Our version of the Titanic sets sail this week. We'll study the ship, read about Ballard's discovering the wreckage, and then, right before vacation starts on Friday, I'm setting the kids on sail aboard the cruise liner. The week they return from vacation, they'll take small paper versions of themselves and play a random elimination game to see who gets to survive, which will be six or seven only from each class.
It's a slightly gruesome and yet extremely cathartic exercise.
Oh, sure, some of the students draw their mini-selves with inflatable rafts and wet suits and everything from magic wands to giant flying savior-seagulls. Nothing will help.
Much like the actual Titanic, their paper-survival depends solely on chance and a strong dose of luck ... and some random pieces of paper with their fates scribbled across in calligraphy ink. It may be over 100 years to the day that the Titanic sank, but it will be a long two weeks before my kiddos discover their fates.
In the meantime, I'll enjoy the strange notion that 70+% of each class will end up stapled into the water or on the sinking bulletin-board ship. It will be uncomfortable for a while, those of us whose fate rests at the bottom of the blue construction paper ocean, but we'll all feel better when the board is full and the game is over. Then we can compare ourselves to the rest of the non-survivors with conversations that always sound unnaturally morose yet gleefully sinister to other classes:
"So, how did you die?"
"Oh, man, it was so cool. I fell onto the propeller and got sliced in two."
"I had smokestack fall on me!"
"Not me. I ended up in a lifeboat with all girls. They made me row."
"I ended up on the iceberg."
"Dude!"
Bring on the sinking! Lifeboats be damned.
