Shakespeare!

It’s my own fault.  With Val away, and me reluctant to spend time alone in the apartment, I had offered some more workshops during the day.  This time, rather than do – again! – the introduction to Drama, I was offering Drama as it might relate to teaching other subjects, namely English, namely Shakespeare.  So it was that I had been about to embark on a week course back in GN2 (or GN Extension, to give it its official name) Cambridge section: the part of the school which follows Cambridge syllabuses, with smaller classes.  They were studying A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Oh, I say “had been about to embark” based on the fact that it had been intended to take five days.  With one of those days now snatched away, plus the fact that I got the time wrong this morning, so lost another half an hour, I was up against it.

Still, there were things in my favour.  I knew quite a few of them, both from the fact that they were in Aesop, plus having taught the mixed teachers and students class a few weeks ago.  There were exactly thirty, which made organisation into groups easy.  And they were quite clearly up for dong some practical work.

We started with zip zap boing (of course!) which was actually handy, as because of a communication glitch, I did not have the printed material I had asked for.  This meant a bit of time-filling, which actually allowed me to put back the exercise I was going to abandon, because of the reduced time.  And then we did a mimed version of Red Riding Hood (why waste material!) which I narrated… five times, as each group of six overacted it.  Or at least I hoped they did; my eyes were glued to the script.  That took most of the lesson, but I did at least introduce what it was leading on to: Flute doing the same thing to introduce the story of Pyramus and Thisbe.  Which we will move onto tomorrow.

I enjoyed it immensely, as they clearly did; they are desperate to get out of their chairs. I am planning to present this to parents at the end of the week, a couple of days away.  It is a regular event at CMS, but they tend to go for polish at the expense of imagination or creativity or, indeed, acting.  I mean to demonstrate the process rather than the product… if the school will let me.