Conan in the Classroom

I've been an English teacher for more than 12 years. Taught everything from sixth grade to seniors in high school. It's always a nice bonus when you get to teach something that you're personally passionate about, so I'm pretty excited about right now.  

I have about two weeks that I can play with in my 7th grade classrooms (if you're out of the US, these kids are between 12 and 13 years old) before the end of my quarter, so based on student needs, I decided to try to reinforce some of our literature standards from earlier in the year. They read The Outsiders back in September, but we haven't gotten to read any literature since. And because many middle schoolers in America never want to move past reading Dogman or Captain Underpants or Diary of a Wimpy Kid (or worse, never read anything at all), I want to use this opportunity to introduce them to some great literature, including a Robert E. Howard story.

My students are therefore starting literature circles where they pick the short story they'll get to read. I've given them the options of:

• "Contents of the Dead Man's Pocket" by Jack Finney
• "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes
• "Good Country People" by Flannery O'Connor
• "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe
• "Weight" by Dhonielle Clayton
• and the reason why I'm blogging about this, "The Tower of the Elephant" by Robert E. Howard.

I teach at a PBL (Project-Based Learning) school, so most units are based around a "driving question" that the kids answer over the course of the unit. I'm calling this one "Conflicted" and our DQ is: "Is conflict more likely to make our lives better or worse?" I think "Tower of the Elephant" is fun for this because the conflict in the narrative has almost no effect on Conan at all- he doesn't get what he wants, but he's also not drastically changed by the events. Unlike many of the other stories where the protagonist has a large personal change, it's a little unique.

"Tower of the Elephant" is pretty layered in terms of conflict. It's got the character vs. character conflicts (Conan's confrontation with the tavern keeper, the spider, Yara), character vs. society (Conan's outlander nature that keeps him from understanding certain social intricacies, and him against the corrupt city of Zamora, with Yara as its representative), and character vs. environment (the lions, the spider's lair).

"Tower" is also a pretty good choice from the Conan canon because it's not as bloody as others. It's a raucous adventure story, but Conan's first kill is just implied, then he fights lions, a spider, Yara, but his final confrontation is entirely bloodless. I'd get complaints from parents if he was hacking and slashing like he is sometimes. Also, I cut just a few lines about drunkenness from the descriptions of The Maul. They wouldn't be worth the parent emails.

The project students will create here is a "Body Biography," which is a graphically-represented way to engage with character and conflict. I'm hoping to post some student examples when they're done! They'll ideally be putting Conan in the center, with several narrative aspects around him (which will correspond with body parts) answering the driving question, examining the conflict, and more.

"The Shapes of Stories," based on Kurt Vonnegut's famous lecture

We started our unit on Tuesday by discussing story structure, conflict types (character vs. character, vs. self, vs. environment [nature], vs. society, and vs. technology), internal vs. external conflict, and we practiced looking for these in Ray Bradbury's "All Summer in a Day." The kids did great!

Today, Thursday (I see 7th graders two days a week and teach 8th grader the other two days a week), the kids chose their stories, got into their literature circle groups, and started reading. I'm pretty happy that I have at least one small group in each class reading "Tower of the Elephant!" Some of them were very intrigued by the little premise or teaser that I wrote for each one, some liked the picture I included. Giving choice and using high-interest texts like the ones I've selected are always pretty good ideas, and students are very engaged right now.

Thus far, our biggest hurdle is that students have struggled with some of the vocabulary. Regardless of if you want to derisively call it purple prose, REH's writing style is in sharp contrast to Flannery O'Connor's folksiness or "Flowers for Algernon's" purposefully-misspelled epistles or or Poe's unreliable narrators. My current balancing act is trying to get the kids to not stress too much about the surrounding world (it doesn't matter if you really know what a Brythunian is, kids!) while also not dissuading them from hopefully recognizing Conan as an outsider who's different from the "civilized" people in the city of Zamora.

We have longer class periods, so students got about halfway through their narratives today. I plan on updating you as the unit goes on!

If there are any other teachers reading this, here are some of the standards we're covering in this unit:

• Cite textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text
• Determine a theme or central idea of the text and how it is convened through particular details
• Describe how a particular story's plot unfolds in a series of episodes as well as how the characters respond or change as the plot moves toward a resolution
• Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text including figurative and connotative meanings
• Analyze how a particular sentence, chapter, or scene fits into the overall structure of a text and contributes to the development of theme, setting, or plot