The Adventure – ~3 weeks of class time (5 85-minute blocks)
This post and the next will be more nuts and bolts – I’ve previously written about the why, now I’ll share about the how. This one will be about the bulk of the unit, where kids plays D&D and read Beowulf (some of them anyway).
“Session 0” (85 minutes)
“Session 0” is a piece of D&D jargon for the time you meet up before the adventure starts, where everyone figures out who their characters will be, when they’ll meet in the future, and so on. So on the first block day of 5 85-minute block days when we’d really be focused on the game, I gave students all the materials I wrote about before and asked them to spend 10-15 minutes reading and annotating. I wanted to see what they could figure out on their own.
Beginning of Class – I started by asking them to turn and talk about cultural traditions that involved poetry, story or song in their families. I wrote about this a little already too. tl;dr: a lot of the white students didn’t fully understand the question, but more of the students of color did seem to. I don’t have a very large sample size but I’ll just say, I wasn’t surprised by that result. I tried to teach them a bit about oral composition, mostly drawing on Albert Lord’s The Singer of Tales. Then we turned to D&D.
Middle of Class – I did my best to help them understand what I thought are the most important things to focus on so that when they started their adventures next time, they’d be both technically ready and emotionally invested:
- Imaginative pre-writing – Having previously given students a commercially created pre-written backstory from published D&D materials, I now shared a worksheet asking them to type a deeper backstory of their own creation, focusing on character development and moving from the archetype they had been given into a particular being (human or otherwise). The idea was, once they started playing, they’d have more of an imaginative basis for their character that would make things feel more immersive. I asked the DM’s to comment on the aspects of the plot and setting to think about what things they were most interested in imaginatively developing. I also asked them to reflect on themes a little bit – in a vague way since they didn’t fully know the story yet. (Note to future self: I should have also given the DMs those prewritten character sheets, though I didn’t, and that meant they were more in the dark about character motivations than they could or should have been.) (Additional note to future self: this unit puts a lot of pressure on the DMs. They need to function as leaders in a way the other students don’t, and there’s more reading required. I think for next time, I will just be more upfront about this, and less apologetic. I have found kids voluntarily rise to challenges when you actually announce the challenge forthrightly – each of the last two years, I have been surprised by the number of kids who choose to read Crime and Punishment even though it’s the longest and most difficult of the choice books in its unit.)
- Non-combat game mechanics practice – I explained about ability checks and ability modifiers, which allow certain game interactions to be more numerically driven. For example “This door is locked so I’d like to attempt to pick the lock.” To practice I had them imagine trying to use animal-handling to tame a feral cat. Each character has their own unique numerical representation of their skills, which is based on their class (fighter, cleric, rogue, etc.) and fantasy race (elf, gnome, human, etc.). Instead of the DM just deciding if you succeed, the DM has you roll dice to see how lucky/skilled you are on this occasion, based on your skill numbers. It randomizes the game in a fun way, once you get used to it. There are 15+ different skills that you can use in that way.
- Combat practice – combat in D&D is a big complex thing. It’s actually where the game originated. Important rules involve initiative (who goes first when they’re fighting), to-hit calculation (how good a character is at landing a blow, using weapons or magic, against an opponent), armor class (how hard someone or something is to hit when someone else attacks them), modifiers (aspects of the situation represented numerically), and some other stuff. To practice, I had them pretend they failed to tame the feral cat, and that it attacked them. The core idea is to roll a die and if that modified roll is greater than or equal to the armor class, you hit. There are lots and lots of other details but the pre-made character sheets describe a couple of simple weapons each character has and how to roll the dice with them.
End of Class
I had the characters regroup from their chosen parties (which each included 1 DM, 1 fighter, 1 cleric, 1 rogue and 1 wizard) into “jigsaw” groups – all 5 fighters went one place, all 5 clerics another, all DM’s sent another. I asked the character groups to have a pretend fight using their characters’ special abilities (fighters using swords, rogues using daggers, priests and wizards their magic) and see who won, so they could practice the rules. I myself sat with the DM’s and did my best to help them get their heads around what they were going to have to do. This is something I could work harder on next time, because I sort of fumbled through it and didn’t leave enough time (see above). Next time I should probably invite them to an out-of-class meeting. I think at least some of them would come.
