Help me give my Sci-Fi Elective slightly more structure

September 17, 2013 6:26 PM

As a sort of follow up to this question I posted last school year, I am now four weeks into the Sci-Fi elective and am worried about the lack of structure I have in my class. I'm looking for ideas/activities to do with my students in class. More details below the fold.

Here is some background info on the class:

It is a .25 credit hour elective for American High Schoolers, my class is 20 students 10-12th grade. We meet twice a week, Mondays and Wednesdays for 50 minutes. We are reading one common novel a quarter, this quarter (focusing on Science fiction), that novel is "Amped" by Daniel H. Wilson, and the students are reading a choice novel in addition to Amped and posting about the choice novel on the class discussion board. Next quarter we are reading "Wizard of Earthsea" by Ursula LeGuin (Fantasy) and the students will be reading a Fantasy choice novel.

My problem is that I don't know what to do with them on a day to day basis. So far, my class has consisted of watching a PBS Idea Channel video, talking about that for a few minutes, and then talking about Amped and other sci-fi/tech-related stuff for the rest of the bell. I am struggling with the balance between not assigning too much work (it's only .25 credits) and not doing ENOUGH. On Monday, I had the students start WRITING a Science Fiction story in partners, and they all agreed that it was pretty enjoyable, but not something they want to do every day. The class is pretty casual by nature, and I have since found out that all of my students are in there because they love reading and love science fiction and fantasy.

I was initially worried that I was asking them to read too much, but I have since found out that almost all of them have already finished their choice novels (meant to be read through the entire quarter) and many are ahead on their reading for the class novel. I don't really want this class to be a burden on them or on me (this class doesn't have to adhere to Common Core standards and doesn't count for English credit), but I also don't want them to lose interest.

Any suggestions or advice on cool/fun/interesting/thought provoking things I can do with this group of intelligent, enthusiastic High Schoolers would be greatly appreciated.

Oh, and tomorrow, I think I'm going to have them do a kind of tech-blog webquest to find something technologically interesting to do some brief research on and present to the class. It's not great, but it's all I've got at this point!

Oh, and here is a link to the class website (discussion board is private) If you have any ways to better utilize the class website, I'm all ears!

posted by ThaBombShelterSmith to Education (15 answers total)

Things I would have loved in high school:

- Ideas for cool stuff to read. Get the kids to write and/or present pitches for why people should read their favorite SF novel. Do it in a low-key, talk-about-what-you-love sort of way. You could open this concept by listening to an episode of the SF Squeecast, which is exactly this.

- Discussion of common tropes. Grab some relevant TV Tropes stuff and some examples from recent media and talk about genre conventions vs. cliches, innovative use of common ideas, that sort of thing.

- Non-book SF chat. Take a look at what SF movies came out this summer and what are coming up. Talk about SF vs. fairy tale vs. superhero and the different audiences and expectations for each. Talk about video games!

- The writer's life! I loved (and still love) learning about how one actually goes about writing and publishing a book. Lots of SF authors keep detailed blogs, Twitter feeds, etc, and you may be able to talk someone in to Skyping into your class to talk with the kids. (If you have someone local, even better!)

- Some cross-disciplinary stuff. Find some short stories that make use of different academic disciplines (whether biology, chemistry, astronomy, or, just as interesting, history or anthropology or literature) and talk about how the story pulls from a bunch of different skills and life experiences.

- A historical look at SF fandom would be fascinating. There are so, so many characters and interesting tidbits if you go looking through the history of SF, the various major and minor conventions, etc.

This could be a super-cool class. Memail me if you need more specifics with any of this stuff - I can probably make suggestions.
posted by restless_nomad at 6:39 PM on September 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

Quick readers! Bundle a bunch of classic short stories with some theme (Flowers for Algernon, Asimovs robot stories) and perhaps read a short in class and a discuss the theme.
posted by sammyo at 6:43 PM on September 17, 2013

Sci Fi in film vs books - maybe examine/discuss the different requirements of books and films, and why book translations to film (and vice versa) should / shouldn't be faithful and exact. (At that age, I just sort of uncritically assumed that a movie of a novel should be a visualization of the book, but that kind of direct translation usually doesn't work out very well. At the same time, make it too radically different and you could break the magic.) Similarly, to what extent should fans of the book be catered to by the movie if/when that conflicts with appealing to new people completely unfamiliar with the story. Ok, that's deviating from Sci Fi and into appeal, but it gets you thinking about what the appeal actually is :)

The heart (if not the definition) of science fiction is "What if...?". (Eg what if a proceedure was invented tomorrow that cost $1000 and meant you would stop aging?) Maybe have the class come up with a What If, and then come up with 20 radically different (and contradictory) possible "answers" - ie directions a story could run with from that premise?
posted by anonymisc at 6:44 PM on September 17, 2013

Assign pages, pepole talk about what they read. You have to talk about the book, and more than just themes.
posted by Ironmouth at 6:55 PM on September 17, 2013

Short stories, even flash fiction, that they can read in a single evening, and discussing them in class. (The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas jumps to mind, and you will get a spirited discussion going about whether to walk away or whether to stay.)

