For those of you who have been reading my blog, you may know that a while ago I talked about creating a One Sentence Project with my English class during my practicum focusing on the following quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
This is from my blog entry “Out out Brief sentence” (https://blogs.ubc.ca/jnishi/2017/01/26/out-out-brief-sentence-the-one-sentence-project/)
“So basically the point of the One Sentence Project, created by Dan Pink, is to get you to distill your life (what you believe in, why you’re here) into one, single sentence. As my lesson plan (check it out below) shows I first show the students a video about the one sentence project, then we read the scene, then I ask students to write a one sentence project for Macbeth in groups. Students then reflect on their own lives, their own beliefs, regrets etc… and then create their own sentence. I am hoping that this makes the students connect what Shakespeare is trying to say in this monologue to the students’ own lives and, by reflecting on their own lives, see that, even though this play was written HUNDREDS of years ago by a hipster who was a hipster before it was at all cool, the words and themes he wrote about are still alive and relevant to their own lives today in 2017. ”
The lesson went over really well. The students analysed the passage and reflected on the entire play that we’d read so far and came up with some really great sentences for Macbeth such as:
He flew too high.
He had it all and did nothing with it.
He had the potential to be a great king.
He had it all and ended up alone.
I think I should have scaffolded the self-reflection time a little bit better because I don’t know if they went as deep as I wanted them too but I know it wasn’t as deep as they could’ve gone. But, for the most part, I believe they took the assignment seriously sharing their dreams and ambitions with me just as I shared mine with them. My own one-sentence was this:
She worked hard and was kind.
All in all this lesson went over well, the students were engaged, they participated, and they saw the connections between the theme of this really old text and their own 2017 lives.
The following powerpoints (because I know how to make those now!) are the results of that project. I didn’t end up taking photos of the students because I was unclear about the policy/rules of it and my students, in all their ever-changing teenage glory, were not fans of being photographed. So instead, I’ve typed up their sentences and put them on powerpoints for y’all to see.
-J
