School Library Journal» hamlet

A Choose-Your-Own-Path ‘Hamlet’ Comic Gets a Huge Boost via Kickstarter

SLJ — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 22:00:59 +0000

Canadian cartoonist Ryan North (@ryanqnorth) launched a Kickstarter campaign on November 21 with the goal of raising $20,000 for his book in progress, a choose-your-own-path version of Hamlet featuring 100 possible endings and illustrated by a small army of acclaimed comic book artists.

North had already paid 30 artists to illustrate his 80,000-word book, To Be or Not to Be: That is the Adventure, to be published by Breadpig next spring. But he wanted to get more artists on board for the labyrinthine project and turned to Kickstarter in order to pay them up front for their work.

North, author of the critically acclaimed Dinosaur Comics and the Adventure Time comic book series, hit his $20,000 goal within three and a half hours.

Eleven days in, he’d raised more than $220,000.

How did this happen?

A mix of factors: An original idea; early press about his Kickstarter success; and a link to a charitable cause. Breadpig donates all profits to charities, in this case the Canadian Cancer Society.

As for the book. Why did North, also a computer programmer, decide to create a game within a physical book instead of just making a computer game?

“I’ve spent many a happy day playing games,” he says. But he wanted to “create an object that is unusual.” Besides, “reading is more fun.”

Taking inspiration from Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) books he’d read as a kid, including The Cave of Time (Bantam, 1979) by Edward Packard and Space and Beyond by (Bantam, 1980) R. A. Montgomery (20 of whose titles were released last month as ebooks). North got to work work creating a version of Hamlet “like a play within a play”–make that 100 plays within a play–in which the reader chooses which Shakespearean character he or she wants to be, complete with comic avatar.

The CYOA line, launched in 1979, was Bantam’s first publishing endeavor for young people. Facing weak sales, Bantam gave away 100,000 CYOA books to libraries. Between 1979 and 2000, the books sold 250 million copes worldwide, according to the site.

North was also influenced by “the brilliant” author Jason Shiga, whose Meanwhile: Pick Any Path, 3,856 Story Possibilities (Amulet, 2010) is also a choose-your-own-route comic book, crafted from a complex algorithm. Shiga’s maze of possible narratives opens with the reader’s decision whether to select a chocolate or vanilla ice cream cone.

North used the open-source software Twine—which allows writers to compose their narratives graphically with a map, and re-arrange as they go—to keep track of his story lines. Readers can “jump between characters” and can expect to encounter up to 110 possible death scenes, he says.

The software “gives me a visual map of where the stories go and how they interact,” says North. “Twine lets you draw nodes and lines between those nodes. If you put text within each node, you have a map of what happens.”

One of those 100 story lines is Shakespeare’s original. “If you make a choice that Shakespeare made, you see a Yorick skull. So you can read through the play as Shakespeare intended it,” North says.

In the tradition of CYOA books, To Be or Nor to Be is “told in the second person. The narrator is telling you how you’re feeling,” North says. He also took the liberty of adding a pirate scene to the story.

The famously indecisive Hamlet informed his book structure. “I was thinking about the soliloquy ‘To Be or Not to Be.’ Hamlet’s talking to himself and he’s giving himself a choice,” says North, who had wanted to write a story about ghosts before hitting on the ghost-rich Hamlet tale.

Fortunately, “Hamlet is driven by a clear goal: Killing Claudius,” North says. “That is well-suited to a game book like this.”

As for the extra money, it will be plowed back into the book. In addition to featuring much more art, To Be or Not to Be will include a choose-your-own reversible dust jacket on a hardcover edition, plus a prequel, Poor Yorick, set 25 years earlier, in which a broke Yorick takes a job as a court jester.

On Kickstarter, North spelled out his plans for the funds as donations hit certain benchmarks. At $100,000: “What the heck, I will write a sequel book. You guys are crazy.” A choose-your-own-path Macbeth is one option, he says.

North requested that Breadpig give proceeds to the Canadian Cancer Society. “My original charity was going to be something that supported literacy,” he told SLJ. But after his wife was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma last year, he asked that the money go toward cancer research. As the Kickstarter campaign states, “By supporting this book, you’re also supporting research for a cure. That is really cool!”

His wife is responding well to treatment, he says.

