One of the reading strategies I really enjoy using is called Phony Document, which I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve taken from the book Content Area Literacy: An Integrated Approach <\/i>by Thomas W. Bean, John E. Readence, and R. Scott Baldwin. In a nutshell, the teacher creates a document that sounds highly credible and authentic, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s entirely made up. There are a number of forms that this can actually take, but I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m going to share one I use before I teach Julius Caesar<\/i>.<\/p>\n
One of the things we do before reading Shakespeare\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s play is to read an excerpt from Plutarch\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s biography on the historical Julius Caesar. I do this in part because Julius Caesar<\/i> is a hefty play both in terms of language and themes for ninth and tenth graders (the two grades I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve taught it with) to grasp, so I frontload with as many historical details and pre-reading activities as possible before we delve into the play itself. After reading Plutarch\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s biography, I present them with a critique of Plutarch\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s account written by a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Dr. Shripner,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d who is the writing clone, if you will, of a mother I know who lives on an island with her LCB and three small people. The critique is as follows.<\/p>\n
Excerpt from Dr. James Shripner\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Commentary on Plutarch\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Biography of Julius Caesar<\/p>\n
While Julius Caesar has many biographers, perhaps the most famous and reputable of them all is Plutarch. In particular, Plutarch\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s compelling account of the days leading up to Caesar\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s assassination has, in the past, been considered to be largely accurate. Despite this, however, there are any number of contemporary scholars who question the validity of his account. Due to several inconsistencies and more than one testimony that pushes the bounds of rational thought, the authenticity of Plutarch\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s biography needs to be thoroughly reexamined by a new body of scholars.<\/p>\n
The section of the biography that has received the most scrutiny in recent years is the account of the supernatural events that occurred directly before Caesar\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s assassination. The least controversial details of this section are the descriptions of the lights in the sky and the crashing sounds, which can fairly easily be explained as a severe storm of sorts. Much more controversial are the eyewitness accounts of men on fire walking through the streets. According to Plutarch, one man even walked the streets with his arm on fire, but when the fire was extinguished, his arm remained unharmed. Furthermore, skeptics question the philosopher Strabo\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s claim that when Caesar made an animal sacrifice, the animal\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s heart was missing, as this certainly goes against the laws of nature.<\/p>\n
Another widely questioned aspect of Plutarch\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s account of Caesar\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s death involves the soothsayer. According to Plutarch, witnesses say a soothsayer warned Caesar of a great danger that would befall him on March 15. When March 15 came, Caesar seemed to think he was out of danger, but the soothsayer reminded him that the day was not yet over. Shortly after, Caesar was in fact murdered in the Senate. Before the actual murder, however, the soothsayer again tried to warn him by handing him a small document warning him of the plot against him. Caesar apparently appeared to attempt to open the document to read it, but was distracted by the people who kept wishing to speak to him. While the soothsayers were not uncommon in Caesar\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s day, it is questionable as to whether one would have been able to get as close to the great Caesar as this soothsayer is said to have done.<\/p>\n
Finally, according to Plutarch, during the actual assassination of Caesar, apparently everyone who supported his leadership (and there were more than a few who did) stood stunned and made no effort to stop his assassination. This, a growing number of scholars believe, is the most implausible part of Plutarch\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s biography. How is it possible that all of his friends stood by and watched while he was stabbed some thirty-three times? Did the statue of Pompey really become \u00e2\u20ac\u0153drenched in his blood\u00e2\u20ac\u009d while all his friends watched and did nothing? If only he had been stabbed once or twice, perhaps the case could be made that there was not enough time to respond to his death. However, is it really believable that all of his friends, even Antony, were \u00e2\u20ac\u0153too afraid to even utter a word\u00e2\u20ac\u009d during the entire stabbing and after the stabbing were too afraid to leave the Senate to notify the outside world? While technically possible, this seems improbable, leading many to add this scene to the list of questionable details in Plutarch\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s biography.<\/p>\n
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m a terrible person, really, so I must confess I have frightening amounts of fun with this. Before we begin reading, I casually start throwing out comments like, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Have any of you heard of or seen Dr. Shripner? He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s one of the most famous historians of our day, with regular gigs on the History Channel and several major news networks. He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pretty geeky, you know, as you might expect, tweed jackets with elbow patches and all that good stuff.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I paint a predictable picture, and inevitably, a few heads start nodding in recognition and often a student or two will \u00e2\u20ac\u0153remember\u00e2\u20ac\u009d seeing him on TV. I try not to get too exuberant about the whole thing, but, well, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s usually a futile attempt on my part.<\/p>\n
Within the document itself, I imbedded two or arguably three mistakes. It is extremely telling to note which students notice the mistakes and which ones actually voice their observations.<\/p>\n
After we read the commentary and discuss it, I reveal that Dr. Shripner is a figment of my imagination. After the initial uproar subsides (more fun for everyone ;)), I ask students to explain why they believed Dr. Shripner was real and credible prior to my revelation. Their reasons usually go something like this:<\/p>\n
This is the fodder for potentially endless discussions on evaluating the credibility of everything from their future college professors to internet sources. More than anything, it encourages students to be critical readers, listeners, and thinkers, but our subsequent discussions also reinforce key details in the events leading up to Caesar\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s assassination. Furthermore, I do a great deal with the use of persuasion within the play itself, so we discuss the persuasive elements of both Plutarch\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s account and Shripner\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s commentary.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s highly enjoyable stuff for geeks like me. (Just to qualify the depth of my geekiness, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve rewritten two acts of Shakespeare\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s plays just for fun<\/i>. Y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122all don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know the half.)<\/p>\n
If no students bring up the embedded mistakes of their own volition, which sometimes happens, I ask if anyone wants to challenge anything in the commentary. We then go through the mistakes individually.<\/p>\n
The mistakes are as follows:<\/p>\n
You can certainly modify this strategy as needed, by perhaps including incorrect analysis or incorrect terminology, for instance, instead of incorrect information. How you craft your phony document would depend on your goals for the lesson. The only downside is that once you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve used the strategy, the jig is up, so it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s difficult and probably inadvisable to reuse it with the same group.<\/p>\n
Interestingly, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been over two months since I introduced my students to my friend Dr. Shripner. And yet yesterday, with a new lesson I presented that included some historical information, my students started asking if I was pulling a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Shripner\u00e2\u20ac\u009d on them and making up parts of the information to challenge them.<\/p>\n
Didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t I love that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the reading strategies I really enjoy using is called Phony Document, which I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve taken from the book Content Area Literacy: An Integrated Approach by Thomas W. Bean, John E. Readence, and R. Scott Baldwin. In a nutshell, the teacher creates a document that sounds highly credible and authentic, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s entirely made up. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1023],"tags":[1361,1356,1360,1355,1359,1357,1358],"class_list":["post-2226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","tag-content-area-literacy","tag-julius-caesar","tag-julius-caesar-pre-reading-strategies","tag-phony-document","tag-teaching-critical-reading","tag-teaching-julius-caesar","tag-teaching-phony-document"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}