The Middle Ages Part 2
“No attack on Christianity is more dangerous,” Jerome Wolf wrote Tycho Brahe in 1575, “than the infinite size and depth of the universe.” - quoted in A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester
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Before we head out to the Renaissance - one more foray into the Middle Ages (after complete Chaucer - a writer who should prove to your students the undarkness of the Middle Ages).
This lesson can be done either as a Group Work or as a discussion. They both allude to and follow naturally other work that's been done (specifically "Federigo's Falcon" - ideas of honor and Courtly Love. - if there were time and world enough, perhaps you could do both. The Group Work is straightforward - as I hope all of my Group Works are. The Power Point discussion is actually part of a larger discussion that was created for combining "Federigo's Falcon" with this story - both as homework and discussion. I've included the untruncated version of the Power Point (with the "Federigo's Falcon" part) as well.
Come Halloween, in my classroom, we tell Ghost Stories. Every student gets a chance to share a story - and I share 2 or 3. This usually happens as we are finishing up the Middle Ages - but more importantly it hearkens back to the Oral Story of Beowulf. The first step for this lesson is to make sure that the students all bring in a Ghost Story (if you look at some of the handouts that directly precede this lesson you will see a mention of that part of the assignment). Here are some of the parameters: It has to be oral - from memory - no reading from anything. The preferred story - is an old one that has been passed down - I tell them to ask their parents, ask their grandparents (this often leads to wonderful discoveries). They need to keep it under 5 minutes.
For all but wo years this was done as a Group Work - and I think that assignment is highly evolved. For one year we did it as a Row Reading Discussion, having the students do their reading and prep for the discussion in class. For another year - I used a Power Point presentation to help focus a Teacher Led discussion on the reading.
After reading about Women Writers in the Middle Ages (and Virginia's Woolf's "Shakespeare's Sister" (where the phrase "a room of one's own" comes from) - the students are given a very practical lesson in why there were so few women writers during the Middle Ages. The class is randomly divided into "Lords" & "Ladies". The students who are "Lords" (randomly chosen) have to take care of a paper baby - while using their wrong hand, cannot join groups - and then they must act on their own initiative, while taking care of their babies - go to the table at the front, sharpen their broken off pencils and still get the Group Work done.
So after the daily content - did you read quizzes - now is the chance to find out if the students were paying attention and processing everything that happened as the result of their reading (the discussions, assignments, Group Work, etc.). This multiple choice exam will cover the Middle Ages Part 1, Chaucer, and the Middle Ages Part 2.
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