Game for Change: Hazelwood School District

https://twinery.org/2/#stories/e8065974-ca0d-f832-3d0d-5c428d2ce4b3/play

This game is based on a completely true story which is unfolding back in my home school district right now. I hope that it causes people to think a little more deeply about our public school system, and how react to problems within it. I liked how the twine game layout made it so that it could be really complicated. The issue doesn't really have a "winning" scenario. So that's fun. I think this assignment could definitely be used to introduce students to being advocates for a cause. Students could go on to explore these issues more deeply in a devised piece.

Here are my references:


http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/hazelwood-schools-cut-music-gym-teachers/article_add3c025-f970-53b7-bb77-1f7b3907d81f.html

http://legacy.ksdk.com/story/news/education/2016/02/12/hazelwood-school-district-clarifies-budget-cuts/80319424/

http://fox2now.com/2016/02/12/hazelwood-school-district-clarifies-plans-to-cut-6-6-million-from-budget/

Round Robin

#1

“Oh my new place? You can’t beat the view! A little lonely though…”

The stars dance in front of the moon and the black sky, connected and distant from the world.

A hard space wind blew and one of the stars was thrown away from the rest to be left all alone.

It was interesting to see how the stories grew evolved as they moved from person to person. What makes this activity interesting is seeing how each person brings their own ideas and twists to the stories. I think that my decision to begin my story with dialogue made it so that the story was fairly ambiguous. It ended up as more of a sad existential poem than a story. But that's OK.

I really enjoy the idea of this assignment, however I think that it is really too complicated to do in this exact manner in a high school classes because you have to rely on everyone else to be on top of things. If I was to do this in a classroom I would definitely do this as an in class activity. Perhaps taking a class period to do this in full. I think that this could be used in a beginning unit on play writing. You could do the stories in more of a play script form, giving the students practice both story writing, and the pattern of writing a play script.

Process Piece: Dishes

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_tINWW5oT3heUhUNkRGVUdqajg/view?usp=sharing

Doing the dishes by hand is a very familiar chore for me. For almost my whole life I have lived in places which did not have working dishwashers. As I child it was my most loathed chore, especially because doing the dishes meant washing stacks and stacks of dishes, silverware, and large pots and pans for nine people who cooked and ate a great deal. Now I have come to terms with this chore as a necessary part of adulthood.

I chose to document the act of washing the dishes in an edited sound recording. I chose this medium because I felt like the task of washing dishes had a lot of interesting sounds which meld together to make a whole. In the finished product the rushing water, the scrubbing, and the clinking of the dishes layer on top of each other, and are hardly individually identifiable. However, as a whole the sound recording documents the very universal task of doing the dishes. The process of creating this piece was much more interesting to me than the product. The sound file that I ended up with is not very interesting. Listening to it I don't think that you would even realize that these noises were carefully selected and edited down from an eight minute recording. But for me each sound I included has a special significance, since liked it enough to keep it in the final edit.

In a class room I think that this would be a great tool for teaching students to get familiar with video or sound editing programs if you were going to expect students to use them to tell other stories in the future. It is also a great introduction to documentary type thinking, if you want your students to start a project where they collect and document the stories of others.

Textual Poaching: Pop Art

I love the work of Roy Lichtenstein, so when approaching this assignment, I decided to revisit some of his work for inspiration. As I was looking over some of his paintings, I noticed a running theme in how he represented women. Most of the women in his paintings are in some kind of state of distress. They are often crying or extremely emotional, usually in reaction to a man. Here are some examples:

I realized while looking at these paintings that while I love Lichtenstein's work, his representation of women doesn't speak to how I feel in my everyday life as a woman, or how I would like to be represented. I think that this kind of representation of women plays on the stereotype of women as very irrational and helpless which has permeated pop culture. 

My remix of this genre shows me in the pop art style as the kind of confident, self assured and happy woman that I would like to seen as. I tried to keep many of the pop art motifs (bold colors, cartoon style ink, speech bubble, etc.) but change the content to reflect my own personal life perspective. "Greet the day" is kind of a catch phrase of mine as well as my life philosophy, showing that I can be confident and happy everyday, regardless of my marital status, or the stresses I am facing in life. 

I think that this would be a great exercise in a theatre classroom when students are dealing with older scripts for plays where the representation is different than it is now for cultures, genders religions, etc. You could have the students create their own "remix" of a scene from a play showing their own personal perspectives on the subjects.