This index contains titles or subjects of articles, essays and comments on this site along with a brief description. Articles are stand-alone pieces, while essays and comments tend to be my responses or observations on a Thought of the Week. If you have comments or ideas, please contact me. 

Articles

Brain-based teaching and the Hero's Journey: The Hero's Journey approach to teaching literature conforms to the most current research in how the brain learns. 

Threshold Guardians: Myth and legend are replete with fearsome "guardians of the gate," but we see them in other literature, films and in our own lives. 

Using film: Legend: Legend is an older film, but in for teaching archetypes, symbols and the Hero's Journey, it is hard to beat. 

The film Fly Away Home in the classroom: For younger students, the film Fly Away Home can be an engaging, enlightening example of the Hero's Journey pattern. 

Illustrating the Hero's Journey pattern: An ever-expanding outward spiral is perhaps the best way to illustrate the pattern of the Hero's Journey. 

The Yin-Yang Symbol: This ancient Chinese symbol of duality and harmony intrigues students and provides an interesting approach to finding insights in literature and film. 

Student writings: Two student writings, done by ninth graders under the time pressure of a test, show interesting insights into characters and relationships in the films Hook and Field of Dreams. 

Themes in Fahrenheit 451: Most people think of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 as a book about censorship. Actually, censorship plays only a small role. There are other, much bigger and more important themes in the book. 

Book Review: Finding Flow: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book Finding Flow explores how to live a richer, more rewarding life. Much of what Csikszentmihalyi has to say relates to how we view our roles as educators. 

The Journey and the Essay: The Hero's Journey pattern clearly applies to literature and life, but can we use it to teach students to write a good essay? Yes, we can. Here's how. 

Themes in Jurassic Park: Mathematician Ian Malcolm's insights suggest dangers and paths to our individual hero's journey. Ideas for teachers on using Malcolm's insights for discussion and research. 

Bet it's not in "The Simpsons": Challenged to prove the Hero's Journey is everywhere, author Reg Harris found not just three journeys in one episode of The Simpsons. 

Essays and comments

Comment (Dec 15, 1997): There really is no "meaning" to an experience. Events just "are," and we supply their meaning from within ourselves, based on the interpretations supplied by the "myths" we have chosen to live, by the masks (or personna, as Jung would call them) we have chosen to wear. 

Comment (Jan 5, 1998): ". . . the movement of change is as much the builder as the destroyer," and so is the movement of the Hero's Journey, which is the process of change. To reject the call to growth and change is to reject all that gives life... 

Essay (Feb 23, 1998): The concept of self realization, that is of making the self real (being and acting out of who we really are), is at the core of the Hero's Journey archetype. However, to realize and express the self, one must first discover one's true self, and this process is the essence of the quest. 

Comment Mar 2, 1998): ...we are indoctrinating our children into the crisis at earlier and earlier ages, and it should be little wonder to us that we see our young people turning to alcohol and drugs for escape or relief. 

Comment (Mar 16, 1998): If learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem, perhaps this is why so many of our students, who have so little self-confidence and self-esteem to begin with, rebel at learning anything. 

Comment (Jun 01, 1998): Synchronistic events are often a part of the Journey. They take the shape of an unsettling combination of coincidences which generate the Call. They are the helpers who show up at just the right time with just the right form of aid. They are they ironies in our lives, those strange justapositions which give us sudden, often painful, insight into our condition and ourselves. 

Essay (June 15, 1998): ...when something goes wrong, when the scope of our world view or values is not large enough to incorporate an experience..., we are called to enlarge our world view and re-examine our values. This is the call to the adventure of redefining our self or expanding our understanding to incorporate the new experience. 

Comment (Aug 10, 1998): It is only against the ground (background) of the villian that we can see the qualities of the hero. The figure of Hamlet becomes who he is because he is contrasted with Claudius, Laertes, Gertrude and Horatio. Figure and ground are inseparable. One gives life to and defines the other. 

Comment (Aug 17, 1998): ...our journeys, as individual as they may seem, are really just one activity of the whole system of life. This would also support the concept of synchronistic help coming to those who have accepted the call and stepped over the threshold. 

Comment (Sept 28, 1998): This could be one source of the "Call" in the Hero's Journey. Leaving things "unfinished" creates tension, and when the tension becomes strong enough, we are "called" to do something about it... 

Comment (Nov 23, 1998): Our problems in school are not going to be solved with more information. Information is readily available. We need to help students develop the skills to digest the information and turn it into knowledge. Computers will not do this. 

Comments (Dec 7, 1998): The student must get beyond abstracting the material, putting it "out there," and involve himself or herself in the experience of the reading or viewing. Engagement must precede creativity. 

Essay/Comment (Dec 14, 1998): This sounds like a description of much of our school system: so bogged down in ideas and techniques, plans and outcomes, assessment and evaluation that it no longer addresses the reality of experience -- and many of our students know this. 

Essay/Comment (Dec 21, 1998): When we seek to control a system (a process, our environment, and even our lives and future), we fix in our mind a vision of an "end." By fixing on that vision, we upset the natural flow of the journey, and (because of the narrowed focus) we block our awareness of options which might be better suited to our needs and growth. 

Essay/Comment (January 18, 1999): The call to adventure comes when the discrepancy between reality and our perceived reality (colored and distorted by our own projections) becomes intolerable. Jung likens the veil of illusions spun by our projections to a cocoon. 

Comment (April 5, 1999): Mentors must remain detatched in the sense that they must provide support and understanding without attaching themselves to the results. They must remember that the Journey must be taken by the initiate, not the mentor. 

Comment (May 24, 1999): One of the great goals of the Journey is to learn to trust: to trust the universe, to trust the flow of life, to trust in the natural balance and harmony of existence. Ultimately, journeys seem to lead us away from the obsession with planning and control, with a fixation on the future, with desires and preconceptions.