The audience for To Be or Not to Be is “the same age that would read Hamlet,’ says North, noting that he really wrote it for himself, and “made sure everyone is keeping their clothes on.”

“I got my brother to proofread this,” North added. “I found out that all his life, he has been reading choose-your-own-adventure stories like regular books, from start to finish.”

Yo, Hamlet! Using Hip Hop With Your Students

Debra Lau Whelan — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 21:57:30 +0000

How one teacher uses hip-hop to unlock the classics

It’s not often that an English teacher working with poor inner-city kids ends up at the White House. But that’s exactly where Alan Sitomer was on April 26—standing in the Oval Office, cracking jokes and shaking hands with President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura.

Sitomer and 53 other State Teachers of the Year were invited to Washington, DC, to attend a Rose Garden ceremony honoring their hard work and dedication. But by Monday morning, the English teacher was back in his classroom at Lynwood High School doing what he does best—teaching students about classic literature through hip-hop.

Ask the teens in Sitomer’s class if they’ve heard of Ludacris, Tupac, or Nas and you’ll get a resounding yes. Ask the same kids if they know the works of Dickinson, Kipling, or Keats, and you’ll get the same answer. In fact, these teens are experts at analyzing the poetry of hip-hop and the world’s greatest writers—and they can identify the symbolism, imagery, and irony in both.

What’s so special about that? These at-risk students attend a severely overcrowded, low-performing school in East Los Angeles that’s surrounded by what Sitomer describes as “gangs, guns, and drugs.” Prostitutes work the streets just a half mile away from the school, and many kids can’t take the most direct route home because it would put them in danger. “We have students every year who are victims of gang beatings, stabbings, and shootings,” Sitomer says.

Life at school is rough, too. There’s a campus probation officer who tracks students wearing electronic ankle bracelets and a canine crew regularly sniffs students for drugs and gunpowder. Many of the students are in foster care or come from troubled homes, so it’s not surprising that more than 45 percent drop out. “My students would rather go to the dentist than the library,” Sitomer says.

But since Sitomer’s arrival in the fall of 2000, things have changed—at least for those who have taken his class. Lynwood Assistant Principal Al Rowlson credits the English lit teacher with boosting academic performance. An amazing 98 percent of Sitomer’s sophomore students pass the English portion of the California high school exit exam, compared to only 57 percent schoolwide. The 19 students in his college-prep class all enrolled in four-year colleges.

Sitomer’s teaching philosophy is simple: “I believe in validating students and their interests,” he explains. “If you diminish their interests, you diminish them—and then you’ll never reach them.” During his early days at Lynwood, Sitomer had many sleepless nights, feeling “tortured” by his students’ disinterest in learning. “One night, I just decided that I couldn’t handle that my students weren’t engaged, and they were unwittingly becoming victims of their own apathy,” he remembers. Bringing hip-hop into the classroom was a natural way to turn things around.

Of course, all the lyrics taught in class are free of homophobia, misogyny, profanity, and violence. “This isn’t MTV, this is a classroom,” he explains. “And I have high academic expectations of my students.” By the end of the year, students read 14 novels, as well as works by contemporary writers like George Orwell, Langston Hughes, and August Wilson.

Dressed in a pair of Sketchers, jeans, and a lavender button-down shirt, the 40-year-old Sitomer walks around his classroom, telling a bunch of 10th-graders about one of his favorite writers. “You gotta realize that Shakespeare was a really cool dude,” says Sitomer, who’s so laid back that he’s a pretty cool dude himself. “I mean, he put rhymes down on paper about the same stuff that Biggie, Tupac, and Ice Cube laid down some of their best tracks about.”

Sitomer goes on to explain that Hamlet deals with the abuse of power, greed, and feelings of desperate isolation, exactly the same things Tupac sang about in his famous song “Me Against the World.”

“See, that’s why we study literature,” Sitomer continues, adding that inside the works of great writers we find universal themes of humanity. The whole point? That great literature isn’t just about the past, it’s very much a part of our lives today.

“Is there anyone in this room who hasn’t felt all alone?” he asks, knowing very well that most, if not all, of his students can relate. “And have you ever wondered if it’s ‘you against the world’? Have you ever thought about whether it’s worth it to go on or, as the Great Bard put it, ‘To be or not to be?’”