Session 1 (85 minutes)
Beginning of Class – About 15 minutes – Sort of on a whim, and since I had been rereading Beowulf over the weekend, I shared a little bit about the context in which Beowulf had been written, showed them some old English, played a recording so they could hear what it sounded like. I was most interested in showing them ways orality shows up in the text – for example, alliteration, formulaic half-lines and epithets. Which is hard but I think they got the “big idea” even if not the details. I assigned the first 600 lines or so of Beowulf (about one-fifth of the text) to be read for next class.
Middle of Class – about 1 hour – They were sitting in their original adventurer groups (the groups where there were 5 different types of characters in each group, not the jigsaw groups where all the fighters etc. were grouped together). So between the two classes, there were 5 groups of 5 (in fact, 1 group of 4 in one of the classes because there are 25 students). In one class, one of the DM’s had told me she’d be absent – overall, it’s okay if any given player is absent on any given day – the players will just work around that – but without the DM it’s hard for anything to happen and it’s really hard for someone else to just jump in. So I ended up DM’ing for that group on that day. This kept me from being able to help the rest of the class as much as I wanted to but it was okay. In the other class, since everyone was there, I just floated from group to group. At the start of the adventure, there is a battle with zombies. It’s probably there to help them feel engaged and also to make them learn how to do battles with the dice.
Most groups needed some help with that but once they saw the rhythm of it they were fine. One group ran away from the zombies; the 9 other groups fought them. In one of those 9 groups, one character died. The game manual encourages the DM to use some divine-intervention type stuff if someone dies in this first battle, which they did. After that, they entered a more narrative phase where the DM helped them explore an island called “Dragon’s Rest.” They are introduced to a handful of NPCs (non-player characters, whose behaviors are simulated by the DM) who live there. Some of the groups got all the way to a crucial plot point – selecting between two little sub-quests that were intended to form sessions 2 and 3 (they can do them in either order). Some of them just barely finished beating the zombies.
One of the DM’s seemed overwhelmed and kept saying she wasn’t good and she could tell everyone was bored. I did my best to encourage her. One of them had done a whole bunch of extra work and was really excited to change the adventure. My first reaction to both of these was frustration. I realized right away even though I wanted them to experience divergent narratives, my controlling-teacher persona sort of secretly wanted them to experience a very specific type of divergence. I reflected a bit on this and decided that was dumb – I should just let them go. As long as they’re on task, that’s what matters. There are a finite number of classes during which they’ll be adventuring, but that’s okay! There is no real beginning or end to D&D – no winning or losing. So I’m just going to keep helping them along and see what happens.
Most of the rest of the groups feel somewhere in the middle – they either made a choice about what part of the adventure was next, or didn’t quite get there but knew where they were headed.
End of Class – 10 minutes – I asked them to stop and journal about what had happened. For the players, I asked them to write in the 1st person and think from their character’s perspective. For the DM’s I asked them to write in the 3rd person. On that first day I read over those paragraphs they had written, just quickly (I never really graded them or left any written feedback). It was really exciting! It was so cool to see what had unfolded spontaneously – who had been literal, who had been more figurative, how they used voice, point of view – what was cool was I didn’t have to tell them to do any of that, and they very much just dove into the writing. Later, I did discover that 2 of the 50 students had, for reasons that totally baffle me, asked ChatGPT to write their paragraphs. This was not graded, totally individual and based in something they that had just done. Very strange. I wrote each student a note letting them know this was unacceptable and that literally they only people hurt by doing that were themselves. One of them wrote back apologizing. The other never brought it up.
