By Elizabeth Sims, BubbleLife Intern
There are many things in life that will never be fully understood. The meaning of life, how the sky got its color and the concept of time are just a few of these things that hold certain sublimity for their indefinable nature. This idea of explaining the sublime is one of the main ideas in Herman Melville’s classic whaling novel, Moby Dick.
Recently, Coppell High School students who are enrolled in Amy Wilkinson’s Academy English III class studied this famous American Romanticism-era novel and attempted to expand upon musings of Ishmael, the book’s main character, about the white whale’s relation to the sublime. After reading and analyzing the novel’s 135 chapters, the students were given a project that put them in Ishmael’s shoes and challenged them to define an indefinable topic of their choosing.
“I wanted to get the students to be able to think about topics from multiple perspectives," Wilkinson said. "Sometimes we look at things from only one facet so I wanted them to get a chance to explore in depth something they maybe have not thought about before. Essentially, they were doing the kind of exploration that Ishmael did with the topic that they were interested in.”
In the interest of creating a challenge, Wilkinson put no limitations on the topics her students could choose, but she did recommend that the topics be abstract so they could be approached from four different angles. The students were asked to convey each of these angles through four different mediums: an expository essay, a piece of short fiction, an original visual piece and a wildcard of their choosing.
The topics, angles and mediums selected were as unique as the students themselves. CHS junior Francesca Graham chose to explore the meaning of happiness and conveyed it using an essay from the scientific perspective, poetry about the different feelings of happiness, photography and an instrumental piece on the ukulele.
“I picked happiness because I like the meaning of happy, and I like being happy,” Graham said. “It really gave me something to think about because you say random stuff throughout the day, and there are always those big topics that we never talk about like happiness. It was interesting because there really was no wrong answer because several different things could come out of the topic.”
CHS junior Keith Kellenberger decided to tackle the subject of wisdom and approached it from both social and philosophical angles. In this, he explored the characteristics of wisdom as well as what to seek when looking for it.
“From the social part, I found that it was easy to explain how you can find wisdom in elders pretty easily because if time is an unseen wealth, then elders have already spent it, so it is wise to learn from their decisions,” Kellenberger said. “It made me look differently on how I should treat my grandparents and how I should define wise people.”
With this being her first time teaching Moby Dick, Wilkinson wanted to focus on the idea that truth is unattainable rather than the small details of the novel. This is why she used this project to test her students rather than giving them a regular assessment over the book.
“The whole purpose of the novel is to show that truth is unattainable," Wilkinson said. "You can shine light on it, you can approach it, and that is valuable, but you have to understand that every perspective has its limits. So, a more authentic assessment than just testing them over what the book says was to see if they could do it themselves.”
Though they knew they would not be able to fully the define the topics, the students were able to discover new perspectives and develop new ideas about the indefinable. They shared their findings with their peers during presentations in hopes that they would be able to gain more insight into other topics. Regardless of the topic or the ways it was approached, the students became wiser as a result of this project.