Making Frankenstein Speak: Engaging Students in

the Classics

Boris Karloff, "Frankenstein"

A Presentation by Sierra Penrod

Presenting on findings from Performance at the Center

Penrod, Sierra

Teachers CollegeColumbia University

Name:____________________________Period:_______

Character Tracer Chart You have been selected to trace the character __________________________________.

Instructions: As you read, look for quotes from the text that help create your assigned character’s personality. Remember, these traits don’t always have to be “direct” characterization that explicitly describe your character. They might be indirect (speech, thoughts, actions, facial expressions, and effect on other characters). Record the quote and explain what it tells you about your character on the right.

Quote and Page Number

Type of Characterization (Direct, Indirect? Speech, action,

thought, etc.)

Inferences about character we can draw based on the quote

Penrod, Sierra

Penrod, Sierra

Frankenstein In-Class Interviews “Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his big giant

monster feet.”

Instructions:

You have been tracing your assigned character’s development throughout our reading of Frankenstein in your (blue) Character Tracer. Now prepare to discover who your character really is.

Step 1: Find your peers who have been assigned the same character as you. Spend several minutes discussing the information you’ve collected on your Character Tracer. What details have they noticed about the monster, or

Elizabeth, or Dr. Frankenstein or Robert Walton? Do your peers like or dislike the character? Why? Is your character admirable or not?

Step 2: Brainstorm a list of interview questions that can help you explore this character further. (Tip: Don’t ask boring questions; ask questions you desperately want to know the answers to! Ask questions that you might not find explicit evidence for in the text.)

Example: “What have you got in your pockets, and why do you hang onto it?”

Or: “What did your mother smell like?”

Step 3: Break off into different groups of three. You should have three different characters represented in your new group.

You will each take 7 minutes to “interview” one another. You will take turns being the interviewer, the interviewee (character), or recorder. Exchange question lists with your partners and give them to the interviewer.

Penrod, Sierra

Interviewer will ask questions, while the character responds instinctively (don’t think too much about your responses. You already know this character well! Just imagine the responses in the voice and personality of the character).

When acting as the recorder, take notes from the interviewer. What insights did the interviewer uncover about the character?

Step 4: Once everyone has had a chance to be interviewed, independently, write an interior monologue on the back of this paper based on your responses to the questions that you gave.

Potential Questions for the Character Interview (Proust Questionnaire)

http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/07/10/david-bowie-proust-questionnaire-vanity-fair/

1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?

2. What is your most marked characteristic?

3. What do you consider your greatest achievement?

4. What is your greatest fear?

5. What historical figure do you most identify with?

6. Which living person do you most admire?

7. Who are your heroes in real life?

8. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

9. What is the trait you most deplore in others?

10. What is your favorite journey?

11. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

12. Which word or phrases do you most overuse?

13. What is your greatest regret?14. What is your current state of mind?

15. If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be?

16. What is your most treasured possession?

17. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

18. Where would you like to live?

Penrod, Sierra

19. What is your favorite occupation?

20. What is the quality you most like in a man?

21. What is the quality you most like in a woman?

22. What are your favorite names?

23. What is your motto?

Interior Monologue Formative Assessment

Throughout our study of Frankenstein, you have been evaluating how authors create characters to reveal theme. You have traced your character’s progression throughout the book, and you have had a chance to delve into your character’s thoughts and motivations through your recent character interview.

Part 1: Write an Interior MonologueDue:Select a “Hot Spot” for your chosen character. Think about the facets of his/her personality that help reveal theme. For instance, you may choose to develop the theme of isolation that the creation of Frankenstein experiences when he is peering in at the DeLacey family.

Write a one-two minute monologue (about 2/3 of a page) from the perspective of this character that shows how this character contributes to a theme of the novel.

Your monologue must include: A brief sentence of context, so your audience

understands where in the novel your monologue is situated

One line from the book that the character actually says that launches you into your monologue

A connection to a pivotal theme of the novel One metaphor Carefully selected diction that reveals the tone of your piece.