Sessions 2-4 (85 minutes each)
Sessions 2-4 were all very similar. I’ll summarize:
Beginning of Class – Each time, I picked out a moment from within the assigned section of Beowulf (I split it into 5 chunks overall) and had them engage in some practice analysis. I realized sort of belatedly that if I didn’t do this, and we spent too much time adventuring, they really wouldn’t be ready for the analytical essay had imagined them writing from the beginning. Just to give you some quick ideas about what I did – each of these were very small (15 minute) lessons involving me sharing a concept, and them writing a brief analytical paragraph or even just sentence on a post-it:
- Recreation and the Song of Sigmund – I asked them to compare and contrast (a) the account of Beowulf killing Grendel with (b) the account of Sigmund slaying the dragon that the bard performs at Beowulf’s victory dinner after he kills Grendel. I taught them a bit about archetypes, and the vision of artistry that these center: not creation from whole-cloth both re-creation. I also talked about the idea of “recreation” (fun) and pointed out how many of our “recreational” activities involve re-creating something that otherwise exists in a more serious context: i.e., the bard singing about Sigmund is a more amusing (and also more mythologized) take on the real-life adventure Beowulf has just had, or how D&D itself describes violence but is very much non-violent in the vibes that emerge when you’re playing. I asked them to explore how Sigmund’s story functioned as “recreation” and “re-creation” and what that meaning that allowed the text as a whole to generate. That “work as a whole” wording is really important for AP Lit, so I wanted them to struggle with that a bit, especially since this was a formative context. I think on this day I also talked a little bit about Henry Louis Gates’ idea from The Signifying Monkey about how texts embed hidden analyses of them, meta-data if you will, especially in oral contexts where distribution of that story might be subject to appropriation and misinterpretation.
- Archetype and Departure from Archetype as Beowulf kills Grendel’s mother – I had them read over the account of how Beowulf kills Grendel’s mother and desecrates Grendel’s corpse. I asked them to explore what was heroic in this account, and what was not, so that they might reflect on the way Beowulf, even though it might seem like an archetypical story itself, is in fact itself playing with archetypes and perhaps deviating from them. Most of them grappled on to the idea that Beowulf lets his emotions get the better of him – it makes sense that a hero would kill Grendel’s mother, because she had come to Heorot to avenge the killers of Grendel (who himself had also invaded an otherwise peaceable kingdom, apparently), but that desecrating Grendel’s already dead corpse had nothing to do with that heroic mission. Achilles does something similar at the end of the Iliad, so arguably this is a part of the archetype, but I still thought they got some good traction on this prompt.
- Telling and Retelling (or – Taling and Retailing – hat-tip to James Joyce) – When Beowulf sails home, he reports on what he’s done, and tells a compressed version of the account of his killing of Grendel and his mother. I asked them to compare and contrast the character Beowulf’s re-telling with the Beowulf poet’s original telling of that same story, and explore what meaning was added to the work as a whole as we see Beowulf do this. They noticed that Beowulf was at times more metaphorical and at other times more literal than the original telling – they wrote some things about point of view and characterization and had takeaways about the way a hero might represent their own actions vs what really happened. There’s all kind of meta- stuff here because the poet themselves in the overall text Beowulf is officially retelling the story of Beowulf, and within that story, Beowulf retells part of his own story (and also there’s the story of Sigmund, which is, as mentioned above, is embedded within Beowulf itself). I shared a bit about Finnegans Wake and Joyce tells the story of how Kersse the Tailor comes to Ireland selling handmade suits that don’t quite fit (he’s re-tailing the work of a tailor, get it?) and the story told within that chapter (“How Buckley Killed the Russian General”) follows that same general pattern (reprising Finnegans Wakes’ earlier “Ballad of Persse O’Reilly”). The point is, it’s stories all the way down.
- Beowulf and Dragons of Stormwreck Isle – At the start of class after the last day of their adventures (so actually not during session 4, but it fits logically here), I asked them to reflect as a whole in how their stories drew on archetypes present within Beowulf and also deviated from them, and how that impacted the work as a whole. This was my intended end-of-unit essay topic (which I’ll write more about in the next blog entry). On this class day I just had them practice that idea a little. A big theme that quickly emerged was the singular protagonist of Beowulf vs. the teamwork-focused Dungeons and Dragons adventure. They had some cool ideas about what that might mean in the context of the societies that produced them, and also their intended contexts of consumption. They also noticed how though Beowulf dies, in most of their stories the heroes survived. And a big theme that permeated all of the above modules and this one was the relationship between achievement of personal glory vs. selflessness as a form of true heroism.
