Gold. What do you think when you hear that word? Being rich? Maybe jewelry, or a bank? But when you think of gold, you might not think of a metaphor, or as Johnny Cade once said to Ponyboy Curtis in the Outsiders, “stay gold”.

In Humanities for the past five weeks, we have been reading the Outsiders, and trying to figure out how that all connects to worldview, and how people have different worldview depending on their location, age, class, etc. Before we even looked at the book, we learned about worldview, and and what our worldview was, we learned how the Outsiders could teach us about worldview and made a MindNode around worldview to show ours, then we did the usual need to knows and adult world connections (the Winter Exhibition). Next, we read the book. We asked questions at each chapter interval and explained what was happening throughout the book as well. We did this to make sure we knew what was happening in the book, why it was happening, how it was happening, and who was involved. We also made a character deck to show that we were learning about the book and to show we knew who the characters were and what their worldviews were.

Then we made a movie trailer. This movie trailer wasn’t supposed to be like the book, it was supposed to be the book, but based in 2021! I was in a group that I would be in for the rest of the project, with Ruby, Julia, Francis, and Kira. Everyone found that our movies trailer was clear, and had a good idea based around it. Next, we made a paragraph, like the first paragraph in the book, but set in 2021. We didn’t spend a lot of time on it, but it was fun to do and think of. Later, this would help us with our tableaus.

Before we worked on our tableaus, we made a movie poster that only featured ourselves, kind of like our last Humanities project (Medium is the Message- click here to read it!). After we made that movie poster, it was time to get into our tableau groups! The first thing we did in our tableau groups was find out what scene of the Outsiders we were going to do for the Winter Exhibition, and make a movie poster representing that scene, before we transpose the scene to 2021! Our scene was the burning church scene where Johnny and Ponyboy go to save the children from the church that was burning down to the ground. Before we did any tableau work, we individually made a movie poster to go along with the tableau scene, but with the whole group in the photo. When we were all done, we made a decision on whose poster was the best (we decided on Kira’s based on the cool silhouette). 

Now it was time to do the tableaus. After coming up with a lot of different ideas, we found an idea that worked for us, and found a good way to transpose the scene to 2021. Instead of using a burning church for the 2021 scene, we were going to use the floods that were happening in the interior! As a tribute to all of our hard work, we watched the Outsiders movie from 1983, making a sketch note about the movie to make sure we were listening.

Finally, the Winter Exhibition came, and we showed off all our hard work with two tableaus from each group, one from when the book was written, and one from 2022! This was a great experience, and we really pulled it off and made a great performance! I hope you enjoyed this blog post and learned something today, as I certainly did throughout the last 3 months!