Pleasantly surprised would be a good way to describe this book. I am used to reading books for school that I am not so fond of, or books that I wouldn’t pick if I had the choice. But lord of the flies is different. I feel as if I would read this book in my free time had someone come along and told me about all the underground meaning, all the ties to society, and the story that was told but yet untold. I feel like I over analyze everything now because of this book. I’ll see a movie and wonder if the way that the character said that line refers to the oppression of their innocence, or I’ll just be reading and each line could mean something completely different then what’s on the page. Anyways let me tell you about the project that just came and went focussing on lord of the flies.
Our driving question for this unit was “What is the role of tribalism in society?” We were looking into tribes all around us. Tribes like family, and friends, sports teams and sports fans. Almost everything can be classified as a tribe. Which we learned throughout this project. We made connections to everyday things as well as to the very well known tribes, such as cults, or gangs, in our final project. Throughout this blog post I will go through the steps of the project piece by piece!
Journal entries
To show our understanding in this project we started by writing. We wrote journal entries. These journal entries had topics like:
- What makes a great leader? What present day examples can you include? How do you see Lord of the Flies as an example (or not)?
- Are all children violent? Adults? What causes or doesn’t cause it? How do you see Lord of the Flies as an example (or not)?
- How is power and control a part of tribes? How does Lord of the Flies show this
As you can tell these journal entries do not all focus directly on lord of the flies, its mostly just how does lord of the flies show this, or can you see lord of the flies as an example, and that because this projects other focus was on tribalism. Not aboriginal tribalism per say, but all tribalism. We wanted to find the connection between a tribe of our choice and lord of the flies through tribalism. My group, (Luca J, Giorgia, and Lucas) decided to do Hells Angels as the tribe of our choice. We were late to deciding and that got us a little bit discombobulated, but we found our way back to being on top of work. After we completed the research, we divided up the tasks so that each member had something to do for our final presentation. In our final presentation we had to use keynote and make a presentation about the tribe of our choice and its connection to lord of the flies.
Here is my groups video of us presenting!
Presentation Reflection
I felt the presentation went well, and that we completed all the necessary requirements for our presentation. We all worked pretty isolated, and if we had, had an extra day maybe we would have been more comfortable on stage with our work. Though I know I get pretty bad stage fright when I go up, I think that if we had run through it I wouldn’t have had it as bad. Also working with 3 other people is hard, and since we were the largest group the bar was set higher because of it.
Throughout this project we covered quite a few core competencies. Here they are:
- Reading and Personal Text Response
- The Writing Process
- Literary Identification and Analysis
- Understanding Language Construction and Intent
I will explain how each of these was used!
For the reading and personal text response this covers all the writing and reading we did. So the reading of lord of the flies counts as part of this, which I did, and I even have proof because I got the book out from the library, just so my eyes wouldn’t hurt at night! Also each of our journal responses fall under this competency. Well not the whole journal response but the thought and plan of the journal response stems from this competency.
The next competency is The Writing Process. This describes the actual creation of work. Either our journal response, or script creation. It’s the transformation of your personal text response into an actual readable document.
The literary identification and analysis I mainly used while writing my journal responses. I used this when I wanted to prove a point by including a quote or a certain fact that supports my work. It just makes it all the more informational, and people reading it feel like its more educational because of it.
The last competency we used was understanding language construction and intent. We used this competency while we were reading lord of the flies. We had to adjust our mindset to adapt to the language being used in a book written in the 1950’s. Also we had to figure out meaning beyond the just what the text was telling us, which falls under this competency as well.
Thanks for reading!
Adlih