Star Trek TNG Darmok

SeeStar Trek Darmok.

Another night of insomnia, another blog post… Hmmm… pattern developing? Oh well, communication has been on my mind alot. As i posted last, there is power and strength in connectivity and relationships. My students are about to embark on our unit of westward expansion. The continual catastrophe that was contact between the Indigenous tribes and the American government and people was because of a number of things but communication and understanding was clearly deficient. I want my students to see that and to learn from that. They can only do better if we give them the tools to do better.

So as I laid in bed last night playing tetris on my phone (the ONLY video game I’ve ever enjoyed) I decided to continue my Star Trek TNG watching. I’ve slipped lately but before the episode began I remembered Darmok. If you haven’t seen it you need to. Its season 5 Episode 2. The short synopsis is Captain Picard and the Enterprise crew have to make contact and communicate with a species that they have never contacted before. There was no reference or prior understanding but they have to learn to communicate to survive.

The use of imagery and metaphor are relied upon heavily to resolve the situation. As I was watching I was typing out the guiding questions and tweeting with a few colleagues about my idea.

Let’s see how it goes…

And it began exactly like anything in a school needing technology does. The tech didn’t work properly. We did get it going though and all classes were able to watch the episode. It was really fun to see them get exasperated and frustrated with the miscommunication but began to understand what they were supposed to learn.

Then the magic word “codeswitch” came up. If you do not know what that is, read up here. The kids made connections with inside jokes, metaphorical stories, myths, legends, and other means of communication.

More exciting than successfully pulling this lesson off, I was just as excited about what I had understood better after watching the episode for the 6th time today, We have to know people to talk to people. Relationships take time, and I’m pretty sure that’s why they hurt when they go away. The support and structure those stories, memories, events, and jokes cannot just be “uploaded”. Again in partner with my previous post, we have to do this… We have to invest the time.

I cannot wait to read their responses next week!