Too Many Taras
Before we go further, let's look at an example of student Diaporamic Digital Graphic Writing.
Click the Play triangle below to watch this movie.
The Making of "Too Many Taras"
Several years ago I had a student named Tara who was (to use the teacher euphemism) challenging. She was a wonderfully imaginative student. She picked up new ideas quickly. Math and writing were easy for her. She did neat and careful work. But she was loud, brash, boisterous and caused more squabbles between her classmates than I would have thought possible. It was almost as if there were more than one personality locked inside her. She was the proverbial handful, yet I couldn't help liking her, and she and I got along just fine.
I remember joking with her that I didn't know what I would do if there were more than one of her. "We'd have to write a book," I said. "The Berenstain Bears and Too Many Taras."
She smiled at the idea, but something in the title resonated for me. It was one of those teaching moments, an epiphany.
I said to the class, "What if we did a story about what would happen if we did have too many Taras in our class." (An unusual connection, yes?)
Everybody thought the idea was great and Tara clearly did, too. She had quite a sense of humor, and I think she found the idea of more copies of her intriguing.
I asked students, "How could there be more than one Tara?"
Students proposed a number of ideas from cloning to robots to magic. I jotted them on the board, and we discussed the possibilities at some length. When then put which plot device to follow to a vote: Tara magically duplicated won.
It might seem odd, but I didn't show my students La Jetée. There were a couple of reasons for this. I only had a VHS copy at the time, which was very fuzzy. These were fourth graders, and I think if they had been a couple of years older I might have made more of an effort for them so see it. I also didn't want them to imitate it, so I decided not to show it to them. Most of them, however, had seen several movies by M. Night Shyamalan--especially Signs and The Sixth Sense. I think the sense of the mysterious that these movies embodied appealed to them.
We got to the end of the script and nobody could figure out how the story should conclude. I said, "Well, if it were me, I'd just make more copies of myself." The idea appealed to the students, so it stuck.
(NB: Tara is not a twin. She was carefully cloned from multiple photos using Corel Painter. Click the thumbnail above to see a larger image.)
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