Middle Part of Class in Sessions 2-4 – They played for 45 minutes-1 hour each day, depending on how long the above opener took. As their adventures deviated, I did my best to be an encouraging helper. I settled rules questions – that was a big part of what I had to do on these days, and I also encouraged DMs to improvise to avoid arguments and ambiguities. Sometimes I just sat and watched them play, listened, or made a gentle suggestion about where they could take things. Mostly, the class really did drive itself on these days. When I get to this point in teaching, it feels like I’ve unlocked a cheat-code. My old department chair used to talk about needing to actually place the cognitive load on them in a real way – in my experience that is the most rewarding outcome of any lesson. I get that you can do this when you give them a worksheet, but that cognitive load is much more low-level and in fact, only barely cognitive sometimes. But in this case, they were literally narrating, collaboratively, solving problems, building bonds and – wait for it – joyfully engaged.
A few days in one thing I did one day, which I will think of ways to build on in the future, is that I had to recenter them on the narrative. The game is sort of equal parts dice-rolling and storytelling. They were (in my view anyway) inclining a little too far towards numbers. I encouraged them to read over their backstories and remember to role-play as the characters to the extent that they were able. That is one of the harder aspects of D&D in fact – distinguishing between the player’s motivations and the character’s – but when I guided them in this way, they generally accepted that guidance.
The divergence in the different groups’ adventures were mostly about pacing. Some took much longer navigating certain plot points than others. I did have them do some sort of railroading (a D&D term for when the DM basically makes the party make certain choices). But overall, one of the most rewarding aspects of this was seeing how the DM’s each handled their responsibilities differently. Some of them felt really beholden to the underlying packets they had been given, and some of them just started making lots of things up. I kept reminding them that the players themselves would not know the difference, as they hadn’t read those packets.
Two people stand out. One was a student I’ll call Kelly. She (white) and her group (two other white girls, one Latina and one Black girl), and they all seemed to know each other very well. Even so, (or perhaps because of this), Kelly was very self-conscious about messing up. She came to visit me several times before class and wanted clarity in different aspects of the story. She wrote a whole bunch of side-notes and wanted me to read over them to make sure they were right. I just kept telling her yes, they were. Eventually though, she was just too stressed by the documents and began narrating more and more out of whole cloth each day. This worked better for her.
Another student – call him George. He and his group didn’t seem to know each other very well, and in fact this was the most diverse group in the class (one white kid – George himself) two Latina students and one Black student. George is very quiet, almost “painfully shy.” But he had played D&D before, and it was really cool to see the 4 of them working together. They all spoke very, very quietly throughout the adventure, to the point where I could never ear-hustle their group’s adventure like I could the other groups (i.e., sit at one table and really listen to the other). I had to sit right there and ask them what was going on. But their adventure was actually deeply narrative in a way others weren’t, mostly because they needed to quietly navigate each other’s insecurities. They’d give each other tips and suggestions based on their character, and George would would narrativize moments that other DMS just focused more on the dice. This group’s adventure was very faithful to the underlying packet, but in the micro-moments, it was more artful than game-y.
The other 8 groups fell somewhere in between – mixing and matching between prepared written narration and oral improvisation – just like what oral poets who created Beowulf had done 1500 years before! Which was one of the biggest things I wanted the students to experience.
End of Sessions 2-4 – Writing – Each day students wrote. Again, I didn’t intervene much and by the time we got to that point in class everyday, they really just typed away feverishly for the 10-15 minutes that was left for them to do that. Something fun that happened is they kept asking each other what had happened, which to me shows the relationship between memory and creation. Even so, all of their individual narratives were never as rich as the dynamic atmosphere of the game itself. Which was something else I wanted them to realize – that any text we have, especially texts that began in oral composition, like Beowulf or the Odyssey – is in a lot of ways dead, at least when we compare it to the liveliness of the setting it was originally created and consumed.
Original Positions 