Lesson Plan

Day: M T W T F
GATE

Date: 17.02.16 Time: 13:45pm Year: 10

Learning Area: English Topic: Short story conventions

Curriculum content description:
Analyse and evaluate text structures and language features of literary texts
and make relevant thematic and intertextual connections with other texts
(ACELT1774)
Create literary texts with a sustained voice, selecting and adapting
appropriate text structures, literary devices, language, auditory and visual
structures and features for a specific purpose and intended audience
(ACELT1815)

Students prior knowledge and experience:

Students have prior knowledge of some short stories and their conventions
from their studies in years 8 and 9
Students have prepared for the creative writing component of NAPLAN in
year 9
Students have analytical knowledge of conventions

Learning purpose:
Using terms associated with literary text analysis (for example narrative,
characters, poetry, figurative language, symbolism, soundtrack) when
evaluating aspects that are valued and that contain aesthetic qualities
Writing or speaking about how effectively the author constructed the text
and engaged and sustained the readers/viewers/listeners personal interest,
creating a range of students own spoken, written or multimodal texts,
experimenting with and manipulating language devices for particular
audiences, purposes and contexts.

Learning objectives:

On completion of this lesson,

students will be able to:
Understand the conventions of
short story writing
Implement conventions of short
story writing in the beginning of
their own creative short story
with a focus on manipulating
language devices for particular
audiences, purposes and
contexts

Evaluation:

Visit students as they are engaged

with their creative writing process,
ascertain they understand the
parameters they are working within,
advise where necessary

Preparation and Resources:

Copy of The Plague for each student
Whiteboard

Catering for diversity

Two students on the autism spectrum received notes about their abilities
High functioning
talks/answers questions without being asked
EA to help
Auditory lesson with visual components to engage both styles of learning

Timing Learning Experiences:

1:00
1. Introduction:

5-10

Introduce the topic of short stories with students. Find out which
conventions of short story writing they know about, write them on
the whiteboard so everyone has the same information.
Plot, narrative structure, tense, style (Diction, Sentence Structure
and syntax, Figurative Language), Theme, Symbol, setting,
context, characterisation, P.O.V.
2. Sequence of learning experiences:

15-25

Hand out to students and read the short story The Plague by Ken
Liu. Have students read through the story again, highlighting the
above conventions they find.
Discuss the story in relation to the film Independence Day as well
as the construction of the story, focusing on how effectively the
author constructed the text and engaged and sustained the
readers/viewers/listeners personal interest.
The Plague:
The human need to improve the lives of those that are different
Technology gone to far, cautionary tale
Dual P.O.V
De-familiarisation making a familiar place into something
strange
Characterisation is well developed in a short time, developed
through though, the others observations, self reflection
plot development is done well through juxtaposition of
perspectives
Metaphor for the colonisation of indigenous peoples
She ends up doing to him what he wanted to do to her irony
Context American-Asian writer, written in 2013,
Independence Day:
Features technology
Hard science fiction
Simplistic
Characters clumsy, clich,
Iconic imagery
Two mediums of science fiction film and short story the film
uses clich characters the American fighter pilot, the various
families, in order to relate to audiences, the iconic imagery of the
Whitehouse blowing up, Will Smith dragging the alien across the
tundra/desert. Short story uses imagery to create the setting, to

engage the reader, the characters are well constructed.

Humanistic.
How does the author engage readers?
What is the setting? How is it constructed?
What is the P.O.V? How does this position us?
How does the author achieve characterisation?
What could be the themes being explored?
What do we make of the 'telling' section?
What can we say about the ending?

15

Start students on a creative writing exercise start writing your

own science fiction short story 300 words two points of view
Focus on experimenting with and manipulating language devices
for particular audiences, purposes and contexts. Set parameters
science fiction genre, aim to utilise diction and figurative language
to engage your audience plot/plan the story for a particular
purpose. Run through how to plan a story beginning, middle, end
know how it will end, what you want to achieve with your story.

3. Lesson conclusion:

Reiterate how The Plague is constructed to make the reader feel

through the use of juxtaposing perspectives the author engages
the reader, develops the plot, uses irony for the ending, imagery is
utilised to create a world in a very short space of time. Two
mediums of science fiction and how they utilise these conventions
in different ways.

Lesson Evaluation:

The lesson went quite well though I think it would be helpful to know exactly
what I will say to start the lesson, I only had a vague idea of what I would be
talking about and not what I was actually going to say. I think when reading
out the short story I wanted to give the students some information about the
author, to give them context, I did this a bit later in the lesson, it would have
been better before reading the story out. The questions I wrote out in my
lesson plan were helpful, I didn't end up needing them all, it was good to
have many to choose from. I felt like the lesson was a bit messy there were
so many points I wanted to get across and it felt scattered and rushed in
places. Perhaps more detail in what points need to be made and when would
help. In terms of behaviour management, I let some students talk over
others or talk while other students were asked to give an answer. I didn't
detail the behaviour management processes that are in place in the
classroom in my lesson plan. I need to wait longer for students to quiet
themselves utilise the pause instead of talking over them. The learning
objectives for this lesson were reached satisfactorily.

