Topics for each section of the plan are introduced in a variety of ways—through movies and television shows, storytelling, lectures, and literature. Discussion is promoted intermittently during topic presentations. Classes begin with brief journal writing (three minutes) as a warm-up, and occasionally end with a game. Viola Spolin’s book, “Theater Games for the Classroom, A Teacher’s Handbook,” is an excellent resource for games and activities.
After a topic has been presented and discussed, students will be engaged in writing activities. They will be given a word list and definition sheet to become familiar with key words related to the topic area. They will work with this list to find similar and dissimilar word pairs such as, “detective/sleuth,” and “criminal/legal.” They will then use the process for clustering (a stream-of-consciousness activity) as a creative way to approach thinking and writing. By clustering word pairs—comparing similarities and contrasting polarities—students will gain a visceral awareness that preconditions critical thinking.
The methods of clustering and writing vignettes will be presented to students as a way to engage right-brain creativity and lend an aesthetic quality to their writing. They don’t have to get stuck in thinking about how to be creative. They simply have to be themselves and let stream-of-consciousness find a direction and a focal point. In the activity of clustering, they are “sprouting ideas.” Music played in the background can aid them in the process by setting a serene tone or a more energetic one depending on the topic or concept to be developed in the cluster. Visual aids and lighting can also help to set the mood. The emphasis on the clustering process is to let yourself go and write down whatever pops into your mind—thoughts, objects, sounds, images, emotions, sensations.
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In the process of clustering, a focal point will be discovered. When students arrive at that point, they can begin to expand upon it by further clustering from that focal point (although they may not need to). From their cluster work, they begin to form phrases and sentences into a vignette. After the vignette has taken shape, students will begin to revise it by listening to its rhythm and sound—how the words feel when they are read and heard. Pruning continues with revisions as they choose, and is completed with the help of the teacher’s corrections for spelling, punctuation, and grammar. A final presentation is rewritten or typed. The purpose of vignette work is to ease students into writing. They learn that longer pieces contain shorter pieces—essays contain paragraphs, poems contain stanzas, and so on. In this way students begin to feel less inhibited or overwhelmed about sustained writing.
As a requisite lesson for the unit, students will be introduced to various functions and characteristics attributed to the right brain and left hemispheres of the brain such as: Right brain—aesthetic, generative, global focus, qualitative patterning, imagistic, rhythmic, metaphorical, interpretive; Left brain—logical, aesthetic-analytical; local focus, literal, explanatory, precise. A chart will be displayed showing the right and left brain, and their respective characteristics. Functions and comparisons will be discussed. The message to students is to “Use your brains, right and left.”
Students will also be involved in more sustained writing projects. There are three full lesson plans included in this unit, and there are lesson ideas included in the text as well. Evocative, original writing that begins to make the students’ individual writing voices recognizable is the main objective of the writing exercises. “Product” is the hopeful conclusion of any process, although process, in and of itself, can be an invaluable life and learning experience. I find that most students will respect their own work efforts to the degree that their work is respected. Therefore, their writing will be presented in poetry readings and storytelling events, displayed on bulletin boards, and included in a class anthology. Students will also be engaged in producing these kinds of presentations.
GOLDEN AGE CRIME FICTION—circa 1830s to 1950s
While some of us may be hard pressed to recall the nefarious schemes that have wound their way through the labyrinths of the crime fiction genre, most of us can recall some notable protagonists whose personas, for the most part, often seem infinitely more remarkable than the cases they crack. These detectives are an eclectic lot, but each in his or her own unique way seems to do basically the same set of things: observe (and reinterpret) the obvious; entrap the villain (solve the mystery); restore justice.
Superman, for example, albeit not a clean fit with the genre since he hails from Krypton but a crime fighter nonetheless, believes in “truth, justice, and the American way.” But then, he’s Superman, and like his present-day counterparts, including Power Rangers and X-Men, all of whom delight and inspire children, his preternatural gifts empower him to lead a pristine life and endeavor to create a pristine world. Unhampered by the mundane physical and emotional struggles of mere mortals, he’s pretty good at it. In fact, he is goodness personified. His more down-to-earth fictional colleagues, Auguste Dupin (Edgar Allan Poe) and Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), the front runners of fictional crime fighting, may not be so good. While they are exquisite sleuths, and in this regard are as competent in their pursuits of justice as Superman is in his, their intrinsic goodness is open to question.
A step or two higher on the food chain from their devoted sidekicks (Watson and Poe’s unnamed narrator), Dupin and Holmes would appear to possess some preternatural abilities of their own. But on close examination we find that they do not. Their savant-like powers of deduction are the result of keen observation which they make known to us in a kick-in-the-head/plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face sort of way. While their antagonists are usually too calculating, clever, and clandestine for most us, Dupin and Holmes seem quite at ease filtering out the insignificant white noise; the peripheral stimuli of such human emotion, reaction and expectation that we might feel about the dastardly deeds committed. They are never horrified about man’s inhumanity to man. They appear to be simply objective about it. Outward appearances might suggest that the mindset of these two could be described as a kind of “social” autism. They lead sequestered lives, each with a companion who acts as a buffer and biographer. Seemingly incapable of social intercourse, they imbibe or inject, and ignore the mores and concerns of the outside world save for the machinations of arch villains. While they are diligent, industrious, ingenious and often altruistic in their pursuit of these villains, the point system by which they measure success is not concerned with the ideals of justice so much as outwitting not only the villains whom they will undoubtedly catch, but the rest of us—fictional or otherwise—as well.