School Plays

Sorry for the long vent This just happened a few minutes ago and I’m still pissed.

Saturday, I have to have my kids ready for a play we’re doing for all the parents. Every class has to do it.

Knowing this was coming up, I looked through some children’s plays, found one that was called “Are You My Mother?” and started teaching it to the children. They were bored with it immediately. So…

Like any good teacher, I pitched the script, but got ideas from the children about what should be in the play. I made some edits to make it run smoothly, but the basic plot is the same thing the children made up as is most of the dialog. A dog and cat find a duck egg. It hatches and tries to find its mother, but it keeps running into all sorts of animals that want to have him for lunch.

The kids have this down perfectly. It’s a pretty funny play. Today, they said they wanted me to think of a better way to lead into the ending where all the children are out on stage dancing/singing and I introduce them. I figured that was a good idea since it is choppy at the end.

Ok…now the part that makes me want to go psycho.

I worked with a kid today to give him a new part to make the show run more smoothly at the end. He finally got it down perfectly and the Chinese Teacher came out and said, “Oh…he won’t be at the show on Saturday.” She knew about it for a while, but decided it wouldn’t be helpful for me to know that information before spending the time to practice with him.

We then started practicing the play like we always did it as I tried to figure out a new way to get to the closing. In the last scene before the music/dancing starts, all the animals appear to try to get the baby duck and the mom duck chases them off. The baby duck goes to look for her again. One of the teachers, who I did ask for advice on something ELSE in the play and am thankful for her help in that, rudely shouts “WAIT!” I figured she noticed they did something incorrectly and needed to try it again, but instead she says, “Now you must pretend like you’re a daddy duck and come out with them and say it’s time to play with them.”

Now…I’m sure there are dads that do stupid mistakes. But why in the world would a dad bring over several guests that tried to eat his baby and say, “Let’s play?”

Being the only foreigner here, I got outvoted. The change stays. I just told them to give me no credit for the play, calmly left, and walked to the office to write this post.

Please tell me I’m not retarded for being pissed about this. I feel more upset because of how much time the kids put into this, how much time they had to try to change everything, and now it’s going to be a cluster f**k for the 1 day we have left to practice this play. Or tell me they’re right…I don’t know.

Matt

Didn’t you know whomever throws the biggest hissyfit wins? You’re right though, they are wrong.

I did a play for the fun of it with some of my students. We did a scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I got it on video, maybe I’ll release it.

It’s not about whether you’re right or wrong (of course you’re right ) but it’s all about the cutiesy factor as far as schoolplays go here. Sense or no sense as long as it looks cute! In my experience last minute changes never work well with kids, they learn fast but forget even faster. The best I can suggest is to have a drawn up battle plan ready for tomorrow to make sure the kids know exactly what’s going to change, where they have to stand, and how and where to move to. Give them the changes they want but keep it simple, clear and precise. You don’t want that cluster f**k to spoil all the effort you’ve put into the play. Don’t let it get to you I’m sure you and the kids have worked very hard and ultimately that will show in the end result!

I was talking with a friend about this today and thought a cute idea would be to start to have the party, but instruct the kids to lynch the duck at the end. We can get feathers they can throw up in the air, little blood packets they can put in their mouth so when they turn around, blood is dripping down. We can end it by them throwing actual raw duck meat out into the audience. Do it all to Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration.” Or maybe really screw them up and have a pudding vender come up the aisle and scream, “If you don’t eat your meat, how can you have any pudding?” Then have him throw pudding out into the audience. But it will be ok, because we’ll just show a picture of Pooh Bear hugging Snoopy at the end and the audience will adore it.

As cute as it sounds, I just don’t have time to get all that stuff together. Maybe for our next show.

Matt

As JoHo claims, it’s all about the “cute”. Costumes and props are more important than scripts, and most of the parents probably won’t have a clue about the story in any case; they’ll just be looking to get a cute picture of Meimei or Gege performing in English while wearing a cute costume. Unless their child is on stage at any given time, they’ll likely be walking around and talking loudly with other parents.

For whatever reason, the school will insist that they need you to write the play, but you could probably write gibberish and nobody would know the difference. Welcome to the thankless world of Taiwanese English Teaching. (Chances are, no one will thank you when the show is over, either).

ps-I’m sure you’ll feel much better when the whole show is over.

Makes me glad my school has never done a play.

And Matt, have you stopped missing snow?

[quote=“cfimages”]Makes me glad my school has never done a play.

And Matt, have you stopped missing snow?[/quote]

LOL I actually have. When I was home in Feb. it was nothing but snow the entire month. Several of my performances were cancelled and there were days I could not even make it out to visit with my friends.

But I really changed my name because some people are apparently using 800x600 (or lower) resolutions. They said my name was so long that it ended up putting a scroll bar at the bottom of their screen…something I find annoying. Changed it to make it easier.

My nickname has been “Puppet” ever since I got here. Figured I would go with that.

Matt