In a philosophy class, I used to put my students in groups and have them work out if they were on a colony ship for the next 100 years, how would they govern themselves? I had them try to work out the basic rules of that closed society. (I allowed them to make up all details -- how many people on the ship, what the ship's technology/scarcity was like.) Then each group would present their ship's basic rules and we'd discuss which ship we'd like to be on, and I'd help them think about what might and might not work, and why they were all secret fascists and/or communists. Then the at-home assignment I'd give would be, okay, now your ship has landed, what's the society's rules colonizing your new planet? You could easily tweak that to be a little more literary and less political philosophy-y. (Have them come up with the rules in groups in class and then write stories at home, and share their stories with their groups?) And (often) one of the major purposes of SFF is to explore these sorts of big philosophical questions by putting them into these SFF-set thought experiments.

Amped is a lot about the ethics of human modification, and there are a lot of directions to take that class discussion in terms of historical, current, cutting-edge, and futuristic human modification ... things like cochlear implants and the Deaf community controversies about them, or Oscar Pistorius (pre-alleged-murder) and the debates about whether he should be allowed to compete in the Olympics. You can lead discussions about them, or assign students to research particular issues and have them lead discussions, assigning reading as required.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:56 PM on September 17, 2013

You have a class full of sci-fi and fantasy nerds? Oh, how *awesome.* I would let them set the tempo. Ask them if they'd like to be assigned more books--and ask them for suggestions, too. I'd think of this class as Book Club for Nerds. Get them talking about the books, providing discussion-starter prompts and questions. I agree with restless_nomad about author visits, too.

I'd totally be willing to skype to a class taught by a mefite.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 6:58 PM on September 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

Have them each pick an author they love and write interview questions. Interview characters. Experiment with genres -- how is writing a spec fic poem different from a spec fic story?

Ask them to follow an online publication like Expanded Horizons or Strange Horizons.

Lol watch one episode of each version of star trek and describe the differences in narrative structure and presentation of science. Look at different genres- what makes something feminist sci fi vs space opera vs young adult?
posted by spunweb at 8:27 PM on September 17, 2013

Building on Book Club for Nerds, is it too late to ask people to present on their choice book? (Extra credit?) Maybe every Friday someone could present theirs? If the book schedule is announced in advance, then the bookworms could read along.
posted by slidell at 8:31 PM on September 17, 2013

I would tyrannize the little critters. Closed-lab force-fed Alfred-Bester experiment. You can do it.
posted by ovvl at 8:54 PM on September 17, 2013

Oh and excerpts from books on writing paired with short stories by the authors. Or blogs too. Like Brandon Sanderson has a lot on his blog on the writing of the Mistborn series, as well as excerpts. Chuck Wendig does too.

I find teen readers sometimes really dig getting into the structure of a novel or short story when that convo is in easily digestible chunks. For example, Marion Zimmer Bradley's magazine had articles on stuff like the use of thee and thine, and Science Fiction Age had some great book reviewers who could break down why something was genre changing or was actually horrible. Since they were magazines these weren't long. Those magazines no longer exist but I bet others have similar features.
posted by spunweb at 9:28 PM on September 17, 2013

For some super-short space opera which can be unpacked in a group discussion, there is the hilariously dense short story “Zirn Left Unguarded, The Jenghik Palace in Flames, Jon Westerley Dead” by Robert Sheckley. If one made a story almost entirely from SF tropes and cliches, well... this is it.
It can be heard on the podcast "A Bite of Stars, a Slug of Time, and Thou," in this episode.
posted by Sunburnt at 1:56 AM on September 18, 2013

When I took a similar high school course we had to make a game based on a sci fi story.
posted by SyraCarol at 3:24 AM on September 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

Can you talk about the history of Sci-fi? In your previous question you mention that you're familiar with the classic Sci-Fi cannon; can you talk about some of those authors and novels/series? Some of your students will have read some of these books/books from these authors and may be able to talk about what they thought of them. You can start further back with early/proto-Sci-Fi if you like and move forward through the decades.

