I am Gudrun Lutz, the teacher of the 12th grade English Leistungskurs of the TG (Technisches Gymnasium) Offenburg in Southwest Germany in the school year 2000/2001. I´d like to explain a few things about our project which might be of interest to other teachers.
How it all started
We are now in the fall of 2001. We had the idea of reading Harry Potter in class one year ago, at the beginning of the school year. It was 2001 before we could start working with the book because at first I had to check a few things. We all had to buy and read the book (the school, by the way, wouldn´t pay for it because it is not „real“ literature). We spent about 6-7 weeks doing classroom and computer work as well as quite a bit of homework. Of course it was not possible to create the whole website in class, so I decided everyone should do their own part mostly at home and then pass the data on to me.We had several discussions about the design. Two of us drew the Hogwarts picture, someone else worked on the formatting of the headlines, yet another person waited for the others to get done in order to be able to start working on the image map itself. In between we then changed the structure of the whole site.
Data started piling up on me; some files got lost, others suddenly existed in 5 different versions and it was not always obvious which was the latest one. Additionally I had to stop working at school in the summer and from then on could only occasionally communicate with the students via e-mail. I still got some help from one or the other, but things of course got more complicated. However, here we go. We got it done!
Reasons for making this Harry Potter website
One of the reasons why I decided to publish the results of our work on the Internet was that I thought this way our work would be more fun. We would have a goal and then later we could show others that we really DID something.Another reason was that I couldn´t find anyone else who had ever worked on an English-version Harry Potter book in a German class an intensive class like our „Leistungskurs“. I found many websites describing how English students read the book(s) in English or German students in German, but no one had ever said that they had tried our combination. If others are interested, why not show them how we went about it and what we did. The simplest way to do this, of course, is via the Internet.
And a third reason was that I assumed that at a technical school with students of the computer generation, it wouldn´t be too much additional work to quickly turn the results into a website. Well – I suppose I was wrong here. It is a lot of work and I had clearly underestimated how much time this project would eat. However, I still believe it was worth it and I would do it again, although I have to admit I would structure things in a different way and thus waste less time in class. (If you´re planning a similar project and want to know what exactly I am thinking of, contact me via e-mail.)
Why read Harry Potter at all?
The reasons to read Harry Potter at all are fairly obvious, I think. Of course, it is basically a children´s book, but then again, it wouldn´t be on all those best seller lists if there weren´t people of all ages reading it. Why is that so? These books are pure fun, and I don´t see why I shouldn´t take advantage of this fact as a teacher. I know very well it would be „better“ to read Shakespeare, Arthur Miller or G.B. Shaw in a „Leistungskurs“, like we did when I was a student – however, I also remember that we didn´t enjoy it very much and that a lot of students (even later at the university) never read the entire plays but only the summaries and comments. And that´s not to mention how students went about when it got to lengthy novels.I believe it is a good book to start with in 12th grade because it is easy to understand, fun and exciting. I don´t know anyone who read chapters one and two and wasn´t glued to the book until they were done reading it. This is the most important fact, because you can´t really work with a book if half of the class hasn´t read it cover to cover. That problem just doesn´t show up with Harry Potter.
This takes us to step 2. With this book, you can practise a lot of literary techniques as you would with any other novel. You can see some results on this site: summaries, characterisations, background information on the author, on the origins of characters and their names (which, in Harry Potter´s case, takes you back to classical mythology!), work on some critical articles, personal comments etc. All this includes a lot of work and a lot of creative writing by the students - and they mostly enjoy doing it, too. What more do I want?
Procedure
This is how I decided to go about the project. Note that I put the writings immediately on the computer before going on with the next step.1. Read the book (during Christmas break)
2. Gather ideas about the structure of our work and then of the website as we would like to see it in the end.
3. Write chapter summaries to make sure we all know what´s happening in what chapter and to have something where we can look things up if we´ve forgotten about some detail (these summaries were more difficult for the students than I expected. Some students went into every detail, others left out important facts. It´s something you really have to practice, and not everyone who takes a Leistungskurs knows how to write a proper summary!).
4. Read a couple of articles on the book(s) or the author, as well as an essay by the author herself (in magazines like Newsweek, Time Magazine or Spotlight); extract the most important information on the author and look for additional information on the Internet; write a paper on everything you found interesting and worth mentioning.
5. Write short personal comments about what students enjoyed most throughout the whole book. The idea her is to know what aspects to focus on in order to hold the students´ interest.
6. Select general topics that might be of interest when discussing the book as a whole. Choose broader topics to work on in pairs, choose smaller topics (like characterisations) to work on indivudually. This is of course the biggest part of everything. We included a short list of some of our ideas on an extra page but you can also get to the topics using the intro page.
7. Find out about the names of people – are they telling names? Explain those roots and origins.
8. Discover and discuss some of the philosophy of the book, general statements about life, friends, good and bad etc.
9. Quickly create the website and upload. :-)
For items 1-8 we had 6 ½ weeks with a maximum of 5 classes (45 min. each) per week. Altogether we must have spent about 30 hours in class on Harry. We didn´t always have access to the computer room when we would have needed it. I can´t really estimate how much time students spent working on the project outside of class.
Secondary literature and other sources
I drew a lot from Elizabeth Schafer´s Sourcebook ("Beacham's Sourcebook For Teaching Young Adult Fiction: Exploring Harry Potter" -- Elizabeth D. Schafer), which is a great help for teachers. On the Internet I also found an abundance of ideas on how to work with the book. Of course students usually read the book in their native language, and since they are much younger than my students, a lot of the tasks aim at a different level than what I was looking for. However, you do get quite a bit of inspiration browsing through all these Potter sites. On our website, we included a list of sites which might be of interest to you and I apologize if they don´t exist anymore, or if there are others (better ones?) that weren´t there when we did our research.Here are the websites which I found particularly useful for teachers:
There is a list of the few articles we read and used.I used some of the ideas that I found under www.connectingstudents.com - I tried to check with the author if she minds but never got an answer. There were a lot of good ideas on www.primaryresources.co.uk/harry/philospher2.htm. I also checked www.scholastic.com/harrypotter/books/guides/sorcerers_stone.htm for ideas. There was a good list - a lot of it in German though - on www.lesefoerderung.de/interest1.htm (about books, interviews, biographies, articles and essays etc.).
Computer Questions
No, I´m certainly not a computer guru or know much about these matters. I was just brave enough to dare saying „Let´s turn this into a website“, hoping it can´t be that difficult after all because everyone seems to do it and there is a lot of easy-to-understand software that helps you. This is the first website I have ever worked on. I know it is anything but perfect and I´m sure it could be done much better, and perhaps we´ll have the time to improve a few things once we´ve received some reactions. However, it will never be perfect and that is fine with me: we are not a computer class but an English class and we did a lot of the work in our free time.Special thanks to Bastian for helping me again and again. It wouldn´t have worked out without him, I suppose!
Enjoy!
Well, and that´s about it from my side. Let me know if you´ve tried a similar project. Let us know how you like our site and email us:
