Curriculum Units as Storytelling

My daughter and I were a little late to the Netflix TV phenomenon of Stranger Things. We didn’t join the fan club until the summer of 2019 and the release of season 3. At that point, before we could watch season 3, we had to go back and watch the earlier two seasons. We were both immediately hooked; it was such a compelling story of everyday, small-town people, including a bunch of pre-teens on BMX bikes, battling supernatural forces from the Upside Down that they associate with creatures from Dungeons and Dragons.  It didn’t hurt that the setting for the series is the fictional small town of Hawkins, Indiana, a town not dissimilar to Danville, Indiana where my wife’s parents lived and where we were visiting for the summer. Though a little lost on my daughter, the 1980s nostalgia of the series also appealed to me. If you were to sign into our family Netflix account, you’d find that our profile images to this day are different characters from Stranger Things.  You probably wouldn’t be surprised that my profile is represented by Jim Hopper, the paunchy, rumpled, middle-aged, dad-ish, Hawkins chief of police. 

In anticipation of the release of the first part of the final season later this month, I’ve been rewatching the earlier seasons recently. As one would expect, each season of Stranger Things follows its own narrative arc.