The Transformation Machine

My students crawled through a cardboard box.

Teachers are always on alert for new ideas for lessons.

I had a bunch of cardboard boxes at home. Deliveries, right? A few of these boxes were huge. I was thinking I could use these boxes in the classroom somehow. It was my second year teaching Language Arts in middle school, and I’d learned that teachers didn’t waste materials. We used everything we could. Anything could be put to use in a lesson or project.

I also remembered that when I was a kid, my brother and I would build forts out of sofa cushions and blankets.

Boxes + Forts + Lesson = Fun Activity in Seventh Grade!

The lesson was going to be about transformation.

I wanted to introduce the kids to the concept of transformation in stories. 

In the beginning of a story, the hero is one way. By the end, the hero is another way. The hero has changed. 

A hero grows from squire to knight or from dishwasher to chef. 

A hero grows from singing in the shower to singing on stage. 

A hero grows from weak-willed to strong-willed, from sad to happy, from bullied to brave, from shy to expressive, from hopeless to hopeful, and so on.

How does the hero change in such a dramatic way? 

The hero changes by working through the difficult adventure of the story. They change through experience.

Before we started reading a story or a novel, I wanted the kids to have this concept in their heads. It was a quick way to appreciate, from a bird’s-eye view, what a story can do. I wanted to make stories accessible and meaningful but in a shorthand way.

Kids are often resistant to stories, especially those we read in school, because kids think stories are puzzles that adults have created just to drive kids crazy.

I wanted the students to feel powerful when they approached a story. I wanted the kids to see stories as adventures, not puzzles.

So I created The Transformation Machine.

I created it out of cardboard boxes, construction paper, tape, and blankets. I let the kids decorate it as well. They festooned it with fabric and string and other scrap materials.

I arranged The Transformation Machine in the front of the classroom. Several boxes were connected in a makeshift tunnel a student had to crawl through. 

I turned the activity into a game as well. They had to mime their Before and After states of being. A student had to mime what they were before entering the cardboard tunnel and then, after emerging from the tunnel, mime what they’d turned into. The rest of the class had to guess.

I was expecting Caterpillar to Butterfly, Tadpole to Frog, and Kitten to Cat.

I got something else.

A student acted like a dog, crawled through the tunnel, and then acted like a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Another student acted like a turtle, crawled through the tunnel, and then acted like an old man limping with a cane, which apparently was me, Mr. B.

Oof.

I was only forty-five. Come on now.

As a teacher, I was always surprised by the ways kids could misinterpret my instructions. I could tell the class to take out their journals, and each student would do something different. One student would fall to the floor. One would leave to get their backpack. One would ask if I had their journal. Another would open their laptop, and another would want to call home. 

This was middle school, and to survive with my sanity intact, I had to broaden my sense of humor about the human condition, like, really broaden it. 

I also had to learn to clarify my instructions, model the behavior, laugh at myself on a daily basis, and do a practice run of the project before I asked the students to do it. 

Back to The Transformation Machine . . .

It was clear the kids understood the general concept of transformation. 

Technically, they had changed from one form into another form: a dog into a dinosaur, a turtle into an old man, and a praying mantis into a horse. But they didn’t quite understand the subtler idea that there should be a connection between the Before state of being and the After state of being. 

There should be growth, not just change.

My fault. I should’ve called it The Growth Machine.

So that’s when I decided on a modification.

The student would have to write down their transformation on scrap paper and show it to me for approval. Once I approved their idea or helped them modify it, the student could begin.

The student would not be able to speak. They could only act and make gestures. So the student would break out of an eggshell, enter the tunnel, and emerge flapping their wings. The rest of the students would have to guess the transformation based solely on the two performances. 

We kept the game going until the cardboard boxes tilted and warped, the blankets slipped off, and the machine collapsed. 

What was left, however, was a great memory.

I hadn’t lectured. I hadn’t passed out a worksheet. I hadn’t written on the board. Instead, we’d done an activity together.

We’d dramatized the lesson.

We’d made it physical and real, if a little silly. We’d played a game with a bunch of cardboard boxes, and we’d transformed those boxes into something magical.

For the rest of the year, I could now refer back to The Transformation Machine. 

“Remember when we did The Transformation Machine?” 

Of course, they did. That was the day Mr. B. crawled through three cardboard boxes and almost destroyed the thing before the game even started.

But they remembered.

I owed the germ of the lesson to Blake Snyder, author of the Save the Cat books on screenwriting. He called movies Transformation Machines. A hero goes on an adventure and changes, radically and permanently, by the end of the movie.

You can track this transformative change, in many movies and novels, by noting what Snyder called the First Image and the Final Image. 

When we first meet Neo in The Matrix (1999), he is asleep at his desk, alone in his room, and surrounded by computers. A message on his computer tells him to wake up. At the end of the movie, Neo is talking on a public telephone, surrounded by people, and is telling the bad guys that he’s going to wake up the world.

You’ll notice this a lot in movies and novels. Some of the contrasts between First Image and Final Image are heavy-handed, and others are subtle. In the beginning of Die Hard (1988), John McClane is cocky and well groomed and holding a giant teddy bear. At the end, he’s beat to hell, humbled, and hugging his estranged wife.

So I had in mind Blake Snyder’s Transformation Machine, with its First Image and Final Image, when I built the cardboard fort for my seventh-grade Language Arts class.

Yes, it was an activity for young kids, but it was also a serious lesson about imagination, human potential, growth, and storytelling. 

And maybe also a warning that turtles and teachers will eventually grow old.

Oof.
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