Assignment 2

Paul knocked it out of the park with this. The purpose of this graphic organizer is to visually demonstrate the idea of a character “foil”. By showing like an unlike traits, connecting them between the three characters, you spatially represent what sets them apart. It has the added benefit of clarifying and challenging our knowledge of how characters are constructed, and the need for specific vocabulary to accurately describe them; the difference between “intelligent” and “intellectual”, for example, I thought was an interesting case in understanding how subtle differences in meaning can make a very big difference. Hamlet and Fortinbras are both intelligent for example, but it would be inaccurate to describe Fortinbras as “intellectual”. Paul did an excellent job bearing this out, and the importance of teacher facilitation in this exercise. Obviously, this organizer should work with any text, but Hamlet was interesting in this case; I was surprised how well it worked, how much people were able to remember, despite everyone, including Paul, feeling very unfamiliar with Hamlet, not having read it in a decade or however long. I think the organizer helped with recall–although if I used this in a class I would probably expect a little more familiarity with the text from my students.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *