AP Literature seems like a boring class. Many would expect a lot of reading, writing, some analyzing, more reading, and more writing. In some cases, that pretty much sums up the course. However, Ms.Heidecker takes a different approach. She feels that it’s better to excite students with information than to bore them with it. Especially considering she only teaches seniors.
How does she do it? Well, she often has activities that involve coloring, communicating in small groups, games, and a whole bunch of other enjoyable and engaging activities. She says to her students, “I remember being a second semester Senior. I don’t want to bore you to death.” However, she takes it to a whole new level when it comes to Hamlet. She sets up an escape room in C200 filled with themes, symbols, and quotes seen throughout the play. From a larger point of view, the entire escape room has a common underlying theme in every puzzle. To make it even more engaging, she makes it a competition between all of her class periods, promising the fastest class extra credit on the final Hamlet test. There were a total of three escape rooms. The first one covered Acts I and II, the second one covered Act III, and the last one covered Acts IV and V. Everything went pretty smoothly for the one for Acts I and II and the one for Acts IV and V escape rooms and everyone seemingly had a good time.
When it comes to the Act III escape room… things got a little messy. It was a situation of sabotage. The escape room for Act III followed the common theme of concealment so a lot of clues and symbols were hidden. One of these things was a fake dictionary hidden in Parkland’s library. However, the dictionary ended up much more hidden than it was intended to be. For two of Ms. Heidecker’s 6 class periods, the book was moved into a place that even the Librarians had a difficult time finding until a class period after the two. Ms. Heidecker then had to simply tell those in the two unlucky class periods what was inside the fake dictionary because not only could the book not be found, but also so much time was lost in the search for an unfindable clue.
While the book was found before the last class of the day, it is still unknown who moved the book out of its rightful hiding place. It has been narrowed down to a class period, but that is all the information on the topic that anyone has received. Though, what’s done is done and the two bookless classes won’t get back the time that they spent searching for something in all of the wrong places.
