More From The Wonderful World Of Teaching

Plays! They suddenly, unexpectedly want us to teach plays in English! I think someone must have said at a meeting I missed late last year, "Hey, why not do plays?" And it was diligently noted and added to the curriculum document without further discussion of how it would be done.

What plays, you might ask? Oh, any play available in the class set room. The English co-ordinator took the trouble to make a list of all the plays available in the school. We have four campuses(Campii?), but not many class sets of anything you can do with Year 8. And we have to share them, while we all do plays at the same time.

There was only one play I  remotely - note italics -  thought I could live with and it was taken away to another campus for the term while I was reading it over the holidays. So I was stuck with a few battered copies - not even enough for every student to have a copy - of plays written especially for schools, written in the 1980s, with 1950s sensibilities. Tim Winton's Lockie Leonard play might have been okay if it hadn't had a wet dream on about page 2 or 3. It's okay in the novel, but stands out in a short play. My boys - most of the class - are 13 years old. They will either be embarrassed or love it for all the wrong reasons. Discipline flies out the window along with the whole point of doing the play in the first place.

No way am I going to use those. I decided I'd have to write my own, but no time to come up with a new storyline.So I took a look at the short stories in the Fablecroft anthology, Worlds Next Door, in which I have a story, and wrote a very short playlet based on Edwina Harvey's "Rocket And Sparky", the tale of a girl and her camel and dragon. (And confessed all to the author, who was delighted and suggested we try to sell it, perhaps to the NSW School Magazine, which used to buy this sort of thing. Nice, but later, Edwina, later! I have 8A to keep amused - sorry, "engaged", the latest buzzword). Of course, we need the original story to accompany it, but it isn't one of the free downloads on the site, the antho is out of print and we only have about five copies. So I tried scanning because the school's "business manager"  as they now call the bursar, is keeping an eye on our photocopying. And who pays for the copies, which I intend to make available in the library afterwards so this work won't be wasted? I couldn't, just couldn't get the first page done. It came out as gibberish. So that did have to be copied. All done on a Friday afternoon, shared with the other Year 8 English teacher - a much more experienced teacher of English than me and even she is not sure how to handle this.

So, what do we do with this? Remember, it's a double period and we're making this up as we go, because we haven't had it before and have been trying to get through other tasks with our classes. There's always something new to tackle because someone who has never taught or taught fifteen years ago at Veryrich Grammar but has the power to tell real teachers what to do has been reading the latest studies by other people who don't teach. We have a short story and a playlet. We both have integration students who will have trouble with anything we give them and no aide support because the poor aides are stretched thin across the school. We have students who will oblige if asked, but really would rather not be heard by the class. We have students we have to discipline before we can make a start.

At this stage, I have a sort-of idea of doing it in groups and discussing what had to be done to turn one kind of text into another, ending eventually in a group adapting another story. Eventually. But I thought we could do "Rocket And Sparky" as a podcast, using the class set of iPads - there are enough for both classes to use at once and they have Garage Band... If the iPads are working. The trolley chargers were playing up the other day. And if they are working, persuading the students that one to a table is going to be enough. Because you can't read a play together with four separate iPads, can you?

And then I have to take them through the process of saving to Public Share or the work is wasted. 

The weird thing is, this woudn't even have been an option if I wasn't a writer. I've written stories for our literacy program because publishers simply don't get the concept of "high interest, low reading level." (And I remember at one SCBWI conference being stared at as if I'd just sprouted a pair of ears on my nose when I asked if the publisher who'd just presented cute stuff for Grade 3  was planning to do Grade 2 or 3 level books of interest to teens). Well, a few do, sort of, but not quite as low as I need. So I have written my own and shared them with colleagues. They're nothing publishable, just stuff we can use in class, but that's all that matters. I write my students' names into the stories and as the documents are in Word, my workmates can change the names to those of their own students.

And I still don't know if all this will work for the integration students. Time to write another play or story?

Oh, the joys of teaching English!