I know that my early Sci-fi experience would have been very different if I had had a better grasp on what was out there.

And then of course next quarter you can talk about the history of fantasy, some classic novels, series and authors. You can't assign them an epic high fantasy series but you just might inspire some of them to read them on their own (eventually).
posted by mountmccabe at 5:12 AM on September 18, 2013

I actually teach some community ed science fiction classes. They're relatively specialized and for adults, but here are some things I do:

1. Discussion questions: "What makes a book science fiction? Is it more than just technology and robots?" I cribbed this from a Samuel Delany essay: give them the first sentence of Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and ask them to read it twice - once, they are assuming that it is Serious Literary Fiction and once they are assuming that it's the start of an SF novel. How are these readings different? (You probably want to use some prompt questions like "why is Gregor a bug if it is Serious Fiction? If it is SF?") This exercise gets at the idea that reader assumptions and language are key components of written SF. Do these in small groups.

2. Close readings. Pick a passage from another SF novel that does some "worldbuilding" work - like Heinlein's famous sentence "the door dilated". Any paragraph which requires the reader to infer something about the world will do. Ask the students to read these and guess as much as they can about the world in question.

3. Cover comparisons. Get color copies of cover images of many editions of a book. (I'm sure there are about a zillion covers for Earthsea books.) Ask the students to imagine the audience for each edition. Why is that cover chosen? Ask them to spot inconsistencies - do they think the cover represents the books well?

4. Teach the controversy! (Er...) You know that there was a movie made of A Wizard of Earthsea that was repudiated by Le Guin because it whitewashed all the people of the Archipelago, right? Here is more. You'd want to spin this differently depending on your class - like, is this a class where people are already familiar with basic ideas about racism? Is this a class with lots of students of color? Is this a class where there are mostly white students and a bad discussion will make the few students of color feel horrible? I think this is an important question about how science fiction works, but it's one that has to be approached with care in order not to let clueless white students fulminate in a racist way. I'd probably lead in by discussing with students what they notice about race in Earthsea and why they think LeGuin wrote it that way. Emphasize that Le Guin felt it was important to write this and ask them why she might have felt this way. Don't ask them any questions like "should race be important in SF", because that can cause discussions that can really fuck with students of color. Treat the question as already-important and ask students to flesh out why.

5. Le Guin wrote a bunch of essays about SF and fantasy. "From Elfland to Poughkipsie" is pretty accessible and short. Why not have them read some of her writing?

6. Why not do a "SF history fact" every class session? You can draw them from books like The Secret Feminist Cabal, which is a history of women in SF and fandom.

7. Why not read them interesting snippets from people's essays and memoirs? Judith Merrill's memoir is quite good, for instance.

8. Samuel Delany wrote an essay called "Racism In Science Fiction" which is available online. It's longish for some HS students, but could easily be used in part.

9. Book introductions! Bring in SF books for "show and tell". Have students do it if they want. Balance "classics" with books like Dark Matter, which is a collection of SF stories by black American writers.

10. Your class is the perfect age to read high-trauma Octavia Butler novel "The Parable of the Talents". They would totally get into it, and Butler wrote a bunch of essays about her youth and her writing.

Would you like a list of youth-friendly SF novels? You could give one to your students. In class, my students have often requested reading lists. I have a sort of list that I could edit a bit and send you - memail me.

Also, I'd be glad to discuss this more!
posted by Frowner at 9:29 AM on September 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

It's way easy for kids to get way behind in reading a novel. Assign a reading journal, and check it weekly. Assign some classic sf tv. Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, etc. Maybe some movies. They should journal about it, but Firefly could lead to an essay on ethics (smuggling) or politics - (better to have a single, giant government) and I haven't seen the newer BG, but read reviews - you'll come up with questions. Use the Sims, or another game, to teach World-Building. Maybe play Settlers of Cataan. Have them create a world, a technology, or some other component of science fiction, illustrate it (model, 2D art, video, go nuts), and do a 3 minute presentation of their component. How does it compare to the assigned novel? etc. Assign enough work and verify enough reading for them to earn the .25 credit. And give them an introduction to the history of science fiction, some common themes, popular authors they should read more of (Harlan Ellison stories), genres within SF. You could assign an author to each student, and have them do a short bio, read at least 1 story, and present it.

I am so envious of kids today having the web and wikipedia.
posted by theora55 at 6:12 PM on September 18, 2013