Part 2: Perform Your Monologue Penrod, Sierra

On ____________________________, you will perform your monologue for parents, teachers, and peers. Your monologue must be memorized and rehearsed. In addition to performing your monologue, you will also need to use technical elements to construct your story. What music will score your monologue and how does it set the tone for your piece? What scenery will you include in your piece? What costume will you wear? Think about how these “technical” choices influence your piece.

You must be prepared to rehearse in class on: ______________________ &_______________________.

Part 3: Analyze your monologueDue:In two meticulously crafted paragraphs, explain the analytical choices you made while you constructed and performed this monologue.

Your first paragraph should explain (with evidence from the text) what choices you made in your own writing. What diction did you use, and how did it help convey your tone? What theme emerged as a result of your monologue, and how did you develop it? How does your monologue’s writing develop our understanding of the source text, Frankenstein?

Your second paragraph should explain how your scenic elements contributed to your theme. For instance, if you dressed your character in black, but had happy music underscore your monologue, explain how this paradox enhanced your theme? If you stood outside Hansel and Gretel’s candy cabin instead of a typical log cabin of the Delacey’s, what might that symbolically represent?

TEACHERS RESOURCESHow does this interior monologue assignment help me achieve the aims of

the Common Core?

Reading Literature Grades 11-12:1. Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn

from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain.

Rationale: Students will have to look to explore the text deeply to understand a character fully and completely. They will be actively engaged in the process of making inferences as they explore facets of characters that are not explicitly written into the text.

2. Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text.

Rationale: Students must demonstrate their understanding of theme in their monologue. They must develop it implicitly in their monologue by making active literary choices, but they must also explicitly develop theme in their analysis of their monologue. When students see their peers’ monologues, they will see how themes develop throughout the text.

3. Analyze the impact of the author’s choices regarding how to develop and relate elements of a story or drama (e.g., where a story is set, how the action is ordered, how the characters are introduced and developed).

Penrod, Sierra

Rationale: Students become more aware of author’s choices when they see how choices affect the outcome of their own performance.

Writing Narrative Grades 11-12

b. Use narrative techniques, such as dialogue, pacing, description, and reflection, to develop experiences, events, and/or characters.

Rationale: While students are not using dialogue exactly, they are using narrative techniques like pacing, reflection, and details to demonstrate characterization.

d. Use precise words and phrases, relevant descriptive details, and sensory language to capture the action and convey experiences and events.

Rationale: Students are asked to analyze how specific diction creates tone in a passage.

Speaking and Listening Grades 11-12

4. Present information, findings, and supporting evidence, conveying a clear and distinct perspective, such that listeners can follow the line of reasoning, alternative or opposing perspectives are addressed, and the organization, development, substance, and style are appropriate to purpose, audience, and a range of formal and informal tasks.

Rationale: While this sounds fairly argumentative in nature, narrative often makes implicit arguments. Monologue is spoken, and must be logical, organized, substantial, and well-developed. As students have an authentic audience, they must analyze how to logically convey their character to an audience that may or may not be familiar to a text.

5. Make strategic use of digital media (e.g., textual, graphical, audio, visual, and interactive elements) in presentations to enhance understanding of findings, reasoning, and evidence and to add interest.Rationale: Students are using strategic media (songs, powerpoint, images) to enhance the performance, and then are asked to analyze precisely how their media effects their performance.

Penrod, Sierra

Mining the Journals for Resources (Courtesy of Teachers College)

Take a moment to refamiliarize yourself with your journalo what were the high points?o what were the low points?o what were you thinking?o where were you physically? o where were you in the book?

