens in other countries. Political commentary after all is naturally an abstraction that focuses on one important aspect and leaving the complicated details out of the explanation.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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