Intercession: Day Six, or the first day the kids called me Ms. Somers. It was weird, but kind of cool.

In our debriefing meeting after school today, we had a discussion about controlled chaos. I hope that if you were to walk into our classroom today, you would see chaos, but it would feel under control. To me, it felt more under control than yesterday. Toivo still wandered off and wedged himself into tiny spaces, Shenelly took the bathroom pass and didn't appear again for a little too long and Daniel, again, looked like he was about to melt down from lack of control, but we did get quite a bit filmed and nobody got hurt.

When the kids came into class, instead of finding their chairs in a circle I'd set up a table for each group of 3 or 4. I tried to separate them by ability to work together (which meant, mostly, separated by gender. Ah, middle schoolers). Each group was responsible for planning one part of Act 2, Scene 2. They had about 20 minutes to work. They didn't exactly stay on task during work time, but it was better than yesterday.

After their work time, I brought out the video camera and put Emily in charge of directing. Emily is such a rock star--I can give her any task and she will do it for me. She put everyone where they needed to be and we got through a few scenes.

Problems:
1. Kids who were not filming disappeared where I couldn't see them. Many pestered other groups. Not cool.
2. Yelling at several kids for touching the air around my video camera.
3. NOISE! 3 groups working, plus the class across the hall, plus the class downstairs which we could hear. You will not be able to hear a word on our videos, so some creative editing work (by me) will be necessary.
4. Mario, while he was waiting his turn, was innocently (kind of) banging on the railing that led downstairs. Erin, who teaches a class downstairs and totally bitched him out in front of anybody. For several minutes. Erin is a very effective teacher and disciplinarian, but I felt super bad for Mario and every member of my group was totally distracted for the next several minutes. Blurg.
5. It's hard to show that the scene we were filming takes place in a modern hospital.

I will probably do a similar structure tomorrow. One group (probably the girls) will work on the parts of Act III where the lovers fight, and the other group (probably the boys) will work on Act V, where the players perform (to cheer up the patients in the hospital? We'll have to work on that). One more day of actual work, then Friday Film Festival party day. We can do it.

EDIT: I forgot to mention our first activity of the day: improv games. Toivo has been rabid about improv games this whole time, so we played New Choice and Freeze as a large group. I won't say the kids are skilled improvers, or that all of them even understood the games, but I think they had fun and it was HILARIOUS to watch. We are so playing again tomorrow.