Please view Powerpoint first (available through Dropbox): https://www.dropbox.com/s/js6cx837u3c1des/Bullying%20in%20The%20Scarlet%20Letter.pptx?dl=0
Lesson Plan:
Teacher: Kristen Kauffman
Grade: 11
Curricular Areas: English
Framework Standards: CC.11-12.RI1 (The standard reads:
Cite strong and
thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly
as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text
leaves matters uncertain.)
Lesson Objective: Because The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a book that deals with
bullying, students will focus on non-verbal cues to understand not only what
bullying is, but how it feels to be the victim of bullying.
Materials: -Sticky labels –marker –large area –reference
to The Scarlet Letter (though book is
not required for this lesson)
1. Anticipatory
Set:
Students will conduct
bellwork on this (as every other) day. On Mondays, students practice sentence
corrections; on Tuesdays, students practice critical response thinking to
thoughtful quotes; on Wednesdays, students respond to questions related to
Greek Mythological stories; and on Thursdays, students write creative stories
in response to weird laws (wondering what happened to lead to those weird
laws).
2. Instruction
There will be little to no lesson
that takes place before the “social experiment.” Students will have a sticky
label attached to their back in a way that they can’t see what the label says.
The label will either say “ostracized” or “towns person.” They label will be
attached as they leave the classroom and walk into the quad, and students will
then associate with others in the quad based on how the people in the quad
treat them. Students in the quad will interact non-verbally and will group up
with their like kind based on the body language of others. Once the ostracized
group is all together, the game is over and we’ll go back into the classroom.
3. Guided
Practice
Discussion that follows will regard a
conversation as to how they know they were in the “ostracized” or the “towns
person” group. For those of you who were ostracized, how did you know? What
were they ways people treated you? How did the make you feel? How did you
respond, especially considering you couldn’t respond with language?
This lesson will help tie into The Scarlet Letter –this idea that
Hester Prynne was ostracized because she was a woman who broke the social norms,
as opposed to Dimmesdale (the man) who is treated as a hero and a religious
leader by the same people.
For the purpose of this Cultural
Diversity and Education class, this also helps to become my experiment. I will
assign the “ostracized” label to boys and girls alike and observe body language
differences in responses to the ostracized group.
4. Closure/Evaluation/Assessment
Students will respond in their class
journal their responses to this activity. Here are some sample questions:
What label were you?
How do you know?
How did it make you feel?
How do you think Hester Prynne felt?
How do you think women who broke
conventional rules of society felt?
How do you think society treated men
like Dimmesdale?
5. Independent
Practice
Students will use this lesson and
their journaled notes to synthesize an analysis that they will use for their critical
thinking essay due at the end of the unit.
Self Reflection:
I found this activity to be very interesting, especially with
regard to how the class behaved around it. I feel like these kids are often
desensitized to lessons like this because they intellectually know that
bullying is bad, and intellectually they know that the heart of a lesson like
this is to bring awareness to and to weed out bullying. On a psychological
level, it’s fascinating to still watch them interact with each other. Okay, so
they know that bullying is bad, but a group of LBGTQ feminist girls in my 5th
hour class have been taught by society that the only way to stand up to bullies
is to be a bully yourself and therefore they “proactively” bully anyone with
views that contradict their own. So, what has society taught them –that it’s
okay to be a bully as long as you’re concerned with civil rights? That concerns
me.
When I sent the kids out into the quad to interact with one
another according to the lesson plan, what I observed was these girls (called
the Militant Feminists, by some of the other kids on campus) were the ones
openly bullying the others with body language. Much of the worst behavior was
directed internally among their members and done in jest, but it’s fascinating
to me that these girls --who think they’re concerned with social justice—don’t
see that the rest of the class avoids them or doesn’t talk to them.
This self-reflection surprises me. Because several of the
boys in this 5th hour class tend to be trouble makers (who have made
it abundantly clear that they couldn’t care less about being in my English
class), I had expected these boys to be the bullies and to treat their peers
with more disrespect than the girls. Because this class has my highest
concentration of minorities, I had also expected to observe some oppression of
the minorities based on who was randomly selected as “ostracized” or not. The truth
of the matter was that race didn’t seem to matter in any of their responses
(which, of course, is good that these kids treat each other equally regardless
of their skin tone). If anything, one of the Militant Feminists is an ELL from
Mexico and she was one of the most entitled towns people, demonstrating brazen
disrespect in her body language and gestures. Whether her response is in keeping
with her peers or whether it is a learned response from how “the in crowd” has
treated her, it made me sad to see the joy she took with that label.
