Journal #5

February 22, 2007

For our second day teaching, Jena and I decided to do Character Development workshops with our students. For Advanced Acting, we had students describe two of their favorite literary or film characters. They wrote down physical characteristics, personality traits, likes, dislikes, and any other information they could think of about these fictional characters. Then, they chose somebody that they knew well and developed a character for that person, also listing different aspects of character. Finally, the students had to act out their characters in short improvised dialogues. Several students decided to characterize each other, which made entertaining scenes when they acted them out. Students felt more comfortable portraying their friends and knew little quirks or traits about them that were easy to act out. Marquesha decided to develop a character of her mother—she defined her mother as always cracking jokes and acting a little crazy. In her scene, she carried herself like a mother would, while at the same time being funny, and Claudia, the other girl in the scene with her, played off this character very well. Claudia was playing her shy younger sister, and without saying very much she conveyed a young, quiet personality. It was still rather difficult to draw students out of their shells, but today was slightly easier than our last session because they had time to prepare their characters.

In the 10^th grade English class, I wanted to really focus on the book the students are reading—Something Wicked This Way Comes—to analyze the characters in the novel. I assigned students to different characters and they worked in groups or pairs to describe the characters. Then, we set up scenes from different chapters of the book so that each student was playing the character they had just worked on developing. This went exceptionally well and I think it helped the students to grasp the ideas of the book a little better. Ms. Hamilton had expressed that students were not really following what was happening in the novel, so I hope that this clarified parts of it for them. One group in particular stood out as successfully representing their characters. The scene was between Jim, Will, and Mr. Dark, one of the carnival owners. The student who played Mr. Dark used effective actions, like flexing her arm and using a flyer as a prop that was supposed to be a ticket to ride the carousel. I was really impressed with all of the students’ willingness to participate in the activity. The only one who gave me some trouble was a young man who is clearly very intelligent and also very creative who told me he just didn’t want to do it. I tried to convince him to do it but after a while I gave up and told myself he would eventually comply. He did, and he laughed at me and said he was just tricking me to see if I would believe him. I wasn’t really sure how to respond to this. He told me he was a good liar, and I said, “Well, lying and acting are pretty much the same thing, so you should be good at this too.” He was one of the few students in the class who had memorized his lines by the time the skits were performed at the end of the class.