Psychology of a Villain

Okay, so the above video is not exactly relevant to the title, seeing how Batman is more of a hero than a villain. Then again, he does have issues of his own…

That’s not important. What is important is that that video, in conjunction with my assignment on Columbine, provided the foundation for my first ever “Unit Plan!” Despite minimal training with curriculums, I ended up having to write one. It was a daunting task (like the majority of graduate school has been) but being the ambitious individual I am, I attacked it head-on. And honestly, I actually kind of like it.

The overarching goal was to understand who a villain is and what makes him/her the villain in the story. This came from the idea from the Columbine shootings. For the longest time, the media and really everyone involved thought they understood why they did it. Yet skip ahead about ten years and the reality was that we didn’t until relatively recently. So this unit plan poses those questions: Who is the villain? What makes him so? Why does he do the things he does? Is it because he is evil? Why he is evil? What is evil?

This unit plan tries to answer all that by allowing the students to explore these issues through readings and discussion. As an English teacher I had to sprinkle in a few writing assignments naturally, but most of them are personal exploratory pieces to simply get the students thinking deeply about these issues. The major piece of writing is a character study in which a student explores all the above questions focusing on a single character and tries to access whether or not a character is sympathetic in their brand of evil. I believe that is an interesting twist and truly challenges a student to think critically on the questions I pose.

My favorite part may be how a bookend the unit plan. I would ask a few questions at the beginning, record the answers and then ask the questions again and see if the answers change. That would judge whether or not my students understood the lesson and if their perspectives changed based on the experiences within the lesson. That is the most important of teaching after all: developing the minds of students and watching them grow within the classroom.