Burning Down the House

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 always gets me thinking.

Of the things that Bradbury targets, my personal television consumption is what I always end up thinking the most about; and it's what I ask my students to reflect on as well.

To introduce Fahrenheit this semester, I have broken my classes up into eight different groups. Each group will be responsible for researching a particular topic that I have chosen that in some way relates to the novel. Groups will consist of no more than three students and the topics include: American Television Habits/History, Reality Television, Social Networking, Violence and Sexuality on TV, and Censorship in America. Each group's task is to become the "in-house expert" on their particular topic. As they research their topics using both the web and the various databases provided by the school district, they must populate a wiki page dedicated to their group with credible information on their topic.

Here's why I like this activity:

• Students are creating content that will be viewed and read by their classmates.
• Students are relatively interested in the topics that this novel relates to. I find it interesting that a novel published in the early 1950s sparks discussion about MTV's Jersey Shore.
• I don't have to prepare and deliver eight different lectures on these topics. This activity allows for an alternative to the Transmission theory.
• This causes students to think critically about information that is available to them on the web.

I created the groups so that they were small. Partners would probably work the best but I began to experience difficulty coming up with topics after eight. Wikis are an important tool in my teaching. I have found that when used, wikis can provide one place, a neat place at that, for information that is directly centered on what I'm teaching.

Here's the link to one of our class wikis.

Students will work for about a day and a half (about 120 minutes) on populating their pages with information. They will spend an additional 40 minutes looking at the pages that their classmates created and responding to discussion questions that have been posted. At the end of two days, students will have been exposed to various topics that relate directly to the literary quest that we are about to embark on. It's like taking a day to plan the various routes that are available before a road trip.

This novel is one of the reasons that I decide, each year, to go without television for a few months. Each year it's the same. I dread the period that will be spent without the parlor walls and by the third day, I'm wondering why I own a television in the first place. In these times, solitude sometimes needs to be a conscious choice.