Into the Maze

Questing LI Sophomores Journey Out of the Comfort Zone

It’s that special kind of perfect mid-October afternoon you get in the Northeast Kingdom—a bright blue sky, a warm sun matched with a cool breeze, yellowed corn fields standing in contrast to the deep green of the surrounding pastures. We’re at the Kingdom Corn Maze in Sutton, across the road from the Simpson Farm, framed by views of Burke Mountain to the east, the Sheffield wind towers to the west. 

“You ready?” I ask my last group of sophomores as we stand at the entrance to the maze. Four other groups have gone in before them, each with a different challenge to overcome. They mutely nod —partly from a touch of nervousness, partly because their challenge is to have been “cursed” with silence until they reach the other end of the maze.

I check the timer. “Go!” I call out, and then they’re off, swallowed by the maze, the walls of corn smothering all but the loudest sounds far more quickly than expected. I walk around the edge of the maze to the exit on the adjoining side to wait and hope for the best.

The roots of this outing go back in part to last spring when Head of School, Dr. Brian Bloomfield, outlined a list of new goals and initiatives for moving the school forward, one of which included getting students out of the classroom and into the outdoors more often, a goal he reiterated at a meeting before school started in August.

“We are lucky to live in a place where we can enjoy the outdoors twelve months a year—we should try not to take it for granted,” he said. “We know that being outdoors, being active, is good for kids’ social and emotional growth.”

“On top of that,” he added, “We should be trying to make school just a bit more fun. Yes, it should connect to classwork, but it’s also about improving engagement and developing relationships.”

Okay, Brian—challenge accepted!

But the real roots for this particular excursion also go back even further. The journey to Kingdom Corn Maze is one part of the culmination of weeks of study in both my Honors and General level Sophomore Humanities English classes. To compliment my Humanities Social Studies counterparts beginning the year with a study of the Middle Ages, I lead my students on a deep dive into the Medieval romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. 

The tale, a story set in the world of King Arthur, was crafted by an unknown author in the late 14th century. A blend of adventure, horror, and humor—and rich in its multiple themes and ornate descriptions of daily feudal life—the work has become one of the most famous texts of the Medieval period. Students love it for its exciting hunting scenes and tense social encounters; I love it for its use of symbolism and exploration of virtue and temptation. It’s a great way to teach the basics of literary analysis. It’s also one of the earliest examples I can think of of both what we now call “fanfiction” (it draws from the Arthurian mythos but is a unique, standalone tale) and “young adult” literature—a story about a teenager attempting to step out of his comfortable life in Arthur’s court and journey out into the wilds to ultimately (so he believes) face his own death at the hands of the Green Knight.

But most importantly, it’s a perfect example of the classic pattern of “The Hero’s Quest,” an archetype made popular through the scholarship of Joseph Campbell, a 20th century professor of comparative mythology whose book The Hero With a Thousand Faces articulated the model of the hero who undertakes a circular journey—traveling out, crossing the threshold of the ordinary, experiencing adventure, finding attainment, then returning home. 

Beyond the literary and historical analysis, as valuable as they are, it is this aspect of the tale that I want my students to embrace the most. We talk a lot about the value of the quest and how the cycle is so much a part of our lives—on a daily basis, in the pattern of the seasons, in our journey from birth to maturation to death. It is vital that they, as young people, see themselves as the heroes of their own stories—heroes who need to challenge themselves, to get out there and see what they’re made of, to not fall into a rut and take the easy way out of what can sometimes be a hard path.

To that end, students are required to craft a self-designed quest—a challenge that either excites their sense of adventure or drives them to address a need in their life. Either way, they are asked to design a quest that gets them out of their everyday routine and their comfort zone. The quests my sophomores chose this year reflected a delightful range of both physical and psychological challenges—from undertaking a solo twenty-four hour bushcraft outing to cooking a full dinner for the family to repairing a distant and broken relationship. One student spent a day volunteering in a senior care facility, another visited an overgrown cemetery deep in the woods, while another spent the night in an old tree fort from their childhood. One performed on stage for the first time at the LI Talent Show, while another tried to find a job for the first time. The range was wide and the resulting narratives were powerful. The students rose from the challenge to tell stories that were sometimes funny, often very moving, and always compelling.

But as this fall’s beautiful weather lingered, I thought it would be fun to complete a “group quest” as a way to not only get the students outside but to bring them together in a different kind of way. With the help of LI’s new Outdoor Adventure Director, Kerigan Disorda, we considered a range of possibilities—hiking a mountain, going to a rope’s course—before settling on a corn maze, a fitting metaphor for the tricky labyrinth of psychological and spiritual danger Gawain must navigate in his search for the Green Chapel. 

We set out after lunch—me, Disorda, Alex Hume (an Instructional Assistant in my class), and twenty-seven sophomores. Before getting on the bus, I collected everyone’s phone. 

“But what are we supposed to do on the bus ride?” a few students asked as they relinquished their phones to the basket.

“Look out the window. Or better yet, talk to each other!” 

The group was composed of two different classes—one Honors and one General level—but they’d all been studying the same text and after an initial bout of shyness melded into a boisterous group eager for the maze we’d been talking about and planning for weeks. 

We’d decided early on that a regular run on the maze would be a little, well, boring. A challenge was called for, something to put the students a bit more out of their comfort zone. We brainstormed some ideas in class, and even asked ChatGPT for some suggestions (which was surprisingly helpful), before settling on a few that offered a little adversity but were practical enough to implement. 

