Mentor Text: Rod Serling’s closing narration from the Twilight Zone episode ‘The Monsters are Due on Maple Street’
Techniques:
- Conclusion
Background – In my Grade 11 course, we focus on a theme of Society: Power and Voice. Within that theme, we do a dystopian literature study. This year, we studied Fahrenheit 451 and Lord of the Flies. I’ve discovered, in my nerdiness, that a couple of episodes of The Twilight Zone pair nicely with these texts, and allow us to explore some ideas – ‘Time Enough at Last” pairs nicely with Fahrenheit and we can consider the nature of mob mentality by looking at what happens in ‘The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street’ and LOTF.
And whenever we watch those episodes in class, I’m motivated to continue working my way through my complete box set of the original Twilight Zone series.
And continually adding to the lessons plans inspired by this show in my notes app.
As I watched a batch of episodes recently, I was struck by Rod Serling’s bookend narrations for the episodes. I realized that in his closing narration for ‘Maple Street,’ Serling was offering us a great mentor text for a part of writing that many of our writers find challenging.
How we might use this text:
Conclusion – I feel like many of our writers have to be “untaught” some of the writing practices they’ve been inundated with, particularly the practice of sharing miniature versions of the body of their pieces in the introduction and conclusion. The suggestion that they restate their thesis often results in a restatement of many of the things they’ve written.
Serling offers a model for this that is powerful. It is obviously easier for him where he’s dealing with a narrative, and we can discuss the value of including narrative elements in all types of writing at another time.
He doesn’t restate the thesis of the show as much as he re-presents it. It’s a little hyperbolic – he mentions bombs and conquest, which aren’t necessarily present in the episode. This makes it powerful, and memorable – a “mic drop moment” like we encourage them to use because of their resonance.
As a result of its placement and purpose in the show, it feels like a separate, summative statement. We could pull it out of context, and it is still thought provoking, and debateable. This is what we might encourage our writers to do with their own conclusions.
If you’ve read my posts before, you know how excited I get when the geeky stuff I love has classroom applications. Honestly, I’ve come close to buying a notebook solely to keep beside the couch, so when I’m watching The Twilight Zone (as well as the 80s reboot, and my Tales From The Darkside box set… I love an anthology show!) I can jot down lesson ideas. Though my first inclination is to craft responses to the episodes, I’m realizing that there are writing prompts and mentor texts in there as well.
What are your best mentor texts for conclusions? Is there something you’ve been using for another classroom purpose that you’ve recently realized works as a mentor text as well?
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