The Zombie of It All
Inviting zombies into your classroom can help your students pay attention to where pop culture and literary analysis meet.
Welcome to From the Teacher’s Desk, where we take turns further reflecting on our episodes and applications to the classroom.
Here’s what you need to know: I think I first really fell in love with teaching when I invited zombies into my classroom.
It started when I was writing the curriculum for my third new class in two years. I was trying to figure out how to engage students with poetry and short story analysis - without relying on a textbook to write the lessons for me. That’s when I came up with the idea of using zombies as a theme, and then the rest fell into place.
Zombie 101
If you haven’t yet watched the YouTube video series “The History of English in 10 Minutes", you really need to check it out. It’s got a lot of great information about the complex relationship between British colonization and language development.
Chapter 6, titled “English and Empire” teaches that the word “zombie” originally entered English from West African culture. And if you look deeper into the etymology of this word, you’ll find out that it originally meant “fetish”, not “reanimated corpse.”
When I originally played with bringing this idea into my classroom, I simplified the zombie origin story to say that the word originally meant infatuation - not too far off. And realistically, this opens a lot of interesting doors for character and theme analysis through the lens of life-altering obsessions.
The idea of zombies as dead bodies come back to life can be traced back to Haitian voodoo culture. Then there was Night of the Living Dead. Then there was Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. And it’s all basically been downhill from there.
The Modern Monster
Sarah and I have talked a lot on our podcast about the hero’s journey and elements of mythology that are reflected in pop culture. But zombies are crucial to discuss with students because they remind us that humans have never stopped analogizing the world around us.
When we don’t understand something about our world, we make up stories about that unknown. This is true from the time we are children, and it just keeps going. Monster mythology is most often rooted in cultural fears of the mysterious. Vampires in Dracula represent fear of independent women. The Creature in Frankenstein represents fear of scientific advancements. And early British witch trials were also used to convict potential werewolves - the earliest version of serial killers captured in England history.
The mythology around zombies has functioned as a metaphor for human consumerism. They have represented our lifelessness when we are immersed in technology in movies like Warm Bodies. And they speak to something beastial at the core of our humanity, something that is brought out in moments of desperation and hunger and disease.
Undead Classroom Resources
When you encourage students to look beyond the brain-eating stigma of zombie undead, you’re also challenging them to look beyond all stereotypes they are handed in their world.
We already know that social media has negative psychological impacts on young adults. But what if you encouraged students to dig into their addiction to their tech devices? Help them own their own narrative and discuss how they act and are treated like zombies when they have a phone in their hands.
You can use zombies to practice literary synthesis. You can use zombie pop culture examples to introduce etymology and discuss the evolution of a word throughout history. Or (just in time for Halloween) you can talk monsters and zombies in general as a platform for a real conversation about fear in your classroom.
At Lit Think, Sarah and I are firm believers in the value of putting the real world in the hands of your students. It just might bring your most disengaged student back from the dead.
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