The Town

It is truly wonderful to work with colleagues who inspire me to do better and create new things. At a recent department meeting, my fellow teacher (and multi-award winner) Anthony shared a lesson he had created during my time away teaching high school highlighting life in Christendom during the Black Death. I loved the idea and ran with it. I wanted to make it an introduction to the time period, since I don't have any lesson that does that well, so I made some adjustments. By bouncing ideas off another colleague, we came up with the idea that students would discover a devastated town and have to try to determine what happened there. While this took it in a very different direction than Anthony's, it would not exist without his initial spark from his willingness to share his lesson. 

While working on making the thing, a 4th colleague offered another idea, reminding me that PowerPoint could do very cool things with 3D models now. I was under a time crunch. It was Friday afternoon and I needed the lesson done by Monday. I couldn't shake that thought though, so I spent the half-hour or so trying to find a 3d model of a cow skull (one of  the exhibits I had already decided on.) I did and it came out great. I literally had a student say, "whoa!" when it popped up on the screen and started slowly rotating. 

The rest of the lesson came together quickly. The overall narrative is fairly weak, but that wasn't an issue. The exhibits are visually engaging and the overall topic natural draws interest. (Who doesn't love a good mystery?!) After having run through it and noted some adjustments to make, I'll likely further flesh out the narrative next year.

Well, enough tease: Here's the files!

DFTT: The Town Presentation File (PowerPoint)

DFTT: The Town Teacher Script

Intro Video (Optional)

Closing Video (Optional)

I "worked" many, many hours over that weekend to get the lesson done. Of course, it's only work in the strictest sense of I was creating a lesson to be used at work. Creating, especially creating a video, doesn't feel like work to me. I enjoy it. This one came together very easily. After my first idea, using the credits from the movie The Town fell through (apparently, it has no credits!), I went back to a movie I used as the intro for another lesson, 2010's The Black Death. It is the intro to my Black Death History Mystery and I very vaguely remembered a scene where they men made it to a desolate village. Sure enough, it was there. That, along with some "hey, we're leaving now" clips helped set the scene. The intro is spooky and definitely draws student interest. Here it is:

I also put together a closing video using clips from the same movie. It isn't as effective, but it does at least sort of reveal that disease was the problem. The lesson was ready to go. Until...

Literally Sunday night I remember that Helpful Colleague #2 had shared his PowerPoint notes on the Black Death with me. I'd scanned through them and realized he had way more videos than I did. I reviewed those videos and found one that literally hit on every exhibit in the lesson (except the cow skull) and closed with a title card reading "THE PLAGUE." Now that is a reveal! (That video is not shared here. I didn't do any work on it, so I don't feel comfortable sharing it. It is the from the first few minutes of a History Channel doc entitled The Plague. You can get it here if you scroll down the page to episode 17.)

The lesson was great. It ran long, as my new creations typically do, so I cut one of the exhibits on the fly. Overall though, the lesson required very little in the way of adjustment.

If you're looking for a lesson on writing with evidence, the causes of the Black Death or just something a little spooky to do for Halloween, check out The Town!