Key ideas from the rubric

• ‘human qualities and emotions associated with, or arising from, these experiences’

• ‘the anomalies, paradoxes and inconsistencies in human behaviour and motivations’

• ‘challenge assumptions, ignite new ideas or reflect personally’

• ‘the role of storytelling throughout time to express and reflect particular lives and cultures’

• ‘draw from personal experience to make connections between themselves, the world of the text and their wider world’

Texts about Grief 

Funeral Blues - by W.H. Auden 

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

In Blackwater Woods - by Mary Oliver  

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

A videogame to cope with grief

Amy Green (TED talk)

Discuss

What comments about the human experience are communicated in this text?

What links can you make between the rubric and the ideas explored through the speech?

Why are emotions, such as grief, manifested in such diverse ways? 

Gardens of the Human Condition

Michael Leunig, The Age, 8 October 1988 (cartoon)

Discuss

What comments about the human experience are communicated in this text?

How effective is Leunig’s use of visual techniques in exploring the darker aspects of the human experience?

What links can you make between the rubric and the ideas explored through the cartoon?

2017 University of Southern California Commencement Speech

Will Ferrell (speech)

Discuss

What comments about the human experience are communicated in this text?

What links can you make between the rubric and the ideas explored through the speech?