I am listening to "Don't look back in Anger" by Oasis. This song takes me right back to 8th grade. Every time I hear this song, I get that nostalgic feeling in my stomach. Flashes of the street where I lived and the people I surrounded myself with appear to me too easily. I am not much of a music fiend. I start liking songs by accident most of the time. I never seek out music that I think I will like. Often I find myself annoyed at friends that insist on playing me songs that I don't know and will never hear again. What I enjoy about music is being able to sing along to all the lyrics which means I have to have heard the songs enough to memorize the lyrics. I also enjoy songs that take me back to a different place. And sometimes I like a song just because the beat is so darn catchy. But I don't dissect music and I feel no need to.
Now that that soliloquy is over.... Let's get an update on my life shall we?
As you may know I have been teaching English as a Second language through a small private company for about a year now. I have also been working as a recruiter of international students for a private university in the area. Since I started, the CEO has decided to found a preparatory college in Redlands. We got all the investers and we are opening this fall. I am now the director of the ESL department there and am working right now on creating the classes that we will offer. I am still recruiting students for the other university as well. PLUS, I was just told that they held aside a couple regular classes that they thought that I would be good at teaching. So you are looking at (....reading the words of) the new teacher of Intro to Acting and Intro to Oral Communications!
Anyway, for those of you who have taken classes such as these, I was wondering there were any assignments you paricularly liked/disliked, things you hated/loved about the teachers, things that you remember helping you learn, and any other precious nuggets of truth......
People usually don't respond to pleas such as these, but please help me out ok?
Truthfully, I've never taken an intro to acting class, and my speech class was so long ago I barely remember any of it.
ReplyDeleteWhat I do remember was giving a series of speeches with a given purpose: persuasive, informative, persistently vegetative, etc...
The class members were then instructed to critique said speeches, and the professor would grade our critiques as well as our speeches.
He always took points off for not taking enough points off other classmates' speeches. I think that must have been my favorite thing about the class, since it is what I remember best. Then again, maybe favorite is the wrong word...
This comment was probably not too helpful, but perhaps there is something useful in it somewhere.
Hooray!!! Congratulations Laura! Teaching speech is a future long-term goal of mine!
ReplyDeleteOn the first day of speech class, my speech teacher had us write down radom speech topics on slips of paper. Then we chose them and had to do impromptu speeches about the topics. It was awesome.
For our completely written out speech, instead of writing our own, we each got to choose to read something out loud and were primarily graded on our gestures and eye contact. This was fun because we each got to read something fun, like children books, etc... plus it's a good step to learning eye contact before you have to throw everything together.
You're going to do great! I'm so excited for you!
Yay Larissa! Such fun classes!
ReplyDeleteOk, so I took both classes.... my communications class at Andrews had some interesting individual speeches... the 3 themes were a persuasion speech (I convinced everyone to eat the BK Veggie Burger on their way home during xmas vacation), a informative speech on really anything, and then an instruction speech. Don't remember what I instructed everyone to do, but I remember one kid showed us how to make homemade wine! That was fun :) So there are ideas on that.......
Intro to acting: I remember we used to do Monty Python sketches, and a variety of short sketches from a multitude of genres. Glass Menagerie was a popular one, and then we were required to help with the school plays (which the majority of us were doing anyway). Plus, since you're miss improv, a little of that can't hurt!
Not much help, a bit random, but anyway.........
I had "Oral Interpretation." I liked the in-class involvement, namely discussions and practicing reading pieces in different voices to get alt. effects with other students in the pews at the stage. I had a hard time with having to memorize pieces to speak in front of the group onstage (we were critiqued on how great out delivery was - eg enunciation, how dramatic it wound up being (which is subjective), how fast we did it, if we twitched, etc. Fun was doing group plays onstage by scenes or short play type things. unnecessary yet informational was ranting about anne hathaway being the writer of shakespeare, not him. Fun=dressing up in costumes. Unfun=getting an A- for doing my darndest and memorizing every *&$% line and trying my best at being an actor without having had a shred of formal training and just being expected to be *great*
ReplyDeletecorrection: the teacher ranted about hathaway. also annoying was having to do religious subjects - e.g. bible passages. Ker-snoooore! And memorizing=boring. also annoying is having to memorize pieces of long length - eg I'm thinking I could be spending my time better on Organic Chemistry's lengthy problems than this. 200 lines, my ass. Billy Goats Gruff onstage = Hot. I love the Baa-ing and the ears and bouncing around and hiding under the bridge as a Troll. Those kinds of things are hot, especially in college. Ridiculousness rules in my world, as do poets more like Blake or Dante than *&$^^ Bible
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Hi Larissa,
ReplyDeleteWhat I remember being most helpful to me in the speech class and other classes where I am supposed to be perfecting some technique was videotaping myself and watching my own videos. I took my speech class by distance ed so I had to video tape everything and watch it to critique myself and then send both the video and the critique to the teacher. I learned a LOT from watching myself and made some drastic changes on account of it, including throwing away a pair of blue jeans...
That's my 2 cents.
Mahi
Haha - I remember helping your mom with her online classes, Lariss - we were her little guinea pigs...it was fun though! Glad I didn't have to watch it!
ReplyDeleteYa, speech class...I remember being critiqued was pretty informative...the kids in my class had good things to say (usually).
But my truest feelings are: you'll be awesome at this!! You are the Monty Python Queen! :D I'm proud of you for landing such a cool job - and I'm of course a bit biased being a teacher myself...
You go girl!!
Wow! Sounds like you'll be busy. One thing we had to do in a speaking class I took was to get up front and read a bunch of tongue-twisters. That was embarrassing! (But funny!) The teacher told us we could do whatever we wanted in that class; sleep, work on homework for other classes--we just had to be quiet and not disturb whoever was up front. That was cool because then when you were the one up front, you knew not everyone was paying attention to you.
ReplyDeleteIn another class, the teacher would just randomly call out someone's name (in the middle of his lecture) and the person was supposed to go up front and speak for two whole minutes about anything. No one slept through that class!
Well, I hope you enjoy all of your new responsibilities--it doesn't sound like you'll be bored!
Ooooh! Congrats on the teaching gig! I'm very impressed.
ReplyDelete*paging Larissa - when are you going to post another update?? we're dying to know what's up with you!*
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