More creativity

One vow I'm making for next year is to incorporate more creativity into my classes. When I spoke at the honor's banquet a few weeks ago, the banquet happened to fall on our annual "Evening with the Arts." I was amazed at how creative some teachers are. One of my favorite displays involved an assignment freshmen had concerning "The Odyssey." On display were several games the kids created based on the epic. Others had sculptures (my favorite involved Legos). I was impressed. And I'm stealing the idea for next year too.

At my history class Wednesday, we had a theater person from the cities lead us in a session. Now this scares the hell out of me. I was scared too severely in college. It seemed like every damned Education class I ever took had to involve some kind of skit or role playing gag. I hated it all.

So when the presenter had us move the tables and get into a large circle, I was skeptical. In fact, the teacher next to me said in a hushed whisper, "If you think I'm hugging you, you're crazy!" It had that touchy feely kind of vibe.

Things didn't improve either . . . at least at first.

The first thing we had to do was step out into the circle and say our name and then perform an action. Then the rest of the group had to say "Hi . . ." and repeat the action.

Unfortunately, I was about five from the end, so most of the good actions were taken. However, I did step out say my name and then did the good old hand in the armpit to make farting noises gag. My personal favorite was when one of my colleagues stepped out, said his name, and then performed his action: slapping the teacher next to him (another colleague of ours) across the face. That was classic, easily the funniest thing I've seen this year.

After that we had to step out into the circle and perform a pose and then hold it for three seconds. Then the person to our left had to make a pose in reaction to our pose.

Finally, the presenter chose several people to act out various events or descriptions from the Dakota War. Then he had those of us who weren't involved give them lines. On his command he had them repeat the lines.

This was when the whole thing became pretty interesting. After various groups acted out different scenes, we were able to get into analyzing the presentations and interpretations. This was very interesting.

And though I can ham it up with the best of them, there is just something about this touchy feely stuff that turns me off. But I know I have several students in every class that would really get into this type of stuff. And it really wouldn't be that hard to implement either. I think it would be even more applicable to English rather than history. I could march them down to the stage while reading a short story and have students form groups and perform short 'stills' of key scenes. Then I could have the remaining students give them lines. I could even have the class divide into groups and have them develop short 'stills' of key scenes. Then I could assign them to teach it to another group rather than perform it themselves.

And instead of hating the session, it turned out to be one of my favorites.