Today I was asked by my friend (her daughter appeared in the trailer for my book "The Coming Evil") who teaches sixth grade Gifted-and-Talented to come in as a special guest speaker and talk about...

Star Wars.

Yep. Nothing but Star Wars. These kids were taken out of their regular classes to come up in the school's attic, watch some of Episode IV (they're supposed to watch the whole thing next week) and talk about Star Wars. Don't you wish you had that kind of class schedule?

More specifically, I was brought in to talk about the mythological archetypes that George Lucas used when crafting the original tale that launched a thousand stories. For about half an hour, I went over archetypes, the Hero's Journey, Joseph Campbell, etc, etc.

Once my session was through, the kids were pretty vocal that they had not been away from Math long enough and wanted me to take up a little more time. Remembering what it was to be a student dreading Math, I obliged and opened up for a small Q&A session.

Holy CRAP.

For forty minutes non-stop, we had a lightning round. These kids were asking all kinds of awesome Star Wars questions. "Why is it that, if the Sith have the Rule of Two, that Sidious has more than one apprentice in the Clone Wars (thinking of Ventriss and Grievous, which I had to educate him on their true standing)?" I had kids wanting to know how much of Grievous was still organic and why he was like that. They wanted to know why there were different color lightsabers--or "glowing sticks" as some of the kids called them. What did "Darth" mean? How many "Darths" have there been throughout SW history? Why can people understand R2? How many planets are there? What species is Ahsoka? On and on and on.

It was awesome. I came back from that thing on such a high. I never thought all that useless SW knowledge would ever come into play, but I tell ya, when you're locked in a room with nearly 30 sixth-graders who are hungry for it, you'd better have something to feed them, ha ha. What was really special was that there was some girls in there--I'm talking "Ew, yuck, Star Wars is gross, I like ponies and Hannah Montana" kind of girls, here, not you cool SW chicks)--and they made it plain to me that they did NOT watch Star Wars. As I figured, most of my questions came from the boys in the beginning, but soon these girls wanted to know all about it, too! "Who's Chewie?" "What does a Jedi do?" It was like SW and EU 101 on super-fast.

Anyway, they were all psyched, so of course I pitched them The Clone Wars--most of them had already seen it and their eyes lit up when I tried to explain to them what a Mandalorian was by telling them that "those guys in white armors that you see running around in the cartoon? They're CLONED from a Mandalorian". The room erupted in "Aaaahhhhh"s.

At any rate, it was fun times and I felt like I really opened up their little imaginations to the wonderful galaxy far, far away...

And, before you ask, of course I told them about the Dusty Duck :P

Hedec Ga
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