Get into pairs (find someone who you didn’t work with) and give a tour of your Frankenstein Journals to your partner

o High points and low points Pairs decide together on a piece that might be a seed with potential for the show from each person will

share with the group Pairs of partners join up into groups Each person shares with the group their chosen journal entry

o explain what it is o explain why it was chosen o Choose one piece that you would like to see in our performance

it may be a single person’s piece, or it may be multiple people who have responded to the same prompt, written the same genre

o Brainstorm different ways that this piece might be performed Get together into a whole group

o Are there any entries (yours or your group members’) that we should hear?o What are some of these ideas that you might want to see in our show?o What are some modalities that we could use to express these ideas (look to our toolbox)?o Share as long as needed

Charting Hot Spots

During your invitations to write in your Frankenstein Journals, you were often directed to specific passages from the novel. Which passages proved most creatively ripe for you?

o Two player/scribes record the favorite hotspots for the class on a single piece of poster paper Now can we chart some hotspots that weren’t addressed in the invitations to create, places within the text

that are ripe for creation, places that are ripe for filling out imaginatively? o Add your hotspots to poster papero As many as possible

Are there any rich veins that we have overlooked?o Add final hotspots to poster paper

Winnow these hotspots down to the seven hottest of spotso Straw poll - everybody votes as many times as they want o If necessary, advocate for a hotspoto Final vote for top 7o Circle the top 7 on the monster-sized butcher paper

Wall talko Model one together with the whole group (Facilitators record group’s thoughts)o Gallery walk around the room o Write pertinent questions and thoughts specific to each of the spotso Reconvene as a whole groupo Shout out what are some questions that are interesting to you

Penrod, Sierra

Penrod, Sierra

Sample Invitations to Create: (I send mine out via REMIND.COM, some teachers

send them via email).Invitations to Create were written by Adele Bruni, Nathan Blum, Erick

Gordon, and Noah Gordon of Columbia University’s Teachers College

1. Dear Players,

We have the opportunity to read several of Robert Walton’s letters to his sister, Margaret Saville, yet we do not see any of her missives in return.Imagine that you are Margaret.  Perhaps you have received one of Robert’s letters, perhaps all, perhaps none.  Write to your brother...what did you think of his journey when he set off?  What do you think now? What specifically do you want him to remember about his childhood, his home, his family? Imagine your surroundings—you, Margaret, as you feel the weight of the pen in your hand, the candle lighting your lonely composition.

Walk a bit in Margaret's shoes, as the saying goes, imagine what this character thinks and feels. Then compose your letter.  Consider enclosing an image or two.

2. Dear Players,  

In Shelley’s time, scientific inquiry had just discovered galvanism - the connection between electricity and muscle movement. This phenomenon was named after Luigi Galvini, who discovered how electric currents could make the muscles of dead frog legs move. Later his nephew, Giovanni Aldini, took these experiments even further. He attached electrodes to the body and head of an executed murderer, making his body move and convulse. It appeared as if the criminal was on the verge of coming back to life. And science appeared to be on the verge of discovering the essence of life. In fact, electric shock was applied to the dead body of Percy Shelley’s drowned wife in an attempt to revive her after her suicide. There were sparks of inspiration for Mary Shelley in the latest scientific advancements of her time.

The boundaries of human discovery are continually expanding. They carry with them the potential of great boons...and great banes. What are the most recent discoveries that fill your soul with visions of wonder, and specters of dread? 

Describe, draw, or somehow create your visions of the beauties and horrors of a recent scientific discovery. If you cannot think of a discovery that inspires you, try examining these pages documenting some recent breakthroughs.

http://exploredia.com/top-10-scientific-breakthroughs-of-21st-century/http://www.wired.com/2013/12/top-scientific-discoveries-2013/#slideid-5923073. 4. Dear Players,  

“I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.”  ― Chaim Potok, The Chosen

Frankenstein is bursting with so many words, so much verbalization of thought and feeling, that it becomes easy to overlook those characters who remain largely silent.  Are they silent by choice?  By compulsion?  We invite you to choose one character and “listen to [a moment of his/her] silence.” Explore its “quality and dimension”—from where does this silence come?  Why and when does it persist?  You might express your findings in text, images, shapes…

Penrod, Sierra

Penrod, Sierra