No, that does not describe my life. Well, not more so than usual.
Fall semester of Northwest Chinese School ended on Saturday. As usual, I ended the semester by pulling an all-nighter to get the grades in and, DESPITE the sleep deprivation, floated out of the last class deeply grateful for all of my students, excited about the next semester and feeling the usual giddy terror that if anyone knew how much I have fun teaching no one would ever agree to pay me for it.
The Saturday class, untrammelled by school administrations and required texts, is a very open-ended one that gives me the opportunity to teach some of the projects whose long-term value is incalculable but whose short-term results might be hard to work into a standard classroom (though if and when I do have my own classroom, I'm dedicated to a yearly NaNoWriMo unit, because the results have regularly outstripped my wildest expectations.) Just to make sure I don't teach a class that would only be interesting to thirty-five middle-school versions of me, however, I try to base most of my teaching decisions on two things. One, the state standards for reading, writing and public speaking; this keeps me at an appropriate grade level and leads to some occasional neat connections being made between what they're doing with me and what they're doing in their weekday Language Arts classes.
Second, I base the spring semester on their answers to the class evaluation in the fall, including the question "What would you like to cover next semester?"
I got quite a few useful gems out of this semester's evaluations. Less in-class work time; I was hesitant to assign too much homework, but it sounds as though the in-class working, as with our novels, was often more boring. No love whatsoever for the "Vocabulary From Classical Roots" work; I may start designing my own worksheets based off their units rather than relying on the workbook. If I'm going to do public speaking stuff, it needs to be scaffolded, supported and clearly laid out; that caused a lot of anxiety, and one eval said simply "In the spring: No presentations. Seriously. I *hate* presentations."
However, the one thing that got the most interest and the most votes was drama and acting. Which is, of course, the area of English education where I'm the least comfortable teaching.
I ran to my old college roommate, a talented and rigorous director, and got these basic theatrical "most important things" to add to the language arts goals I'd be focusing on.
moi: .
Okay.
What would YOU say were the four most important things about acting and playwriting?
18:32 Roomie: four each? or four all together?
18:33 ....you should read David Ball's Backwards and Forwards...it would help with something like this...
but...
Acting:
1) Motivation
2) Obstacle
18:34 3) Creativity
18:35 ....4)....
I'm not going to state this very well...
18:36 but the idea that...the person in the script is does not exist...that they are what you make them...when you see it as a shell, or a skeleton, you can better see what needs to be filled in.
18:37 or how to build into your portrayal what is needed to make the character a real person
Ok...
Playwrighting:
(you should ask Jenn...she took the class :))
but...
1)
18:39 oh gah...I'm so not a playwright...
18:41 1) Write, knowing all the time that it will be read out loud.
18:42 2) Good exposition
18:43 addendum to 1)....write, knowing it will be seen, as well
I don't know what 2 means...
18:44 I mean, I do...but I mean that you need to be able to apprise the audience of the situation of the play without saying "so, this is the situation of the play"
18:47 3) Conflict
| 12 minutes |
19:00 Roomie : I don't have a 4th...
...I was trying to think of one...but I have given up...
Or rather, I was trying to think of how to state it, but I gave up.
So now begins the brainstorming, the planning, and the search for a good middle school sample text as far as plays and scenes go. The go-tos for teaching theatre, once you get beyond "This Play Was Only Written To Be Anthologized For Eighth Graders," appear to be "Romeo & Juliet" and "The Crucible." Both are awesome shows deserving of a far more character-based and subtle treatment than they usually get. But I think both plays can get offered to middle schoolers a little condescendingly: "Look! Juliet/Abigail Williams is under eighteen, too! Don't you feel catered to? Isn't it (air quotes) 'relevant'?"
Though perhaps I say this just because I like both of those plays, and I'm not interested in only spending a single day or two at most on them.
Despite my anxiety, I've got to say: theatre! Drama! Acting! This is going to be fun. And with any luck, my talentless enthusiasm will be infectious, and the students will feel less self-conscious. :0)
Any thoughts on theatrical possibilities?
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