TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Suncoast Pasco News

Tales from the classroom

ADVERTISEMENT

BY KLINT LOWRY

THE SUNCOAST NEWS

Published: October 31, 2009

Some might say Tom O'Connell might be pulling a trick on his students; for them it's definitely a treat.

For four years now, as Halloween has approached, O'Connell's mild-mannered classroom at River Ridge Middle School has transformed into a holiday house of horrors, complete with cobwebs, strobe lights, eerie music and creepy props.

"It's gotten bigger and bigger," said O'Connell, made up to look like the Heath Ledger version of Batman's arch-nemesis, The Joker.

It would seem to be just another school Halloween celebration. But there is another element lurking behind the haunted house motif - an educational element. O'Connell has turned Halloween into an opportunity to get his students acquainted and comfortable with the idea of literary analysis, of not just consuming entertainment but to study it for its content and structure.

And what better way to introduce this idea than with something kids like.

"Right now, the horror genre is hot, especially vampires," O'Connell said. Go to any bookstore, look at what's on TV or what's big at the movies. Young people are feasting on stories about bloodsuckers and other supernatural beings.

"From a teaching perspective, if you can put your finger on the pulse of what the kids are interested in, that's huge," he said. And if you look at it with an open mind, he said, there are a lot of rich narratives and characters, much of which is steeped in literary tradition and actual history.

Vice principal Nancy Guss, for one, didn't need any convincing of the validity of the idea. Her office is filled with bobbleheads, snow globes and other desktop items featuring the likenesses of great authors, including several of Edgar Allen Poe.

It all started with Poe, Guss said. He invented the genre.

Each year, the Halloween project does a different theme. This year, the focus was on characters, and the classroom was turned into a museum of the macabre, featuring several stations, each dedicated to the infamous antagonists of popular horror movies, like Freddy Krueger, Jason and Jigsaw.

O'Connell's students were assigned to get the background information on the characters, to describe their fictional stories and to find out how they were created and what part of the inspirations were based on real-life events.

They presented their essays to Alicia Green's sixth-grade language arts students, who would later be asked to write papers on what they found most interesting from the presentations.

Each station was set up as a gruesome homage, with life-size likenesses of the cinematic figures hovering near the presenters, along with some of their favorite tools of terror, severed body parts and other creepy accoutrements.

The first stop for the sixth-graders was with Nathanial Peterson, who some shared things he'd learned about "The Nightmare on Elm Street's" Freddy Krueger, primarily that the character is based on events that took place in the Los Angeles area in the 1970s.

There had been a series of attacks on teenage girls, Peterson read. Some of the girls claimed they had had dreams of the attacks before they occurred. The father of one of the girls had an idea who was behind the attacks and sought to take justice into his own hands. He set fire to the house of the man he suspected, killing him.

"Many of the girls continued to have nightmares only now the man in the dream had severely burned skin," Peterson reported. "Pretty eerie, huh?"

After the last of the presentations, there's one more station where the students could get candy and soda - it is a Halloween, after all. Finally, they got to watch a 10-minute legendary tale of horror from the days of yore - Michael Jackson's "Thriller."

Today's pop culture is tomorrow's classic, O'Connell said. As popular as the genre is today, it's easy to imagine it will be the stuff of serious academic study 50 years from now. After all, everything was new once.

"I compare it to teaching Greek mythology," he said. "It's a lot of myths and legends, it's just more modern-day."

Even Shakespeare has his "awful, dark aspects," he added.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT