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Welcome to the Constellation of Kasterborous!

OK not doctor who related but all my ideas for school projects that are more interesting than the ones you guys find on like facebook or whatever.

Are you a highschool teacher? do you need cool project ideas? I want YOU to have cool project ideas. Because I get bored, to be frank. so here's a few of mine!

ELA PROJECT: Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities

Invisible Cities is is fantastic novel. I think making a bunch of highschoolers read it together would be very entertaining and fun for them because it would introduce them to weird literature. Invisible Cities is almost like a collection of poetry except not really. It's also historical!

Vague lesson plan for Invisible Cities

Have students read Invisible Cities as a class, as they read, tell them to look out for their favorite city which they will later have to analyze by connecting it to a more metaphorical meaning! If they're stuck, tell them to make up connections! Get creative, grab at a few straws, its more fun than looking up "INVISIBLE CITIES MEANING SPARKNOTES" this is an exercise in thinking creatively- not overly serious business because literature is all about exploration. If you always analyze literature by repeating what everyone has said before you, you're not going anywhere.

Teach them about analyzing rhetoric and use Calvino's unique writing style to do so. The final project will be a creative writing assignment in which students pick a city/location that they are familiar with and write their own city in the style of Calvino's. You could force them to do the city you're in but if you have exchange students or students who moved here recently, that would leave them at a disadvantage. Anyways, they'll need to choose a particular aspect of the city they're talking about, they shouldn't be describing Everything in the city, Calvino's descriptions are made so they could all technically be the same city! Example: you're in a city built around a university, you could talk about Cities and Libraries! Or you're in a cold environment, talk about the cycle of repairing roads every year after winter, call it Cyclical Cities! Talk about how they keep reusing the same material to build the roads only for it to be destroyed year after year and people are used to excessive road work. Talk about Cities and Parks. In my city, our past mayor made a ridiculous amount of tiny patches of grass into parks. He just slapped a sign and a bench and then boom, official park! If you have a football team- citys and stadiums! ETC.

I think that this would be a fun exercise in both learning rhetoric and learning to draw big ideas from little things you notice around you. I also think it would be fun for teachers to read all of these, at least it would be more fun than having to reread 30 essays based on the same hyper specific prompt!

MUSIC PROJECT

Ok, this one's more for elementary school. Teach your 1st graders John Cage's 4'33''

now, this isn't my original idea, this happened to me. And this, I believe is an important lesson in why teachers ought to be allowed to make their own lesson plans rather than following a curriculum. In first grade, we had a 4'33'' day in which my teacher taught us all about it and convinced 30 1st graders to try and sit in silence through the entire preformance. WHICH IS HILARIOUS and my teacher was clearly a genius. She was awesome that year, she taught us all Danse Macabre for halloween- which remains one of my favorite pieces of music to this day. BUT THEN, the next year she was given a strict curriculum in which she had to play all these stupid videos that taught us nothing while she just kind of sat there. in the corner. and then went insane and got fired. Genuinely a tradgedy. My cello teacher could tell what school his students went to apparently because the ones from my school knew literally nothing about music. I'm so mad. Teach your elementary school students weird music. Now. Let your teachers get creative.

The Kasterborous constellation is where the Planet Gallifrey, home of the Time Lords, resides.

"...You should've seen it that old planet. The second sun would rise in the South and the mountains would shine. The leaves on the trees were silver, when they caught the light every morning it looked like a forest on fire. When the Autumn came, the breeze would blow through the branches like a song..."

- Doctor Who, 'Gridlock'