Yesterday I made...well, a mistake. It might be understandable...and thus far, nothing has come of it. Still...it comes at the beginning of a less than perfect week...I just want everything to run smoothly from now on...and yesterday didn't help...
See, I teach one of the drama classes at our school; the class for 7th & 8th graders, Monday and Wednesday. Its a lot of fun, and a little challenging; middle-schoolers are not generally prone to drama in the formal sense...its a bit like channeling a river, getting them to use their expressive energies productively.
We've done a lot of work on basic emotional expression, as well as developing their level of comfort in front of their peers, doing silly or awkward things.
Finally we've come to the time when we can begin using lines. I have been looking for sources, but haven't had a whole lot of luck. Finally one of the other teachers lent me a book, and I started picking some scenes. I picked a scene for the ladies of the class from Little Women...for the boys, of whom there are several, I had to try and find a large scene with something interesting.
I found a scene from a play called "Dead End" set sometime in 19th century, on the streets New York. 5 street kids...one rich kid...and a "Jew kid". The language was stylized to make them sound like they were from New York, and some of the sayings are a litte rough. There are issues of class prejudices, racial prejudices...but I decided we could use that to discuss some of what theater allows us to explore.
There were two or three "bad words" such as "ass" or "hell"...I figured it was nothing they hadn't encountered at some point, and we would just change the words and move on.
Somehow...I missed the real gems. I won't repeat the worst of them here... but...at one point one of the charaters teased the "rich kid" for being a sissy...and suggested that he had the appetite and eating habits of an infant...only...not quite like that...
Then there were the derisive racial slurs when the "Jew kid" entered the scene...again, in my cursory reading of the scene, somehow I missed them.
The scene ends with the 5 street kids throwing the "Jew kid" to the ground, holding him down, spreading his legs and preparing to "cockalize" him. Fortunately, none of my kids could figure out what that meant...
Sigh.
As the kids left the class room, on their way to get into their cars with their parents and go home, I heard them muttering some of the delightful new words they had picked up from my class...the end of a not so great Monday.
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1 comment:
Don't sweat it. Every teacher I know has made such slips in their time. Rarely, if ever, does anything come of it. If anything does, just keep cool and explain what happened.
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