Journal #6

March 1, 2007

As our relationship with the students gets better, the lessons seem to run smoother as well. Today we did a scriptwriting workshop with the 10^th grade students that went extremely well. First, we brainstormed about the components of a script—what would be included in a script. The students seemed to know all of the parts that made up a script, so I passed out worksheets for a partner activity. The worksheets had dialogues from the book Something Wicked This Way Comes, which the students are reading in class. On the worksheets, the students were asked to identify the objectives of each of the characters and of the whole dialogue, add a setting and stage direction, and finish the dialogue. At first I was unsure if all of the students understood the task, but once they got to working they started to understand it better. They are finally feeling comfortable raising their hands and asking for me and Ms. McRae by our names, which is an exciting landmark. After all of the students finished their dialogues, we went over the worksheets as a whole class. There were some students, like Nubia and Zindy, who really understood the concept of objectives and helped other students to understand it.

After we discussed the handouts, the students acted out their scenes. In both classes, the characterization was much better today than it had been in the past. In the 10^th grade class, they did a really good job focusing on stage directions and doing specific movements that they had planned out in advance. My favorite part about being able to walk around and help out groups while they work is talking to students about other things too…although we kind of get off topic, it is important to me to get to know each of the students and answer questions that they have about other things as well. Ofelia was very interested in talking about college. She said that she wants to be a theater major, but what she really wants to do is architecture. I told her that at UCLA you can do your undergraduate in design or theater and get a master’s in Architecture, so it is something to think about for the future. Jesus was listening in on the conversation and asked me about community college. I am really glad that this topic has come up several times and that students understand the value of taking the community college to university route. I want these amazingly bright and talented students to understand that there is a place for them in higher education if they wish to pursue it and that there are different options of ways to get there. I hope that in addition to teaching them the basic skills of theater and arts that we work on through ArtsBridge, we are also acting as liaisons to a world that society has told these students is out of reach.