Saturday, April 17, 2004
 

Putting Some Drama in My Life, Grad-Student Style

Eh, I should update.

So, what's new in my little bitsy itsy teeny tiny pathetic excuse for a world? Not much, to say the very least.

I finally filled out my textbook order form for next semester; needless to say, I did this on the morning that it was due. I've been teaching intro to fiction, but next time, it's intro to drama. I've gone back and forth all over the place on what to teach. The only guideline we have in choosing our texts is that we have to cover at least three historical periods (as opposed to two for fiction). Drama goes at the rate of ~10 plays per semester, which would amount to a lot of money, in individual texts. Normally, I'd just insert a rant about the insanely rich students at this university, but at least one kid in my class this time has financial problems (he's talked to me about them), so I'm seeing the error of my stereotyping ways.

At any rate, I couldn't make up my mind in the least. I've done drama as part of other courses, but I've never taken a course that was all-drama. As a consequence, I have no idea how to teach it (that is, I can teach it by pretending that the plays are novels, but I can't teach anything about staging etc), and I have no really good ideas about how to lump similar texts together under a theme, as I do in my intro to fiction.

So I finally settled on an anthology. I can pick what plays I want to teach over the summer. It's got introductory information and the like, so I can at least feel like I'm teaching them something about the history of drama. It's got some things I'd thought about teaching, anyway: Hedda Gabler, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Mother Courage, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, M. Butterfly (I think the whole freakin' department teaches that one). In other cases, it has authors I want to teach (Beckett, O'Neill), but not the plays I would have chosen.

I flat-out refuse to teach Shakespeare. I prefer Marlowe. So there.

While we're on the subject of intro to drama (and I know that this fascinates you all terribly), here's an amusing anecdote from this past week:

I was sitting in the computer lab in our soon-to-be-erstwhile offices, when an undergrad came to put mail in our (soon-to-be-erstwhile) mailboxes. She asked us our names, saying that she always liked to put faces with the names she delivers mail to. Well, fine. I can understand that. When I told her my name, she said she was considering taking my class in the fall, but that she, along with friends, had been afraid to because my last name "sounds scary." ??? They pick their classes on the sound of our last names? I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

She then went on to inform me that I didn't look scary. That, needless to say, burst my bubble. Dangit!

The girl (quite the chatterbox, in spite of the fact that the history student and I were rolling our eyes at each other by now) continued that she was down to either my class of that of JM, whose last name also apparently sounds scary (incidentally, she butchered the pronunciation of both our last names) as well. I hope JM isn't reading this, because I told the kid that she was nicer than me (which is true).

I clearly have so much to look forward to.

So, that's about all from my neck of the woods. Toodles, folks.

Elvisette philosophized at 7:23 PM