The Plague
Lessons on life.
Im in the river fishing with Mother. The sun is about to set, and the fish
are groggy. Easy pickings. The sky is bright crimson and so is Mother, the
light shimmering on her shkin like someone smeared blood all over her.
Thats when a big man tumbles into the water from a clump of reeds,
dropping a long tube with glass on the end. Then I see hes not fat, like I
thought at first, but wearing a thick suit with a glass bowl over his head.
Mother watches the man flop in the river like a fish. Lets go, Marne.
But I dont. After another minute, hes not moving as much. He struggles
to reach the tubes on his back.
He cant breathe, I say.
You cant help him, Mother says. The air, the water, everything out

here is poisonous to his kind.

I go over, crouch down, and look through the glass covering his face,
which is naked. No shkin at all. Hes from the Dome.
His hideous features are twisted with fright.
I reach over and untangle the tubes on his back.

I wish I hadnt lost my camera. The way the light from the bonfire dances
against their shiny bodies cannot be captured with words. Their
deformed limbs, their malnourished frames, their terrible disfigurement

all seem to disappear in a kind of nobility in the flickering shadows that

makes my heart ache.
The girl who saved me offers me a bowl of foodfish, I think. Grateful, I
accept.
I take out the field purification kit and sprinkle the nanobots over the
food. These are designed to break down after theyve outlived their
purpose, nothing like the horrors that went out of control and made the
world unlivable.
Fearing to give offence, I explain, Spices.
Looking at her is like looking into a humanoid mirror. Instead of her face I
see a distorted reflection of my own. Its hard to read an expression from
the vague indentations and ridges in that smooth surface, but I think
shes puzzled.
Modja saf-fu ota poiss-you, she says, hissing and grunting. I dont hold

the devolved phonemes and degenerate grammar against hera

diseased people scrabbling out an existence in the wilderness isnt
exactly going to be composing poetry or thinking philosophy. Shes
saying Mother says the food here is poisonous to you.
Spices make safe, I say.

As I squeeze the purified food into the feeding tube on the side of the
helmet, her face ripples like a pond, and my reflection breaks into
colourful patches.
Shes grinning.

The others do not trust the man from the Dome as he skulks around the
village enclosed in his suit.
He says that the Dome dwellers are scared of us because they dont

understand us. He wants to change that.

Mother laughs, sounding like water bubbling over rocks. Her shkin
changes texture, breaking the reflected light into brittle, jagged rays.
The man is fascinated by the games I play: drawing lines over my belly,
my thigh, my breasts with a stick as the shkin ripples and rises to follow.
He writes down everything any one of us says.
He asks me if I know who my father is.
I think what a strange place the Dome must be.
No, I tell him. At the Quarter Festivals the men and women writhe

together and the shkins direct the seed where they will.
He tells me hes sorry.
What for?

Its hard for me to really know what hes thinking because his naked face
does not talk like shkin would.
All this. He sweeps his arm around.

When the plague hit 50 years ago, the berserk nanobots and biohancers
ate away peoples skins, the soft surface of their gullets, the warm, moist
membranes lining every orifice of their bodies.
Then the plague took the place of the lost flesh and covered people,
inside and outside, like a lichen made of tiny robots and colonies of
bacteria.
Those with moneymy ancestorsholed up with weapons and built
domes and watched the rest of the refugees die outside.

But some survived. The living parasite changed and even made it
possible for its hosts to eat the mutated fruits and drink the poisonous
water and breathe the toxic air.
In the Dome, jokes are told about the plagued, and a few of the daring
trade with them from time to time. But everyone seems content to see
them as no longer human.
Some have claimed that the plagued are happy as they are. That is
nothing but bigotry and an attempt to evade responsibility. An accident
of birth put me inside the Dome and her outside. It isnt her fault that she
picks at her deformed skin instead of pondering philosophy; that she
speaks with grunts and hisses instead of rhetoric and enunciation; that
she does not understand family love but only an instinctual, animalistic
yearning for affection.
We in the Dome must save her.

You want to take away my shkin? I ask.

Yes, to find a cure, for you, your mother, all the plagued.

I know him well enough now to understand that he is sincere. It doesnt

matter that the shkin is as much a part of me as my ears. He believes
that flaying me, mutilating me, stripping me naked would be an
improvement.
We have a duty to help you.

He sees my happiness as misery, my thoughtfulness as depression, my

wishes as delusion. It is funny how a man can see only what he wants to
see. He wants to make me the same as him, because he thinks hes
better.
Quicker than he can react, I pick up a rock and smash the glass bowl

around his head. As he screams, I touch his face and watch the shkin
writhe over my hands to cover him.
Mother is right. He has not come to learn, but I must teach him anyway.

The Plague copyright 2013 by Ken Liu