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| Ada: The Board Game |
Followed, of course, by "April Fool!"
There's not much fooling around in Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, but we concluded our discussion of the novel today by mapping out the main characters' internal journeys. Group drawing projects tend toward chaos, but despite the livelier-than-usual classroom hijinks, the groups produced maps that highlighted character development by pinpointing moments motivating change. One group even mapped out a board game to suggest the two-steps-forward,-one-step-back nature of character development.
And then later my Creative Nonfiction class may have looked a little foolish to anyone not in on the joke. We're reading about the unwritten rules underlying the rituals common to any strong family or cultural group, so we played a role-playing game designed to bring these unwritten rules into conflict with one another. Each student drew a slip of paper briefly outlining a particular role and set of rules: you're a hungry child who wants to be fed but cannot speak; you're a police officer looking for a miscreant, so question everyone; you're the only one aware that the dam has burst and the flood threatens the entire community, so make everyone leave, and so on. Once we all understood our roles and rules, I set the class loose to see what happened (within the confines of the classroom, of course).
Afterward we wrote about what we'd learned: the voiceless were marginalized; the only person who got what she really wanted was the little old lady who was polite and helpful to everyone; if the flood had been real, we all would have died; and the police officer, the journalist, and the doomsayer got stuck in an infinite loop of questions without answers that could have continued indefinitely if I hadn't put a stop to it.
Which I am allowed to do in my role as teacher. Just following the rules here. No fooling at all.
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