Notes from West Egg

Okay, so which of these assignments would you pick if you could choose:

1. Write a 1,500-word essay explaining the theme in Animal Farm, using literary elements such as character motives, symbolism and imagery.
2. Give a 5-minute presentation that relates the theme in Animal Farm to some aspect of society today, making sure to draw clear connections to the events in the novel with the actions of a current government.
3. Take one chapter of Animal Farm and rewrite it by changing the plot to include one modern tool that was not available to the characters but that might have changed the course of their fate if it had been. That tool is the Internet.

I would actually assign all three of these, time permitting. The first one would be an in-class assignment that followed several lessons on theme, literary elements and a thorough brainstorming of those aspects of the novel. The second would be researched at home and presented in class, possibly by pairs of students. The third would be a group assignment, completed outside of class on the class wiki. Here’s how it might look:

The teacher divides students into groups, with each group is assigned a chapter from the novel. Each chapter is downloaded by the teacher from Project Gutenberg Australia, a site with free e-books, and placed individually on the class wiki. Student groups brainstorm during class the ways that having access to the Internet would have empowered the lower classes of animals on the farm. Specifically, in this chapter, what might the animals have been able to do to become less confused, to remember the past better, to gain a broader perspective, to check the facts, to compare prices of goods, etc…? How would this information have negated the growing power balance between the pigs and the lower animals? How would it have weakened the effects of the pigs’ propaganda? How might the animals have used the Internet to leverage information and prevent their original revolution from reverting back to the status quo? 

At home, the students would begin to change the plot of their chapter by going online and accessing the wiki. They could do this alone or in groups or by talking in real time over Meebo instant chat. The wiki would record each layer of changes to the story, showing who has contributed what and in what order. Over the course of a week, each student in the group would be required to edit the chapter a certain number of times at a minimum, say five edits. Some students would do more, and that’s fine, but the goal would be to achieve consensus about the finished chapter. The end product would be a collaborative work that maintained the tone and spirit of Orwell’s masterpiece but played with an alternate ending… all while indirectly analyzing and synthesizing highly relevant, modern issues (information as power, technology as the means of achieving justice, how information protects individual freedoms).

Once the chapters were completed, the teacher could have students do a number of things with the new products. If there were multiple classes, groups could read and discuss other chapters that parallel theirs (i.e if your group rewrote Chapter 3, what do other periods’ Chapter 3’s look like?). The teacher could set up online surveys and have students vote which chapters Orwell himself might have written (i.e. which best embody the author’s tone and the novel’s theme). The teacher could have students act out a dramatic scene from the new chapters. 

This assignment (which I thought up this morning while doing the dishes) seems pretty Google-proof to me. In other words, they can’t find the answers on the Internet (at least not yet!) and they can’t just copy and paste their way to a product. They have to really think before they write. The work would be original, collaborative and analytical (… if this happened… then what…). They would have to understand the characters’ motivations, as well as the “rules” of the fictional universe that Orwell placed them in, and, ideally, they would create new metaphors to replace the old. For example, if the pig Squealer is the metaphorical equivalent of a propaganda minister, then which character would become the blogger? Which the Googler? Which would hack his way through Napolean’s firewall? How would these roles change the characters personalities? Which characters, because they can’t read, would still be at the mercy of the totalitarian regime?

(CC Photo Credit: “Watering Hole” by TravelJunkieoz)