
Suitable for: Years 10-11 | Duration: 2 hours a week for 9-10 weeks; 18-20 hours total
Prerequisites: Poetry for Beginners OR Literary Techniques (one-day crash course)
Additional Material Fee: $20 (one text)
About:
It’s alive! Have you ever created a monster? We don’t mean a bad essay; we mean something that has a life of its own and frightens people. How would you react if you did create a monster?
Maybe you have never made a monster. Maybe you have written a bad post on social media? Made a bad video? We all know about ideas that initially sounded good and then went beyond everyone’s control. Initially a ghost story, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a novel about one of those interesting ideas that went horribly wrong. The novel asks if technological advance always improves human lives and asks how humans relate to their families and societies.
If you’re worried about the advances of technology (and at least one of our teachers is terrified by them) then Frankenstein is the novel for you. Costumes are optional.
Student Writing Outcomes:
- Opinion pieces about the chapters studied in class;
- Analytical paragraphs or partial essays about themes in the novel;
- Full essays about the novel;
- Creative responses to the themes and concerns expressed in the novel.
Student Learning Objectives:
- Reviewing and consolidating an extensive list of techniques for analysing novels;
- Understanding the mindset and challenges of people from a different period of history;
- Having the tools to analyse and write about novels in opinion pieces and essays;
- Considering the similarities and differences between people today and people in the 1830s; and
- Evaluating the novel’s explorations of questions we still ask today.