Journal #12

May 3, 2oo7

Today was the start of my second residency--this time I'm flying solo. I am doing an Interpreting Shakespeare workshop series as the 10th grade English students are reading Macbeth right now. The residency will be very short-just 5 sessions-because they are only working on this book for several weeks and because I want to make sure I have time to gather information and work on an analysis of both of the residencies. The session today went very smoothly. I gave a brief introduction to the residency and what we would be doing together, then we watched part of a modern version of Macbeth to get a sense for what they could do there skits about. Then they partnered up and looked at a short excerpt from act 1 (each partner group had different ones). They had to write down the Who? What? and Where? of the segment then perform it like they thought it would be performed in a Shakespearean play. Then I had them do the short dialogue over again in a new setting (drawn randomly from student-written suggestions). Some of these turned out to be very humorous--one group had to do their scene as if they were under a bed, and another had to pretend they were in a skating rink. I think today was successful based on the two goals that I had: 1) that the students fully understand the plot and main themes of Act 1 of Macbeth and 2) that the students start to think about using the plot and themes of Macbeth to make their own scenes and skits. Next session will be devoted to splitting up the groups and starting to write their versions of the scenes. I think it is going to be a very fun project to work on (for them as well as for me)! And when students are working with a difficult text like Shakespeare, fun is really important. We also had a good discussion about Macbeth's lust for power and how Lady Macbeth pursuades Macbeth to commit an evil act. This discussion was engaging, as students talked about why power is so important to have and what they would do for that kind of power. I think it was one of my most complete lesson plans thus far in terms of really hitting on all of the standards; I am really looking forward to seeing the creativity that will come from these talented students.