Students shake their heads in acknowledgement and Sitomer knows he has a captive audience that really gets what he’s talking about. “When the bell rings and students are still talking about your lesson on their way out from class, that’s when you know you’ve hit it out of the park,” he says with pride.

Sitomer also knows his lessons are hugely successful because students often say that he’s touched them in some special way. A few years ago, for example, a 15-year-old walked up to him after class and handed him a note. It was a thank-you letter for saving her life. The girl, who was in foster care, had problems at home and was falling seriously behind in school, but when Sitomer introduced her to Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” his analysis of the poem moved her so much that she had second thoughts about committing suicide. “I made the decision that if one little poem could have such an impact, what could an entire novel do?,” Sitomer recalls.

That was one of many incidents that inspired Sitomer to start writing novels, and so far, he has three—The Hoopster (2005), Hip-Hop High School (2006), and Homeboyz (2007, all Jump at the Sun)—all of which deal with issues taken directly from his students’ lives. Lynwood High Media Specialist Martha Flores says Sitomer’s students are always in the library asking to check out his books. Even Disney took an interest, immediately signing Sitomer to a three-book deal.

The great thing about hip-hop, Sitomer says, is that it isn’t just an urban phenomenon—and since everyone listens to it, his teaching technique can be adopted by all educators (see “Using Hip-Hop with Your Students”). He’s so convinced that just about anyone can do it that he self-published a teacher’s guide called Hip-Hop Poetry and the Classics for the Classroom (MilkMug, 2004).

And his efforts haven’t gone unnoticed. In 2003, he was named teacher of the year by California Literacy, and in 2004 he won the award for classroom excellence by the Southern California Teachers of English. Loyola Marymount College, where he’s a part-time professor, recently named him educator of the year for teaching educators how to be successful in urban classrooms. And, last year, he won district teacher of the year, which of course, led to state teacher of the year and the White House.

With all of this national attention, other school districts are already trying to lure him away, and there have been offers to write full-time. But for now, Sitomer’s staying put. “I know I don’t need to stay in the classroom,” he says, “It’s simply out of love.”

Using Hip Hop With Your Students

Begin with a specific learning objective. The goal of bringing hip-hop to your students is to engage their interests while teaching them something of real academic value. However, when you first start to use hip-hop, it’s easy to find yourself adrift. Make sure you’ve planned a learning objective. That way, when things get exciting (possibly, a bit too exciting), you’ll know how to direct the conversation toward a specific academic goal. Utilize one or two core standards-based objectives as your compass. Teach irony. Teach subtext. Teach historical context. Just make sure you know where you’re going.

Choose your hip-hop intelligently. Despite what the media might lead you to believe, all hip-hop isn’t “gangsta rap.” I always do a short history lesson with my students, explaining that hip-hop, when it started in New York, was an artistic means of celebrating life and having fun. Then, like other artistic expressions, it changed, morphed, and grew in other directions. Some folks use hip-hop as a means to advance social change; some use it to create political awareness; some use it to express the frustration of their “inner city” experience; and some use it to simply dance and have a good time.

Encourage students to build bridges of relevance between hip-hop and academics. If you’re nervous about finding appropriate hip-hop, flip things around and let your students provide the hip-hop, while you provide the academics. Then, have your students meet you in the middle. You don’t need to be a hip-hop connoisseur to bring it into your class. Rather, illuminate whatever academic objective you wish, and then challenge your students to bring in a clean excerpt of hip-hop that uses the same literary techniques. For example, study Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem: A Dream Deferred” and teach about imagery, rhyme scheme, and implied messages in the text. Afterward, challenge students to find and explicate those same elements in a sampling of hip-hop lyrics.

Let your kids educate you. Nobody can teach anything that they don’t know themselves. Challenge your students to educate you about hip-hop. Have them write a paper explaining why their favorite hip-hop artist is deserving of literary merit. Instead of asking for the same old tired biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., why not ask your students to do a research project about Jay-Z or a PowerPoint presentation on hip-hop culture?

Acknowledge the reality of today’s world. Hip-hop allows you to infuse some much-needed passion, energy, and excitement back into learning. A great place to start is with your own favorite pieces of literature. Explain why you love a particular book or poem. Explain what you think it says and why you are a better person for having read it. Then challenge your students to do the same with their hip-hop songs.—Alan Sitomer