The teacher gave an English class the following assignment:
James Shapiro wrote about William Shakespeare, “There are many ways of being original. Inventing a plot from scratch is only one of them and never held much appeal for Shakespeare.” Shakespeare, the English language’s most celebrated playwright, was famous for taking plots from other stories of his age and recasting them as plays. He’d change things in important ways, but even then the plots of plays like Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and As You Like It were recognizably lifted from other sources. Nowadays that trick could get him sued for plagiarism or at least make it so he had to pay royalties to the writers whose stories he used; in his day, though, no one minded, and now the only reason we remember most of the stories he stole is because he turned them into something better. For this assignment, I’d like you to steal a story. Please begin with a story that you’ve already heard--anything from a fairy tale to a myth to a movie to a book--and change it for your purposes. What you create will be partly allusion and partly pure theft. It should be at least 350 words, and I’d like you to write at the bottom what story you “stole” and adapted.
There are two novel ideas in this student’s work – the retelling of the story of Humpty Dumpty, and the change in format from a story to a news item.
I can get new ideas, or build on or combine other people’s ideas, to create new things within the constraints of a form, a problem, or materials.
I can get new ideas, build on other’s ideas and add new ideas of my own, or combine other people’s ideas in new ways to create new things or solve straightforward problems. My ideas are fun, entertaining, or useful for me and for my peers, and I have a sense of accomplishment. I can usually make my ideas work within the constraints of a given form, problem and materials if I keep playing with them.