Beyond School

Still thinking about educational computer gaming….and this idea is forming. It’s not about making a video game, but about how to use wikis to create a “creative writing game” unit. Like so:

My students in 9 English are reading The Arabian Nights–100 pages from it, anyway–over winter break right now. When they come back, I want the summative assessment to be a creative writing/storytelling project connected to Scheherezade and company.

The selection they’re reading, “The Hunchback’s Tale,” is a typically dizzying example of the narrative frame-within-a-frame wizardry of the Nights. But it has an element of “gaming” in it that I want to transfer to the final project. Let me explain.

In “The Hunchback’s Tale,” a hunchback is invited home by a drunken Muslim tailor and his wife for entertainment. Once home, the wife accidentally kills the hunchback by choking him while shoving too much food into his mouth for fun. The couple panic and decide to get rid of the body by leaving it at a Jewish doctor’s house and running away. They prop the hunchback’s body at the top of the staircase in the Jewish doctor’s house, and the Jewish doctor accidentally knocks the body down the stairs–and panics because he thinks that he killed the hunchback. So the Jewish doctor lowers the hunchback’s body over a wall into the yard of his neighbor, a Muslim steward and chef for the sultan. When the steward sees the hunchback against the wall, he mistakes him for a food-thief and gives him a solid hammer-blow to the chest–and then panics when he discovers that he “killed” the hunchback. So the Steward, under cover of night, takes the body to the nearest bazaar and props it against the wall. There, a drunk Christian broker mistakes the hunchback for a thief who’d stolen his scarf earlier in the night, and starts throttling him. A Muslim policeman breaks up the “fight,” discovers the hunchback is dead, and arrests the broker.

The broker is about to be hung for murder when the steward happens by and confesses: “Hang me instead,” he says. But the Jewish doctor happens by and says, “No, hang me.” Then the steward shows up and confesses, and says, “Hang me.” (What a harmonious multicultural world!)

At this point, we learn that the hunchback was the favorite jester of the “King of China,” who happens to be in town. The King arrives, is amazed by the story, and says he will pardon all the “murderers” if they can tell a story more wonderful than that of his hunchback’s being “murdered” four times in one night!

So–and here’s the gaming part–the four “murderers” take turns telling stories that they claim are more wondrous than the hunchback’s. They are telling stories like their survival depends on it (just like Scheherezade, who is, of course, telling all of these stories in the “master frame”).

If their stories please the King of China, they survive. If not, they die….

Does this sound like any television game shows you can think of? Survivor, for instance? Or American Idol? (Or, for the long of tooth, The Gong Show?)

The King of China is the audience/jury. The contestants live or die by the merits of their performance.

One final detail that’s beautiful for teaching/learning the elements of a good short story: The King listens to the four storytellers, and rejects each one of their stories as being “less wondrous” than the hunchback’s! Why do the stories fail? The King doesn’t explain, but his literary judgment/critical thinking is solid–these stories are unsatisfying.

So let the students give presentations of their criticisms of the failed stories! Out of this can come a class-created rubric of what makes a “winning” short story. “What was missing from the stories that made the King dislike them?”

So here’s the unit idea, and the reason a wiki is a better writing tool for it than any traditional classroom method I know of:

1. Whole Class:

• Create that class short story rubric based on evaluation of the failed tales in Arabian Nights. (Give a Six Traits organizer to students so they categorize their findings under these headings–incidental learning of the common critical language we’ll use for writing in the second semester will come from this.)
  

2. Teacher/Students:

• Assign a partner for each student.

3. Pairs:

• Have each student tell their partner the story of the most amazing thing that ever happened to them (if they don’t have one, they interview a parent for the parent’s “most amazing story”).

4. Individual:

• Each partner summarizes the story as the “pre-write/first draft” on their own wiki page (wikis save every version and revision of a document as separate documents in the “history” tab of that document).

5a. Individual:

• Students then revise their summary with successive edits using the Six Traits of Effective Writing.
  
• Revision 1: Ideas, content, images, details;
  
• Revision 2: Organization (good intro, different chronological order, etc);
  
• Revision 3: Voice;
  
• Revision 4: Word choice;
  
• Revision 5: Sentence Fluency;
  
• Revision 6: Conventions and Mechanics (especially dialog conventions);
  
• Revision 6: Presentation (add images, formatting and font style).

5b. Pairs (Peer editing on wiki):

• As individuals write their partners’ stories, the partner will serve as peer editor. (The idea is that the partner will have an emotional investment in the success of his/her story, which will motivate engaged feedback to the person that’s writing it.) That feedback will take place in the “discussion” tab of that story’s wiki page.

6. Groups?:

• Assign groups of four to collaboratively create a narrative frame device similar to Scheherezade or the King of China on a new wiki page.
• Each group of four copies and pastes the stories written by four other students into their frame device–and collaboratively writes the critical reaction of their “frame audience” to each of these stories as part of the frame story, deciding whether each storyteller “survives” by pleasing his/her audience with his/her story.
• Each “survivor” is finished, but any story that does NOT survive is allowed a final revision (open to all?)–one last chance to please his/her audience and survive after all.

7. Groups: Publish Group Wiki:

• Each group publishes its own 4-story-with-frame-narrative wiki.

8. Whole Class: Publish Class Wiki:

• Combine all group wikis (from BOTH classes) into a single wiki page and give it a title (The Korean Nights?).

9. Individual:

• Orally perform your own story and record it as a podcast, using Audacity, and embed it on the wiki.

That’s the idea….so far. Comments, Jonathan? Prof. Groom? Anybody?

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

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