Apocalypse Theories Post 6

Today was an interesting experience. There were a few things going down in the year 9 class and I could feel that a lesson of high-trust, openness and difficulty was not quite going to cut it. I played them a documentary about New Zealand's anti-nuclear position so the have been introduced to a whole lot of ideas about different apocalypse theories which they will need to choose from next week. The level of engagement with the documentary was amazing - I only wanted to play 10 minutes but we ended up going for the whole 50 minutes or so. The period after lunch was the one that they really needed some clear parameters around though.

I had an activity ready with a learning intention something along the lines of "We are learning how to use sources to construct a story about what a nuclear holocaust might be like".

They had to select key information that would help them to write a creative story from the testimony of a Hiroshima survivor, some Hiroshima and Chernobyl photographs and some information from a secondary source giving a broad overview of the Cold War and nuclear bombs. Using this selected information they need to write a one page short story about what a nuclear apocalypse might be like. These of course will be displayed as part of the exhibition. Students need to choose a perspective to write from, such as a male or female, child or adult, a tense, and a time period, either on the first day of the event, a week later or 10,20 or 50 years later. Probably what we need to do is take a look at some really good quality short stories and have a read and integrate that into our own stories too. The English teacher is doing some great debating stuff with them on our topic so I might need to go this alone when otherwise it might have worked to have him look at short stories. The great thing about our integrated learning programme though is that we work closely together so sourcing some short stories from the English Faculty is going to be no big deal at all.

Using the complexity theory idea of providing "enabling constraints" students also needed to include a child's toy, a friendship and a sign of hope in their story. And, of course, it needed to be a story based on some evidence.

Well today that was just the activity they needed. On Monday morning we'll go back to the hard stuff but having this activity up my sleeve prevented a lesson turning into a disaster. God only knows what the dramas were about but they were certainly being a bit weird.