First Halloween Lessons

In the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school, we moved from Florida to Missouri. My English II class that year was run by Mrs. Rowe, whose uncanny resemblance to Dana Carvey's "Church Lady" she actually endorsed with a giant poster in her classroom. The poster featured the Church Lady striking her most self-righteous pose, and was captioned "Well, Isn't That Special?"

She was the first of many teachers to try and get me to perform some wretched act called "prewriting." This requires one to actually plan out one's writing in an organized fashion, followed by composing the actual essay in a similarly regimented manner. This confused the daylights out of me at the time, and for many years afterwards. My time in high school (just like that of most of the people I know) was defined by starting on an assignment no more than one day before it was due. (Two, if it involved painting.) I most often waited until the night before, right around normal bedtime, and the anxiety of not getting it done and therefore failing would compel me to work. Fueled by the adrenaline, I'd stay up as long as it took to get the thing done, whatever it was.

I managed to use this model to perfection up through senior year: my crowning achievement was producing a twelve-page term paper on Franz Kafka the night before it was due. Before I could begin the paper that night, I had to do all the research I was supposed to have been doing over the previous six weeks. Six hours and eight cans of Mountain Dew later, I had succeeded. The paper got an A, which is especially nice considering it was for my AP Literature class.

It wasn't until my Freshman Composition class at UGA that I learned what everyone does, often sooner than I did: that you can't produce truly good papers by waiting until the night before. Having learned that much, I assumed that was all there was to be gleaned from that lesson, and I modified my strategy: I thenceforth began my writing assignments three days before they were due. Eventually, though, I discovered that prewriting is in fact a valuable tool, and not (as I smugly maintained for so long) a crutch for the inept.

I tell all of this because if the me from the day after I wrote the Kafka paper met the me from right now, he'd (I'd?) probably punch him (me?) in the face. I'm such a prewriting geek that I now begin these blogs with a rough outline of what I need to say. I'm such a nerd.

Anyway. Halloween was fun this year, all things considered. Though it was pretty slapdash at the beginning, my Halloween lesson for my high schoolers was, by the ninth or tenth time teaching it, decently cohesive. I began by showing the opening song from The Nightmare Before Christmas ("Halloween Town") in Japanese, courtesy of YouTube. Then I asked each class what they knew about Halloween. This produced a list of vocabulary ranging from three to twelve words long. The worst class only got "Halloween," "candy," and "trick or treat;" the best went as far as "grim reaper" and "Cerberus." (Seriously--a 15-year-old Japanese boy tossed "Cerberus" in with Halloween. He pronounced it with a hard C, which is faithful to the Greek pronunciation, but I learned it incorrectly, with a soft C, so I thought he was saying "Care Bears" at first.)

I initially had pretty high hopes for what would come next, including teaching the kids about the Celtic holiday Samhain, the evolution of the word "Halloween" from "All Hallows Evening," the story of Jack o'Lantern, and the ins and outs of trick-or-treating. You can probably imagine the looks of shock and fear on my fellow teachers' faces as I pitched this lesson plan to them. Suffice it to say, the end result was toned down quite a bit. I had to settle for a three-sentence breakdown of Samhain: "2,000 years ago, people lived in Ireland. These people believed that once a year, on October 31st, dead people could come back to life. People were scared of them, so some wore costumes to try and scare the dead away." That's the best compromise I could strike between all the trawling I did on the Internet and what the students would actually understand. Even this much had to be given slowly.

Several of my teachers, trying to be helpful, likened the Samhain festival to the Japanese Buddhist festival O-bon. While both are festivals involving the return of the dead to the earth, all the research I've done has shown that while the Gaels feared the return of the deceased on Samhain, O-bon is a much more welcoming celebration of one's ancestors. I think one of us misrepresented our holidays, and I'm pretty sure it was me. Oh, well. The history isn't so much crucial to the understanding of Halloween as it is simply interesting.

Next, I talked about pumpkin carving. Telling the story of Jack o'Lantern would likely lose all its effect in translation for the students, so I settled for pointing out the distinction between a pumpkin and a jack-o-lantern. I showed lots of pictures I found of different jack-o-lanterns, and explained how to carve a pumpkin, complete with drawings on the board and sound effects for popping open and gutting a pumpkin. The kids absolutely loved all of this. With my second, smaller high school, I brought a green Japanese pumpkin I had carved, and showed it to the students after explaining carving. At this school, I have a class of seven third-year commercial-track students that I've talked about before. The teacher and I decided to have the students carve some pumpkins. I went to the grocery store, bought four more green pumpkins, and carved out three of them for the class to use. The fourth I purposefully left unhollowed so the kids could hear the juicy ripping sound it makes when you tear off the top. I tried to get them to stick their hands in and scoop out the guts, but had to settle for them using a spoon. I had to dart out early, so I only snapped one picture.

The most important thing I learned from this little unit has nothing to do with the holiday itself. This was the first time I've known exactly what I wanted to teach the kids, and felt no pressure or stress about whether or not the students would understand. Of course, the deck was stacked in my favor: the students already know little snippets about Halloween, I showed lots of pictures, we played games, and I gave them candy. Even so, it felt amazing to be able to relish the sheer joy of teaching something. I take it as a preview of how everyday teaching could one day be for me, once I get past all the crazy lesson planning.

Pictures!