Grendel Diagnosis Case

"Self-Evaluation"

In an eleventh grade English class, finding exclusive evidence to defend Grendel's innocence creates challenges that a student may face when presenting. When assigned with my group members, deciding who was going to be on the prosecution side and the defendant side was easy and most of our group members chose the part they wanted to reenact. Getting started right away, our group members were collaborating with the lawyers and came up with questions to defend Grendel. Our group was put Grendel on trial for murder, I was Grendel's mother defending Grendel in the trials. So, making questions were challenging because I had to show that Grendel murdered out of self defense. There were obvious things that went well, the mistakes that were made were obvious, and after getting feedback, we learned what could have gone differently.

During trials, our group had very strong evidence to draw the attention of the jurors. Our group presented pictures; Grendel being attacked in the tree, Beowulf ripping off Grendel's arm, and a letter to Beowulf from Hrothgar asking for his help to kill Grendel. We did this to add additional effect, to prove that Grendel was antagonized first, and Grendel only killed out of self-defense. It was stated in the trial that Grendel only tried to communicate with the humans, like when he was stuck in the tree and when he brought a corpse to the people. He illustrated that each confrontation, Grendel was attacked by the Danes. Our group members dressed up like the characters, which added creditability and made our trials more interesting.

For the trials it was a requirement to reach a fifty-five minimum time limit and it was noticeable that our trials were going faster than expected. In order to slow down the process, we tried to drag out my questioning as long as possible. When pressured, mistakes can be made which can brought down our presentation and exposed what went wrong. I tried to explain a incident where Grendel did not kill Wealtheow because of her beauty to show that he was not a pernicious killer. During the case I said the Queen's name wrong, so it did not have much of an effect to help Grendel. Our group lost effect on the jurors because of our lack of entertainment; we could had more pictures, video, and could of acted more enthusiastically. This caused the audience to be bored and prosaic. Even though we were supposed to be serious, we were still supposed to keep the audience entertained and I feel that our group was deficient in that part of the trials. In addition, I believe we could have had stronger questions so it would give the witnesses a chance to have coercive responses.

Getting feedback about the trials helped us learn the mistakes we made and