Dante Lessons for the Classroom

This is a handout that is used to serve as an introductory - prereading excercise for Dante's Inferno.  The handout has places that students are to write down bad experiences (of different sorts) that they have had in their lives - then good ones - and finally, it asks the students whom they would ask to have as a guide (if they could have anyone) to see them through these events in their lives.  Then we leave our classroom and as we go downstairs to the forbidden basement - I ask them to look at each of the negative events that they wrote down.  When we read the bottom - we talk about who they have as their guide.  Next, we start looking at the positive events that have happened in their lives (but never say them outloud) and we return up the stairs to our room. 

When I first saw this film I remember how well it fit in with the Summer Seminar that I was taking at NYU on the Renaissance.  Then when I got back home I realized how well it fit in with everything that we did in my senior World Literature class.  I use these movie questions and show the film after we have done a brief unit on Dante (see these handouts), and after we have spent a day talking about the poems of Pablo Neruda.  The students do get such a big kick out of seeing these ideas brought together.  There are of course references to everything that we've read - and these can easily be adapted for your own class room.  There is an attached version that does not have The House on Mango Street mentioned but does have A Long, Long Time Ago referenced.