In Ms. White's English 2 class for the last quarter of her classes she does something different than most English teachers. Ms. White does a unit on the book Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Lord of the Flies is about a group of kids who are stranded on an island after their plane crashed in the ocean and the book explores the dark side of humanity, the savagery that underlies even the most civilized humans.
Ms. White started this unit because she had grown up watching the tv show “ Survivor” with her step dad, when Ms.White was teaching at Ontario and the unit for Lord of the Flies came up “ I saw an opportunity to do something interactive and fun as a unit.” When she went into education Ms. White wanted to be a creative, engaging, interactive teacher, she came up with the idea to divide the class up into tribes and have competitions for points. Everything that goes on in the unit is connected to what goes on in the book, the unit focus is each tribe is in charge of a motif that recurs throughout the book once the students are divided into tribe they choose one motif that is in the book “ they’re in charge of that motif they’re the experts on it” when students are reading the book in class or on their own they are supposed to be gathering evidence on the motif that their group has chosen.
The purpose of this unit is to know the difference between theme, motif, and symbols as the students work together as one group “ We lost how to work together with other people when covid hit.” This whole unit is meant for students to enjoy themselves for the last quarter of the year and learn more and more about themes, motifs, and symbols and how they are everywhere in english. The idea of survival came from the tv show that has been on air for 23 years now where a bunch of people are on an island and they are divided into tribes and do challenges to stay on the island and members have the option of kicking one person off of the island. In Ms.White class students do not get kicked out of the tribe they are in because they all work together to get extra points for their teams that go for the assignments they want to use those points on to pass that assignment.
