Jessica Handly

Jessica Handly

Star Wars Day

I was born in 1977. The year Star Wars was born.

As a child, my imagination was captivated by all things Star Wars. I have very fond memories of playing with my younger brother; every snowdrift was a scene from Empire Strikes Back. Every bicycle ride was a speeder race away from Stormtroopers on Endor. I was Leia. My brother was Luke. We loved Star Wars, and though life intervened sooner rather than later, and we drifted away into other worlds of our own choosing, Star Wars was always with us. It was a place we always returned to, grabbing those old VHS tapes, and later DVDs, when we felt the need to stay inside and watch the snow drift down on the world of Hoth outside our windows.

Fast forward to 2009.

As an adult, I chose to become a teacher. I loved writing, books, mythology, literature. The most exciting day in my career was the first time I was asked to teach a Literature class. Shakespeare, Frost, Chopin, what wasn’t to love? These were literary gems to me, authors who had created beautiful worlds, using words as a paintbrush over the canvas of the mind. I could stand there for hours talking about literature, and so I did. But this foray into literature was not as easy as I’d hoped. I had thought my love of the written word would spill from me into my students. They would drink it up as I did, once, when I sat at the desk in their place. But to their young minds, Shakespeare seemed like a foreign language. Frost and Chopin? Antiques someone brought down from a dusty shelf.

How to reach them?

I remember quite clearly that late autumn evening, feeling frustrated and bent over my lesson, struggling to find a way. The television played on low, as was often the case while hashing through lesson plans late into the night. Suddenly, a familiar theme. Something that struck a chord from my childhood. Something pushed aside but never forgotten. I looked up … and two hours later, I knew what to do. 2021. I’ve been teaching for twelve years. I’ve taught hundreds of students English Composition, Creative Writing, Reading, and Literature. Of all those classes, my most favorite lesson is what my students have come to call Star Wars Day. It is the most engaging, most thought-provoking, inspiring lesson I have developed in all twelve years of my career. It is engaging to my students, who learn about the Quest, the Hero’s Journey, and Mythic Archetypes without falling asleep in their lattes and bagels.

It is thought-provoking, as they make connections between the journeys of Luke, Rey, Anakin, and Kylo-Ren, and how they are very much like other characters they know from other movies and stories. They raise their hands and

call out in class (I truly don’t mind), and they tell me, that’s like Moana … King Arthur … Hercules … Iron Man. They make connections between what they know and draw on previous experience to explore what they don’t know. They learn about the hero’s call to action, and perhaps our hero doesn’t initially want to go, but leaves the safety of their home to find a better way, a new world, a treasure. And when I tell my students that they are on a quest, and that they are the hero, and that they have to face challenges and find the treasure, their eyes widen. Yes. The lights go on. Yes. Facing the challenge of classes. Yes. Education is their treasure. Yes.

I tell my students about Joseph Campbell, who wrote The Hero of a Thousand Faces and inspired George Lucas himself. They tell me they’ve heard about Campbell in this book or that movie, and didn’t realize he was connected to Lucas, but of course it all makes sense. My students in turn, inspire me. They tell me I should read these books and those movies, and I do, learning about their world as they learn about mine. It is a shared inspiration, and it all comes together because of a series of movies that was born the same year as I was, and has given so much to my life. I now pass that gift on to my students.

Someday, my students will look at this lesson I created for them, this Star Wars Day. They will look back on it as I look on my own youth and the world Lucas built. My classroom became for them a place they could live in the moment, in a galaxy far, far away. There, they learned about quests and archetypes in a way that hardly seemed like learning at all. There, they could make connections and feel like they were a part of something bigger, even if it was just for a little while.