Slithy, Gyrey and Mimsy

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Slithy, Gyrey and Mimsy
Creating the modern Jabberwocky

• Kit Breshears CED-595
• College Lit Instructor

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Thintroduc (the Introduction)

• Focaudi (Focus Audience)
• College literature students. More than likely,
  this will be a 100- or 200-level course, but
  could be open to 300 level students as well
• Students have been reading their first novel in
  this course The Annotated Alice The
  Definitive Edition compiled by Martin Gardner.

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Studjectives (Student Objectives)

• The Student Will
• Use a word processing program to compose an
  original poem of at least 15 lines that heavily
  uses portmanteau words to tell a modern story,
  much like Lewis Carroll did in his poem
  Jabberwocky.
• Use the Internet to find common portmanteaux and
  images to be used in the creation of an original
  poster
• Create a high-quality poster that displays their
  original poem and demonstrates proper use of
  related images
• Present the poster to the class and instructor
  and explain what portmanteaux they have chosen
  and created

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Research URLs

• Initially, I discovered a great lesson plan that
  used the original Orson Welles broadcast of the
  War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells to inspire
  students to create audio broadcasts of stories or
  novels that they were readinghttp//www.readwrit
  ethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id901
• Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut was the
  next novel lesson that I discovered. In this
  lesson, the instructor uses modern music to
  encourage students to find themes or theme songs
  for passages in a novelhttp//www.readwritethink
  .org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id1164

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More Research URLs

• Additionally, I found a blog of a student
  currently in a college lit course. She shared her
  thoughts about what she was currently reading,
  and let her classmates and professor respond via
  commentinghttp//collegelitblog.blogspot.com/
• Finally, while his videos are not the most
  absolutely compelling, a professor at MIT used
  video to put his lessons on iTunes and the web,
  thus making his lectures available at all times
  (and portable.) I would utilize this in my
  college lit classroom to provide additional
  details about the work we were currently
  readinghttp//ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Linguistics-and
  -Philosophy/24-262Spring2004/LectureNotes/index.ht
  m

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Tlesslan (The Lesson Plan)

• Grade Level/Curricular Area
• 200-level college literature course
• Time Required
• 2 sessions (50 minutes each session)
• Software Content
• Graphic Design (Publisher/Quark/Indesign),
  Internet Access, Word Processing (Word/Works/Text
  Editor/Pages)

Check out the lesson plan here.
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Introbjectives (Instructional Objectives)

• The Student Will
• Use a word processing program to compose an
  original poem (at least 15 lines) that heavily
  uses portmanteaux words to tell a modern story,
  much like Carroll did in his poem Jabberwocky.
• Research data on the Internet students will be
  looking for common portmanteaux words and images
  for their poster
• Create a high-quality poster that displays their
  original poetry and demonstrates proper use of
  related images
• Present the poster to the class and instructor
  and explain what portmanteaux words they have
  chosen and why they chose their particular
  direction

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Reqmat (Required Materials)

• One computer per student
• Internet, graphic design (Publisher/Quark/InDesign
  ), Word Processing (Word/Pages/Works/Text
  Editor)
• High-quality color laser printer

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Prequisites (Pre-Requisites)

• Classroom study of poetry in Lewis Carrolls work
  Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found
  There, which includes the poem Jabberwocky, a
  famous poem using portmanteaux.
• Portmanteau words, or portmanteaux, are words
  that are a combination of two or more other
  words. A common one is blog, which is a
  combination of the words web and log.

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Brief Lessoscription (Brief Lesson Description)

• Students have been studying The Annotated Alice
  The Definitive Edition compiled by Martin
  Gardner.
• The teacher briefly reminds students what
  portmanteaux words are, and why they are
  relevant.
• The teacher demonstrates how to compose and save
  a document using Microsoft Word.
• The teacher then demonstrates how to build a
  poster using Publisher. Students having a
  knowledge of Adobe InDesign or Quark may also use
  those publishing programs to compose their
  project.
• Students are then taken to the Fine Arts computer
  lab to begin working on their projects.
• Students compose their posters, print them out on
  the high-quality laser printers, and present to
  the class.

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 Potential problems that may come up during
this lesson

• Composing poems may take awhile students may not
  have enough time to compose their poems and
  design a poster in class.
• Will students have access to enough free images
  to make a nice looking poster?
• Will students be able to design a high-quality
  poster with given resources if they have never
  used publishing software?

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Samtcome (Sample Outcome)

• To see a sample outcome, click here.

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• Pros include
• A real understanding of how Carrolls creation
  of portmanteaux are still relevant today
• Writing portion of this project encourages
  creative thought
• Composition and creation of portmanteaux
  requires time, thought and analysis this isnt
  your old school poetry
• Creation of poster requires quality Internet
  research for images
• Poster creation also means students think
  outside the box
• Using computers and images to do this project
  instead of drawing a poster prepares students for
  future publishing projects down the road in their
  lives

• Cons include
• High-quality, free images are difficult to find
• Writing poetry may not come as easy to some
  students as others it could take a lot of time
  to create an original poem
• On the opposite side of that coin, some students
  may be able to do this project very quickly
• Many modern words are portmanteaux, which means
  that it could be relatively easy for students to
  plagiarize words or poems

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Futlans (Future Plans)

• This lesson will be a fun one to teach, not
  because it is incredibly difficult, but it really
  allows the students to see how a novel written
  for children more than a century ago still has an
  impact on the words of today.
• Future plans for this lesson could really include
  composing a list of commonly used portmanteaux
  and developing a poem or a short story using only
  those words
• Additional plans could include putting this list
  of portmanteaux to music and publishing a video
  online
• Finally, a fun but somewhat simple project
  could be to require students to to develop their
  own classroom wiki of commonly used portmanteaux
  that apply to this particular literature class.