First Day on Prac

Well, I taught my very first lesson today. It was a year 9 class studying Shakespeare - one of the students' number one protests is that the language is too hard, so I started the lesson with a brief exercise in which the students were given insults taken from various Shakespearean plays and encouraged to take turns insulting each other with such pearlers as "Pray thee, stand farther from me" and "Thou dost infect mine eyes".

The exercise was good for breaking the ice and hopefully encouraging the students to see Shakespeare not as dry, boring, serious stuff but also to recognise the potential of his plays to be entertaining and humourous.

We're looking at Romeo and Juliet, so I started with a structured close reading of the Prologue, in which we counted the number of words related to "love" and the number of words related to "fighting" and compared our results. The numbers vary depending on how you define certain words, but something like 7-9 words related to fighting emerge, against only two related to love. So we discussed the implications of this for our expectations of the play. I likened the Prologue to the blurb on the back of a book, or the narrator/voiceover on a movie preview: that is, to highlight the themes and important events of the text. We covered the function of the Prologue in an illiterate society, and why the Prologue "ruins" the ending, and why audiences would still want to see the play even though the know how it ends. I explored this particular issue by asking why the students would want to go to a movie like "Pearl Harbour", "Titanic" or "300" when they already know how it will end - that it's essentially not the destination but the journey that they go for.

On a tangent I facilitated an exercise in 'translating' the Shakespearean language into a Twitter-esque style modern day interpretation. Since Twitter is blocked by the school we did the exercise on the board - the kids that contributed seemed to have a fair grasp on what was going on, but I had less than 50% of the class's attention for most of this exercise.

All in all, for my first lesson I think it went fairly well - I should have prepared more material as I started to run dry about 15 minutes before the end of the lesson, and I need to get more assertive when it comes to behaviour management, but for a first attempt I don't think I should judge myself TOO harshly.