September/October 2006
Tablet Autopsy
Elizabeth Cullen
I’ve worn many hats – that’s typical of independent school faculty. In my case I began as a teacher, transitioned into the technology department and ended up a media specialist. I love how the following lesson seamlessly integrates the goals of all three roles; ideally all our lessons should.
Last spring, eleventh grade English teachers were looking for an additional curriculum novel. They wanted to reflect the values and/or history of the nineteenth century, to include an "other voice;" (ie., no more dead white guys), and, it had to be not-too-long, compelling, and interesting to resistant readers. As an eleventh grade English teacher, I was part of that meeting. After it, I went downstairs, put on my media specialist hat and went to work to find this wonderful, yet-to-be-named novel. It was a challenging search!
In the end we chose Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The author claims to have written a true account of a murder, but García Márquez is notorious for stretching the truth. As a novel it presented the opportunity to study a Latin American writer, to talk about magic realism, and to discuss the reliability of a first person narrator. Further, it connected to the curricula – both the social roles in late nineteenth/early twentieth century Colombia and to students’ previous science knowledge.
The author uses four of his one hundred-twenty pages to describe the fatal wounds and autopsy of Santiago Nasar – quite a gruesome description. However, I found that my students did not remember and visualize all of the appropriate anatomic vocabulary so as to be sufficiently horrified by the description. Coincidentally, I had been looking for an opportunity to incorporate our new PC tablets into a lesson. I decided to project a simple anatomical drawing so that students could perform an "autopsy" of sorts while labeling the structures García Márquez describes, using the stylus on the PC tablet.
Vocabulary
- Liver, anterior side
- Stomach
- Transverse colon
- Small intestine
- 3rd lumbar vertebra
- Right kidney
- Abdominal cavity
- Thoracic cavity
- Encephalic mass
- Hypertrophy of the liver
- Hepatitis
- Hemorrhage
- Cranium
- Trepanation
We hypothesized about which of seven wounds might have been the fatal blow. Students were surprised when they realized how deep a single stab wound must be to penetrate the stomach and the pancreas. One student was particularly alarmed when "…they both kept on knifing him against the door with alternate and easy stabs, floating in the dazzling backwater they had found on the other side of fear" (118) She commented, "the twins kept stabbing him…and that the knife was going into the door."
Then, we began the autopsy. Using the stylus as a scalpel we removed a large portion of Santiago’s cranium and began to examine his liver and small intestine. I asked students to pace off the length of an average small intestine so that they understood how much material was removed, thrown into a bucket, and given an "angry blessing." (76) When Father Amador describes the autopsy he performed in the novel he says, "It’s as if we killed him all over again after he was dead." (72) This was the goriest part of the procedure, but they were equally impressed that the body cavity was then filled with quicklime. Fr. Amador had intended to preserve the body with quicklime, but instead, he hastened the decomposition and Santiago Nasar had to be buried much earlier than the family would have liked. Students imagined García Márquez’s "craftsmen’s tools" (75) used by the priest as "a saw and hammers," or "butchers’ knives, meat hooks, horror movie kinds of utensils." Despite their interest in CSI-type television shows and the savvy they thought watching such shows gave them, they were interested to know that every piece of the corpse was examined, not just the areas that received direct wounds; "they practically took the whole body apart."
Students were clearly engaged, and in the end two things happened. I got the "Eeewwww, that’s disgusting!" reaction I was looking for, and we had a great discussion of the realism side of magic realism. My students understood many more of the subtleties of those pages and appreciated the brutality of the murder much more than they had before the exercise. They have told me that the murder and autopsy seemed much more gruesome to them after the tablet lesson. "I got to see what exactly was injured and where the body part was. I was able to really relate to what was being examined in the book." "I could see where he had been stabbed and the extent of the injuries he would have received."
García Márquez’s magic realism inspired me to use my classroom tablet in a new way. I think we sometimes struggle as professionals when it is time to incorporate a new technology, but this lesson was a great success. Students quickly recalled their previous science vocabulary, reminding each other of former knowledge and taking most of the classroom leadership in that phase. Colleagues and parents who have seen the lesson have been very supportive, and it is my hope that the eleventh grade teachers will "steal" it next year. Certainly the next time I teach this novel, in Spanish or English, I will use this technique again.
In all, the tablets have gotten a positive review by students and teachers. I love the flexibility my tablet gives me in the classroom. Students say, "We are able to see pictures of things we are learning about easily. Also, we are able to interact with the teacher and other students." "…it mixes class up a little by doing something different and it’s tree friendly – we don’t have to print out mountains of paper when it can just be pulled up on a projector." The St. Paul’s School for Girls technology philosophy has always been to use it when it enhances curriculum, and clearly in this case, it did.
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Elizabeth Cullen has been the media specialist at St. Paul's School for Girls in Brooklandville, MD for two years. In September, 2006 she will return to the classroom, teaching Spanish at Western High School, the oldest all-girls public school in the nation.
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