I'm fortunate to work with a very creative Latin teacher at Strong Middle School who's always ready to move her students beyond conjugating verbs and memorizing the gender of nouns. For example, we have twice collaborated on a project in which students learned about slavery in ancient Rome and then made connections to the ongoing problem of modern slavery and human trafficking.
As it happens, we are both big Sherlock fans so when the time came for her 8th grade students to read The Aeneid, it seemed like a great idea to try to keep track of the characters from the poem using a technique very effectively dramatized in that show: the Mind Palace. Here's how we did it:
As it happens, we are both big Sherlock fans so when the time came for her 8th grade students to read The Aeneid, it seemed like a great idea to try to keep track of the characters from the poem using a technique very effectively dramatized in that show: the Mind Palace. Here's how we did it:
| | We started off by introducing the concept using this scene from the season 2 episode, "The Hounds of Baskerville," in which Holmes tries to recall the name and location of a research facility crucial the plot. Watson helpfully explains to another character what the 'mind palace' is and how it works (and takes the opportunity to offer a little dig at Sherlock's ego as well). We showed them a second, explanatory video from How Stuff Works to provide an idea of how a mind palace is constructed. |
| We found the visuals in this video helpful but there are plenty more short segments on the technique out there. Find one that works for you. Then we explained the assignment: students were to build a memory palace, based on their homes, the school, or some other place with which they were familar and which could be easily accessed in order to remember ten characters or places from The Aeneid. | |
The biggest challenge was trying to figure out a way to have the students 'turn in' what is, after all, a very private and internal process. Much like Sherlock's producers do a great job of showing the inner workings of Holmes' mind, we needed to devise a way for the students to show the workings of their own. We decided to have them create a variation of a Pecha Kucha, or 20x20 presentation, in which the speaker's visual materials are strictly limited to 20 slides, each of which stays on the screen for 20 seconds. For this assignment, each student would take 10 photographs of places or things in their 'mind palace' where they would 'store' their selected characters and places from the Aeneid. They could mark the photos up with Google Drawing, Pixlr Editor or another online image editor if they chose. They then arranged their series of 10 photos into a Google Slideshow and used the 'Publish to web' function to automatically advance each slide after ten seconds. This gave us a '10x10' instead of a '20x20' and it meant that each presentation was a very tight 100 seconds. I created a sample, using our places around our school to help me remember ten U.S. presidents, which I narrated live for them in class. In retrospect, 10 seconds per slide was a little too tight and it might have been better to stick with a 10X20.
They had about a week to put this together and on the day it was due, they published their slideshows to the web and presented them to small groups of 2 or 3 classmates. They used Nimbus Screenshot to record a screencast of their slideshow and their voice as they explained how each place in their mind palace contained something from The Aeneid. The screencast videos were saved to Google Drive and turned in through Classroom. Each group then chose one presentation to advance, tournament style, to a round in which the videos were shown to the entire class.
This document has my notes for the project and links to some resources, including the videos embedded above and instructions for using Nimbus. Here's a planning guide given to the students to help them get ready. And finally, a rubric for assessing the project.
They had about a week to put this together and on the day it was due, they published their slideshows to the web and presented them to small groups of 2 or 3 classmates. They used Nimbus Screenshot to record a screencast of their slideshow and their voice as they explained how each place in their mind palace contained something from The Aeneid. The screencast videos were saved to Google Drive and turned in through Classroom. Each group then chose one presentation to advance, tournament style, to a round in which the videos were shown to the entire class.
This document has my notes for the project and links to some resources, including the videos embedded above and instructions for using Nimbus. Here's a planning guide given to the students to help them get ready. And finally, a rubric for assessing the project.