Overall, this is the second time I’ve done this exercise (in
my second year of teaching The Scarlet
Letter) and it never ceases to provide interesting observations. The
expected bullies treated everyone with shocking disrespect, and then were the
students in conversation at the end who were the most against bullying of any
kind. No matter your label, no matter whether you feel justified in your
disrespect of others, you should always be kind and respectful to other people.
Period. I find it sad that a group of kids who have had no end of lessons on
bullying and who intellectually understand the dangers of it are quick to
express and model those taboo behaviors when they’re “allowed” to. Other
students who wore the “towns person” label were not as inclined and still
respectful.
How I Spent My Time:
Because this project is intended to take 10-15 hours, I put
much of the time into research. I drafted a new Powerpoint Presentation (I had
two others about the author biography and about the themes in The Scarlet Letter) but I decided now
would be an excellent excuse/opportunity to read a few more books and update
that Powerpoint based on the framework of this lesson. The two books I read for
this were The Devil in Massachusetts
and Hawthorne: A Life. The biography
was a bit dry, whereas the “modern enquiry” (clearly someone’s doctoral
dissertation) ended up being an absolutely fascinating read involving the
psychology, superstition, misunderstandings, and freak occurrences thus
producing the convex that became the Trials. There is some argument to suggest
that many of their hallucinations weren’t only brought on by boredom, bullying,
and mob mentality, but also starvation: theirs was a very harsh winter fraught
with hunger from a failed corn crop, and culturally the women weren’t allowed
to leave their houses in the winters (except to go to church, of course, but
that was once a week). Of course they had a mental breakdown!
From there, much of the hours to account for this project
went into research. I have taken my classes to the library at YC many times for
Shelly to walk everyone through research, and –oh, darn!—I had an excuse to
fall down the rabbit hole of research myself! You’ll notice that several of my
sources listed are database sources because both JSTOR and Psychology Database
had a lot to say on the topics I was interested in. One source in particular –“
Youth Involvement in Anti-Gay and Anti-Lesbian Bias Crimes”—allowed me to think
about expanding my topic. After all, I had signed up to research bullying with
regard to race and gender, and certainly queer or gender-questioning culture
could fall under that umbrella. This is why I thought 5th hour would
be a better class to observe for this lesson than 4th hour, not only
because 5th hour is larger (I have 29 kids there instead of 23), but
because 5th hour represented a more diverse mix of students with
races, sexual identities, and gender preferences.
The lesson plan took an hour to complete, so delivering the
Powerpoint and going through the discussion questions took another hour. All of
the typing and synthesizing has been taking another hour or two, so I believe I
have been able to manage my 10-15 hour requirement (if not more, between all of
the reading and rabbit-hole-falling I did).
Overall, this was a fun lesson and provided me with a great
excuse to take a second look at a lesson plan that I already love.
Works Cited
(Please note: Blogger will not allow me to create hanging indentions as per MLA8)
(Please note: Blogger will not allow me to create hanging indentions as per MLA8)
Armstrong, J. W. (2014). REVERSAL OF MISFORTUNE. Nature,
516(7529), 138. Retrieved from
Gross, Bruce. "PRISON VIOLENCE: DOES BRUTALITY COME
WITH THE BADGE?" Forensic Examiner, vol. 17, no. 4, 2008, pp. 21-27,
Psychology Database,https://proxy.yc.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/207639160?accountid=8141.
Milder, Robert. “Hawthorne and the Problem of New England.” American
Literary History, vol. 21, no. 3, 2009, pp. 464–491.,
www.jstor.org/stable/20638603.
Starkey, Marion. The Devil Came to Massachusetts: A
Modern Enquiry Into the Salem Witch Trials. Anchor Books, 1969.
Stotzer, Rebecca L,M.S.W., PhD. "Youth Involvement in
Anti-Gay and Anti-Lesbian Bias Crimes." Violence and victims, vol.
30, no. 2, 2015, pp. 308-321, Psychology Database, https://proxy.yc.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1667040316?accountid=8141.
Wineapple, Brenda. Hawthorne: A Life. Random House,
2004.
