i love jesus and i'm gnarly

It is so weird that I am almost done with school. I ordered my hood thingy today for the commencement ceremony. And I'm almost finished with the turning in of things, last minute papers and suchlike. It's weird living in the dreamtime between what happened before and what's going to happen! This is totally always the time when I would have made some bold move and upset the teetering balance of something, just to make it stop teetering. England is totally just such a move, don't let me fool you for a second.

I don't know, I'm teaching now and the left side of my brain is totally upset because the right side of my brain is planning the whole class. Or, I should say, "planning" the whole class. I'm using improvisation for most of the first three weeks, not coincidentally. I've actually come up with some cool things to do. I started them out with the ol' observation thing, where you come in and perform a one minute movement piece where you imitate someone you saw. Next, I'm going to have them write stuff in their character's voice and perform it for the class so they have to really think about who the person is (I gave them a bunch of questions to answer to get them writing). Then I'm going to assign students to work together to come up with scenes where the characters they've created meet each other and interact. I haven't decided whether this will happen in or out of class. The final result, I'm hoping, is that they just think critically about character and objective and scene structure and all that, which will then be part of their formal scenework later in the semester. This has a lot of purposes, really, but my ultimate purpose is to set the atmosphere in the classroom up in a positive way.

I don't know. If y'all have any suggestions about this, please do send them over!
Mao