QR Challenge: Poe and the Doppelgänger

Created using the ClassTools QR Treasure Hunt Generator

Teacher Notes

A. Prior to the lesson:

1. Arrange students into groups. Each group needs at least ONE person who has a mobile device.

2. If their phone camera doesn't automatically detect and decode QR codes, ask students to

• Download a QR reader (e.g. I-Nigma | NeoReader | Kaywa) onto their mobile devices
• Bring these devices into the lesson.

3. Print out the QR codes.

4. Cut them out and place them around your class / school.

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B. The lesson:

1. Give each group a clipboard and a piece of paper so they can write down the decoded questions and their answers to them.

2. Explain to the students that the codes are hidden around the school. Each team will get ONE point for each question they correctly decode and copy down onto their sheet, and a further TWO points if they can then provide the correct answer and write this down underneath the question.

3. Away they go! The winner is the first team to return with the most correct answers in the time available. This could be within a lesson, or during a lunchbreak, or even over several days!

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C. TIPS / OTHER IDEAS

4. A detailed case study in how to set up a successful QR Scavenger Hunt using this tool can be found here.

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Questions / Answers (teacher reference)

Question	Answer
1. How does Poe portray the motif of the doppelganger, or character double, in his two tales of 18 39, “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “William Wilson”?	Though Poe examines the doppelganger in both “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “William Wilson,” he emphasizes different aspects of its character in the two stories. For example, in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe presents the possibility of a complete split between mind and body in the twin siblings of Roderick and Madeline.
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3. What do the twins represent?	The siblings are an external representation of the philosophical relationship between mind and body, but become overly identified with their respective halves of the equation. Insofar as sickness plagues both siblings, Poe suggests that a complete split between mind and body is ultimately impossible.
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5. What about in William Wilson?	In “William Wilson,” Poe is less interested in the external agents of mind and body than in their internalized effects. The narrator’s alter ego, in fact, embodies a figment of the narrator’s own paranoid imagination.
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7. Why does the narrator create this doppelgänger?	The narrator creates a physical doppelganger out of his own mental pathology. When the narrator attempts to resolve this rivalry with the plunge of a sword, Poe demonstrates, as in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the bodily effects of mental disease. However, the narrator’s attempt to murder his foe is actually an act of suicide, as his hated competitor represents a part of his own being. If Roderick and Madeline represent the external components of the mind-body split, then “William Wilson” condenses these two components into one body haunted by a split personality.
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9. How is family portrayed by Poe?	Family haunts us - we love them and we hate them so we are ever in conflict

 

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