February 15, 2006
Students find humor in history
Hysterical Biography class creates comedic 1930s radio-style play
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
Weaving in a dumb-as-a-post miner, a shady operator and Godzilla, seven homeschoolers are learning history by writing a comedic 1930s radio-style play about California's Gold Rush era.
The students are part of Mike Henry's Hysterical Biography class, which teaches research, analysis, writing and oral presentation skills to the students using a large dose of humor. A veteran teacher of homeschool students, Henry envisions the nine-week course, which meets Monday mornings, as a fun way for students to boost their communication skills while learning history.
"I just think that all kids have amazing talent that they might not realize they have," said Henry, a Fife Lake resident, who is pursuing a master's degree in post-secondary education at the University of Phoenix. "Once they start exercising those creative muscles they realize that they can do it."
The first few weeks of the nine-week course had the students, mostly teens, writing a range of assignments with a historical theme, including poetry and short stories. They conducted their research out of class, delving into the Internet, books and encyclopedias. Henry discussed how to discern reliable sources on the Internet as well as research methods.
The next phase included starting a major research project and writing scenes for the play.
"I'm not really a writer type of person but I think it's helped," said A.J. Barker, 16, who previously took a class taught by Henry. "[Research] is fun but it's hard to find any information, you'd think it would be a pretty well-known topic but obviously none of the miners wrote anything down, there's just a couple of first-hand accounts."
Ashley Steele, also 16 and a homeschool junior, has taken numerous classes with Henry over the years. She has performed in two other productions his classes have written and produced. One of the biggest benefits to her education has been the writing practice.
"When I first started with the writing, I wrote a short story and stretched to get it to two pages," she recalled of a class a few years ago. "For this last writing assignment I had, it was a stretch to keep it under six."
For the past three Hysterical Biography sessions, students have worked to blend their ideas for plot, characters and comedy. They wrote scenes on their own and worked during class to integrate ideas while making everything consistent and flow together.
"It was, 'OK, how do we put these together,'¡" said Steele of the collaborative process "Some things were put in and others taken out. Godzilla was in one of the student's short stories so we were joking about it and we thought it was too funny to leave out of the script."
The resulting work, currently titled 'Dumsa and the Mother Toad' is a high-energy comedy the students will perform as a dramatic script reading of their work on March 6 at the library. A second class this spring with Henry will transform the script into a play that will also be performed for other homeschoolers and the public.
Henry began teaching homeschoolers in 1997 during a year-long period of unemployment. He had spent 17 years in youth ministry and, drawing on previous career experiences as a journalist and radio personality, decided to offer his services as a communications professional.
"I decided that there's a lot of homeschool kids out there who are really good at math, science and history but how do you get the kids to learn communications skills," he said. "I put it in one of the local homeschooling newsletters and I had two parents jump at it, but between them they had five kids."
"I started with a small comedy workshop and the kids really blossomed, they just loved it," Henry noted.