Lesson Overview 

This lesson is actually a bookend for a lesson that I will put at the front of this unit - I edited a version of the movie "Becket" starring Richard Burton so that it could be watched in one class period.  The students watched it - after doing their reading on Becket in the intro to The Middle Ages, and the intro to The Canterbury Tales (also in their textbook).

 In this Student Project - all of my British Literature Classes were involved.  The idea was that an Amtrak train was heading to Memphis - with "pilgrims" to see Elvis's Graceland Estate.  The idea came from Paul Simon's song.  Students posted about their characters on a blog that I had set up online - so that the other students could see that post - and then they were able to incorporate other characters than their own into what they wrote for the project.  They were required to write three parts:  1) a small intro for the "General Prologue".  2) a "Prologue" to their tale  and 3) their "Tale".  Then three editors (one from each class period) put it all together - complete with pictures the students drew - and photos that the students took of themselves as their characters.

We begin the project with an introductory class - complete with music (think REM's "Pilgrimage" and Arlo Guthrie's "City of New Orleans" [the train that goes from Chicago to Memphis - the one that the "pilgrims" will be on] and of course, Paul Simon's "Graceland").  This is one of the very few creative writing exercises that we would do all year.  I abandoned the assignment because it is such a HUGE project to do - especially if you have more than one class - but the ironic part is that computers, software, and the internet would have made the project much easier very soon after I stopped doing it.

Here are the opening instructions from a 2011 Handout (we tried to revive the project that year - the students asked me to - but we abandoned it pretty quickly :(  ).
For this assignment you will write three short stories that are part of a larger frame story: a short piece of a General  Prologue (the entire class will add all their pieces together), your character’s prologue, and your character’s tale.  Unlike the travelers in The Canterbury Tales, your pilgrims are going to Graceland to pay homage at Elvis’s tomb.  Remember, just as all the pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales were not pious with pure motives to visit the tomb of Saint Thomas à Beckett, your pilgrim can have her own motives for going on the trip as well.  In other words, they don’t have to a big Elvis fan.

Use The Canterbury Tales as a model, but be sure to throw in your own original touches.  You only have to worry about rhyme and meter for the the first and second parts of your assignment – the segment of the general prologue that will describe your character – there you will  use the same rhyme scheme and number of syllables per line as what is found in The Canterbury Tales.  This way all of the pieces of our prologue will fit together.

See the handout below for the complete instructions.

Thoughts on the Lesson 

A colleague of mine used this lesson the year after I first came up with it.  He came to me afterwards and told me that he changed the place from Elvis's Graceland to the Grammy Awards in L.A.  When I asked him why the change - he told me it was because his students didn't care about Elvis - and he didn't think Graceland was relevant to his class.  I'm sorry, but he missed the point - most of the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales aren't pious pilgrims going to pay homage to Thomas a Becket.  It was the thing to do - and the place to meet people.