After getting off the bus, students were broken down into five groups and each assigned a challenge. Two groups of six were “cursed” by the witch Morgana—the same mysterious figure who turns out to be behind the hijinks in Sir Gawain’s story—to be turned into “three-legged beasts.” That’s right—the old three-legged race trick. Two other groups of five were “cursed with blindness,” forced to blindfold two of their members, each with a guide to keep them from harm along with a scout. The last group of five struck with the “curse of silence”—not allowed to verbally communicate in the maze; hard to enforce, but the group promised to be good sports and wore face masks and earplugs as an extra measure. 

Things were a little chaotic at first—the brilliant afternoon and beautiful views from the Simpson Farm would be enough to make anyone giddy—but we finally got organized. The three-legged teams lashed themselves together and worked in a little practice, the blindfolded explorers readied themselves for a stretch of disorientation, and we all gathered at the entrance.

Disorda and Hume headed in a few minutes before the groups with their walkie-talkies; they would be my eyes and ears in the maze if any team needed help. We decided to have the groups enter at one-minute intervals to space them out and limit interactions, though teams were under strict orders to not inhibit any group’s progress.

The starting line grew strangely quiet as the groups lined up and began heading in—the early nervous laughter now replaced with nervous silence and anxious looks as they faced the towering golden stalks of corn. None of us really knew what to expect. 

Finally, with the last group off, I headed for the exit, clipboard in hand with the team’s starting times, curious to see who would emerge first—and in what condition.

Ten minutes passed, then twenty. At one point, I radioed the team. “Any sign of them?”

“Oh, yeah,” Hume called back.

“Everything okay?” I asked, trying to gauge his tone. 

He laughed. “Yeah, they’re doing fine.”

A few times I heard voices. Once, I even caught sight of a group through a small gap in the maze—one of the teams with blindfolds, clearly lost and struggling to reorient themselves.

Signage at the front indicated the maze typically took thirty to forty-five minutes in the daylight. But then, twenty-two minutes after going in, the first team appeared at the exit, three pairs of three-legged beasts clambering through the corn, with big grins on their faces.

“How did you guys finish so fast?” I asked. I was a little worried—I’d planned on at least thirty minutes. “You didn’t cheat did you?”

“No!” they insisted. 

“It took a little while, but once we got used to walking together, we were able to cruise,” someone explained. Then, two of the team admitted that they’d done the maze twice over the last few weeks with family and friends. That explained it.

The next three groups came in closer together, completing the maze between thirty-three and thirty-seven minutes. One group—group four, the blindfolded team I had spotted earlier—remained lost in the maze. With forty-five minutes expired and time getting short, I radioed for Disorda and Hume to round them up and guide them to exit. 

After everyone was accounted for, we headed back to the lawn. It was time to dole out the quest’s rewards. In keeping with the October season, each group got a bag of Halloween candy to share regardless of their finish, but the winning team got a special treat.

“Team One, please come forward and kneel.”

With all of us stifling a few giggles, the team came forward and got down on bended knee for a good old fashioned dubbing ceremony. I had brought my Scottish claymore—a traditional two-handled sword—for the occasion, which had raised plenty of eyes, especially among the boys, earlier. Each winner was knighted “Sir” or “Lady” and made a peer of the realm (we do live in The Kingdom, after all). 

In Gawain’s tale, he returns to Camelot with a green silk belt as a token of his quest, which Arthur orders his fellow knights to wear in a show of camaraderie. With Spirit Week just beginning and the “Big Game” with St. Johnsbury Academy looming, giving them anything green seemed hardly appropriate; instead each was awarded a maroon pennant (a mini Viking “banner”) as a token of victory.

But after the ceremony was complete, there was one more surprise in store. 

I gathered the groups and gave them each a sheet of paper with a quote on it. Earlier in the week, we’d spent time in class looking at passages from the poem in its original Middle English, the 14th century language of both the unknown Gawain poet and the very well-known Chaucer, and learning how to pronounce the language in its original form. The students had proven surprisingly clever in figuring out which parts of the story the passages were taken from. 

“There is one more contest and one more bag of candy for the winner!” I told them. Each team had one minute to look over the passage, review the pronunciation together, and pick a member to recite. Whoever gave the best recitation won their group the prize. 

The knyght mad ay god chere,

And sayde, “Quat schuld I wonde?

Of destinés derf and dere

What may mon do bot fonde?”

The quote is among my favorites from the poem. Spoken by Gawain just as he is about to embark on his quest, leave home, and go off into the unknown to face death, the passage speaks to the heart of the heroic spirit—the willingness to confront the darkness and accept one’s fate regardless of the outcome. There are many translations, but my favorite, which I share with the students, comes from the scholar Brian Stone:

Said Gawain gay of cheer,

“Whether fate be foul or fair,

Why falter I or fear?

What must man do but dare?”

Considering it had been a few days, the groups all did better than I thought they would, so much so that it was hard to pick a winner. By the time we got on the bus—the kids tired but with big smiles on their faces—it kind of felt like we had all won.

I asked the students later how they felt about the trip.

“It was so much fun!” they exclaimed.

Mark, who had journeyed through the maze blindfolded, said, “I liked getting to experience the teamwork. Getting to see—or hear, actually—how my team worked together was interesting.”

Connor, who had been the other blindfolded student on his team, joked, “I like accidentally headbutting Mark.”

“I enjoyed working with the other class,” Mathias said. “It was valuable because we generally don’t have a lot of interaction.”

“The dubbing ceremony was fun!” said Cassy, a boarding student from China. “I loved it. And the candy, of course.”

“I thought it was great that we got outside and out of the classroom,” said Meadow. “It opened up a new opportunity to explore.”

“It brought the class together,” Abram added.

Gawain returns from his journey not just with a green sash and a scar on his neck, but with a more mature vision, a new sense of his worth. Through both questing together and questing apart, students come away with a better appreciation for both Gawain’s journey and their own.