For this year's work on Les Miserables, I gave the students a "yellow passport", a shout out to the paper that Jean Valjean brings with him to the Bishop's house at the beginning of the novel. The passport marks him as a convict and is the thing that will continue to hold him back from a life--a good life, an honest life, a better life. Though Jean Valjean doesn't become honest in the way, perhaps, the Bishop hopes he will, Valjean becomes a better man--and it's all because he left the worst part of him behind: The piece described on the yellow passport. My students were challenged to take something that they wanted to improve, regardless of how profound or superficial it was, and change themselves. They were to take their own personal "yellow passport" and become a better person as a result. They then had to extend the assignment into a symbol that represented the new them: Jean Valjean takes two silver candlesticks with him wherever he goes, a c...
Personal musings of Steven Dowdle