Ah, the never-ending struggle, challenge, and balance with what has proven to work with what’s new.
Teaching Joseph Campbell’s Journey of the Hero structural pattern works — it works because students understand truly what plot is, they can apply it to multiple mediums, stories, and their own lives, and wait…no more needs to be said. They can apply it to their own lives.
Having to let go of my curriculum baby — you know that baby–the one you work on for months, craft, shape, support with standards and engaging lessons, scope-it, and sequence-it and tie it all up with a bow, and share it with the world, only to have the world think it’s slightly funny looking or outdated. Well, I still think this baby, the Journey of the Hero unit, has merit and value, so thought I would try something different a few years ago and ‘chunk the Hobbit.’ No, that’s not some new Lord of the Rings drinking game, but I broke down the Hobbit into bite-sized pieces for groups of three chapters each. It kind of worked, but kind of didn’t. (Recently, though, I had a sibling of one of my former students ask me on behalf of her sister if I was still teaching that — she loved it.)
We have a full class set of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, so this month I’ve devoted time to reading this extraordinary novel through the idea of the monomyth.
So far…it’s kind of working. I say kind of because there have been some obstacles, our own Road of Trials:
- Too quick of an introduction of what JOTH is and entails
- Jumped right into reading, and students not getting the message they need their books with them every day, to class and to home. They are allowed backpacks in my room so the carrying of a $15 paperback may be too much…but they have all gotten the message again.
- We had two mornings of ice delays, so that threw off our schedule a bit.
- Students are still not looking to Canvas for work, or at least the majority are not.
- Students are still expressing too much “learned helplessness” (and it’s making me a little crazy). In fact, I gave students their first quote as scaffolding and one student stopped dead in her thinking tracks and said “I don’t get it” and then kept talking over me when I said let’s work this out. So now I need to go back and teach a lesson on what ‘central idea’ is. Never again will I not have multiple lessons on the basics at the beginning of the year.
Here is what is starting to work:
We walked through the first three sections together, scaffolded and intentional:
Smartnotebook file (which I can’t embed here, but if you need it email me or contact me in the comments)
JOTH Reader Response Tracker
[embeddoc url=”https://blog0rama.edublogs.org/files/2017/01/JOTH-reader-response-tracker-25hyc1p.pdf” viewer=”google”]
After we worked on it by hand, this weekend I’ve given them a scaffolded digital version that displays the work they’ve come up with : JOTH Part Time Indian Support
[embeddoc url=”https://blog0rama.edublogs.org/files/2017/01/JOTH-Part-Time-Indian-Support-12b05v8.docx” viewer=”microsoft”]
So we’ll see. We’re on our own journey through the novel, trying my best to allow them to discover what they think and find. I’ll keep you posted.
PS It’s not an accident that Penelope is named Penelope. Think about it.
Google Docs Links:
Journey of the Hero Support Doc
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByKyQvl3l_F5Wng1M2YyaVZ3NW8/view?usp=sharing
Journey of the Hero PowerPoint
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByKyQvl3l_F5NVc2ZVZwbHkweGM/view?usp=sharing
Archetypes PowerPoint
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByKyQvl3l_F5c0pFd1dRNGh6NjQ/view?usp=sharing
