What's your dragon?

I'm teaching a class this semester called Character Development. Funny story ... about a month ago, as semester one wound down, my boss said, "Would you like to teach PE?" I cheerfully replied, "Nope!" He said, "Debate?" A firm shake of my head.

I spent the following weekend wracking my brain for ideas, mostly gravitating towards something interdisciplinary that would allow me to bring more art and film into the classroom. When I was an undergraduate at Rollins, one of my favorite courses was called Anger. A handful of faculty rotated lectures about anger based on their interest and speciality (philosophy, art, religion, literature) -- and it was way cool. I remember looking at the angry brush strokes in Van Gogh's Wheat Fields and examing the angry motivation of those creepy boys in Lord of the Flies and considering the anger of the Old Testament Hebrew God. Loved it. So, I coupled fond memories with a dire need among Camino students ... and out popped a course called Character Development.

This past week, my students and I watched How to Train Your Dragon. Okay, not exactly high art, but judge me not. The film is actually quite sweet, plus it interested me because it examines ideas I thought might resonate with teenagers, among them forbidden friendship, as well as fear. Since, I reasoned, fear is a basic human emotion, surely the kids would connect.

We talked at length about things we are afraid of, the usual suspects such as spiders and heights making top appearances. (Christian, whose sole aim is to shock me said he's afraid of being gang-raped in a prison. I countered, "Guess you'd better stay out of trouble.") I try to sneak in every bit of reading I possibly can, so I had the kids match character descriptions to photographs of artists' renderings. I showed them TED videos of folks conquering their fears and in so doing, realizing gains they never imagined. And we chatted at length about Hiccup's various fears and his rather unconventional solutions to them. In a nod to the skills-based education freaks, we even made cause-effect charts and converted them to sentence frames. Ah, I thought, all is humming along nicely in room 212.

Finally came my grand finale: a paragraph. Yes, the dreaded paragraph.

Two minutes before the end of class on Friday afternoon, I said, "This weekend, my friends, I want you to write a paragraph describing your dragon -- and how training it could lead to a better world for yourselves."

When the shouts of, "We never have homework" died down, Ivan, the biggest kid in the freshman class, with a look of utter confusion said, "But Miss, we don't have dragons." I took a deep breath and said with all the patience I could muster, "Yes, true, but I was speaking symbolically." Ivan's confused look persisted.

In desperation, I looked at the girl corner of the room, where a gaggle of overly-made-up lasses, although typically disengaged from my lesson, usually grasped my general aim. Allie, with her head lolling in her hand, said, "Miss?" And I hopefully replied, "Yes, Allie? You have a question about the homework assignment?"

"Nah," she said. "I just wanted to ask ... Why are you so pretty?"

Dragons, indeed.