http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zlNkrb1FU5g#!

By Julianne Cauley
News Editor

Video by Sunil Rajan

Students lie in the main hall coughing with blood stained clothes tattered. Three paramedics clad in blue robes, masks and gloves run down the freshman staircase to attend to the sick students.

Two hooded men in grey sweatshirts with red bandanas covering their faces carry away the victims in a tarp and pile the dead bodies at the base of the stairs.

This reenactment on Friday of the Bubonic Plague by Clara Caussey’s Academy English class demonstrated a new approach to learning. The students are out of the classrooms and created an environment that fosters the understanding of the epidemic on another level.

“Not everything we do in my class is hands on, but this one lesson I really felt was important to teach differently,” Caussey said. “When I created this assignment last year, I had noticed that my students were having trouble what research was all about. It is not copying and pasting information, but rather it is about synthesizing the information to put it to use somewhere.”

Caussey’s projects are usually presentations. In this assignment, the students are challenged to prove they really know the material instead of simply reading off of a screen.

“My favorite part of this assignment was the fact that I was not in a desk,” sophomore Alex Irizarry said. “We really had to do it. Like I was a victim so I researched all my symptoms and really had to absorb the knowledge of what I was supposed to act out.”

The students are given three days to research the 1349 Bubonic Plague, specifically in London. The students assume the roles of victims and responders. In order to reenact the plague as realistically as possible, they even look into what victims wore.

“I had one of the worst variations of the plague so I was not alive for very long,” Irizarry said. “One predominant symptom I had was coughing up blood, so I had to take swigs of Gatorade and cough it up on my shirt. It was funny to see the nurses trying to help us. They would try to give us ointments for the pain and fluids for hydration. There wasn’t much that they could do, we were too sick and dying too quickly.”

The students act this out in one of the busiest areas of the school. Heads turn and many are confused with what was going on.

“The hardest part was actually sticking to my part,” Irizarry said. “All these people kept walking in the hallway were asking me what I was doing. But I was dead and I could not say anything. They probably thought I was weird. They just walked on by. At one part, you have to be carted off and because I died quickly I had to just lay there for 20 minutes and act as if I could hear and sense everything going on around me and just be still. For me, it was really hard to just sit there and do nothing.”

While the task challenges some students’ acting abilities, it also challenges their research and how they approach learning.

“This task challenged them and their research ability,” Caussey said. “They had nothing in their hands besides their props to use to remember what they learned. They had to solely rely on their research and how well they learned to absorb information to apply it.”

While some students may prefer traditional teaching methods and lectures, Caussey’s students are excited for the different style.

“I really liked it because we had to read it, absorb it and then act it out,” Irizarry said. “This forced us to remember it and not do the copy and paste research some of us are used to. I really prefer this hands on approach to learning. I feel like I learn more about it if I am experiencing it. Because of how we were graded, we really had to know our stuff to remember it and then act it out correctly.”

They are assessed on two different things: an annotated bibliography and their performance.

“I am actively walking around with them watching and listening and voice recording notes over whether they fully understand the symptoms of the plague and how it affected everyone,” Caussey said. “They were graded on whether they reacted appropriately to each other. I am hoping that these kinds of assignments really allow them to learn something and let it stick with them.”

This reenactment of the Bubonic Plague is a perfect representation of the inventive nature of Coppell High School.