Sometimes, I wish I was a kindergarten teacher, because then I could do cool activities on the day before Thanksgiving break like make hand turkeys with my students. Alas, I teach high school; there's no way to justify doing hand turkeys with teenagers. Still, my greatest joy in teaching (well, second to actual educating, I suppose) is getting away with the most ridiculous things in my classroom. There's something sadistically fun about occasionally assigning my students absurd, fairly meaningless tasks and watch them go at it. So, I figure to hell with their ages, let's bring on the hand turkeys!
I decide to give the assignment to my honors students, because if you're going to do something for the simple minded, it's all the more fun to have the smart kids do it and watch them make it far more complicated than necessary.
Also, because I need to disguise the assignment in some sort of academic context, I decide to have it correspond with our unit on the Odyssey. Though we haven't actually started reading it yet, we did frontload (that's teacher talk for providing preview information so that students can better succeed later on) mythical characters. With this in mind, I decided that instead of hand turkeys, we'd make Hand Beasts: mythical creatures that correspond to the shape of traced hands.
The assignment was to color a Hand Beast, name it, then write a story in epic poetry style wherein the Hand Beast has an encounter with a "real" mythical character. Most importantly, I insisted that they do all drawing and coloring with their non-dominant hand in order to better achieve a kindergarten aesthetic. Naturally, I didn't explain that I was intentionally trying to make them look bad each time the students groaned, "Why?" Instead, I insisted we were doing it because "the Pilgrims suffered, too."
The results were largely amazing. Many of them took it so seriously, that I repeatedly caught them sketching with their dominant hands (cheating!) because they wanted to do well. About half of them were turkey-themed Hand Beasts, which is fine by me, considering that was my initial objective anyway. Below are some samples:
This one is called Wierdo (sic) Turkey Mouth.
One of my favorites is definitely Ignacio the Talking Utter. According to lore, Odysseus went to milk a cow, only to encounter Ignacio the Talking Utter, who impolitely told Odysseus not to milk him, suggesting instead that he "go to the darn grocery store." Consequently, the pair got in a slapping fight. As was frequently the case in BC times, Odysseus's stomach was covered in super glue, so that when Ignacio popped him in the gut, he became stuck. In an awkward predicament, the pair called a truce. Soon, Odysseus became the primary source of milk in his village.
Corinnuh looks wise and haggard.
This student couldn't trace eir own hand for eir life! I came and asked whether eir fingers were that fat... let me tell you, if looks could kill! This five-headed Hand Beast received no name, but is responsible for the changes in season.
Another favorite is Enrique. Enrique was thrown a great surprise birthday party, which, incidentally, is the real reason Thanksgiving was invented. "After the party, Enrique was furious because the [party] was over and he wasn't done dancing. He went on a rampage around the world and killed trillions of people. It was the worst attack of any kind in the history of the world. Then Zeus informed his best friend that there would be another party next week for someone else. They looked around and noticed all the dead bodies and everything was destroyed. They shared a good laugh and lived happily ever after."
Ice$ Man$ has an afro! He was the "freshest" of the mythical creatures and was known to have been "droped out of a monney cloud." Furthermore, "his mouth is always lookin like a disco ball."
Meet Hand Beast Karflogazar. One of the best parts about this activity is that I kept repeating the phrase "Hand Beast" as if it were an actual thing. By the end of the period, students were not asking to see each others' drawings, but, "Can I see your Hand Beast?" With straight faces, even! I love passing off nonsense phrases like legitimate vocabulary!
"Turkon is a regular turkey that fell in a toxic waste pit and he transformed into a turkey-dragon thing. Hence the name Turkon!" He destroyed Zeus with his toxic farts.
Volcalem is the pleasant result of two hands being traced.
Immediately, I knew there was something simple and special about Bostwick, but I didn't realize how accurate those two words would be. He is Odysseus's "special little brother." (When I asked what exactly that meant, I was told he was "born differently.") Bostwick died at the age of two, then Circes brought him back to life. Afterwards, Bostwick forms an army of dead sailors, with which he took over the universe by the age of two-and-a-half. "Then he travels into the future and conquers that too, then he went to the past and conquered all of the past. By age 3 1/2, Bostwick was ruler of all space, time, and reality."
Originally named KeVeEzY, he soon became fOb KeVeEzY, a turkey immigrant from South Korea and best friend to Apollo.
Finally, the best named creature has to be Goblrarr. Go ahead, try to pronounce it, it's fun. Not only is Goblrarr fun to say, but it has the awesome five-year-old's art quality I hoped for. Also, according to the story, Goblrarr "is the rarest type of mythical creature ever." Now that's cute!
Most of the students wanted more time to work on them, but hell if I was letting them walk out with these. I wanted them for my fridge. At the end of the period, one student asked whether "myths really happened?" which indicates to me that I better do some legitimate educating soon as well.
1 comment:
SOUTH KOREA!!!
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