Week 4: Crossing the Threshold

Since our students had already encountered (in their lives, in popular culture, and in, of course, their summer reading) and would encounter throughout the year (in Gilgamesh, In Darkness, Oedipus, Antigone, Phil, and The Odyssey) the concept of the "hero" (but from as many different perspectives as there are freshmen), we revisited the "Draw How To Make Toast" activity of a few weeks ago, an activity which highlighted the widely disparate ways that we communicate even the most mundane activities. This time, however, students drew "How to Be a Hero," then synthesized their individual ideas with a small group, then with the larger group.

From their, students in each class determined the most common traits of heroes: physical ones, mental ones, social ones, moral.

Armed with these common conceptions, students returned from a weekend break to a scavenger hunt that took them around (and outside the school). Small groups received missions based on three well-known heroic journeys from popular culture: Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and The Hunger Games. There were words problems, math problems, clues that required communication, opportunities for encouragement and further clues--and, of course, opportunities for some groups, if they so chose, to sabotage other groups . . .

They didn't quite know why they were on a scavenger hunt--only that they were on a scavenger hunt! Sometimes that's enough to engage students: novelty, surprise, challenge, competition. Of course they had some idea about why they were doing it, but no one had any idea that it would culminate in the following days in a ubiquitous "circle with a line through it" which will serve them well through the English curriculum and into college--and, I'd argue, into life in general (whether they like it or not!).

Here's what the search and the problem-solving looked like for English 9 Blue:

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