Genres, genres

The twelfth grade will study four dramas this year:

A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry

The Doctor's Dilemma, by George Bernard Shaw

The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster

All My Sons, by Arthur Miller

This week we're starting Raisin and yesterday in HL we combined some of the opening stage directions with an exercise in commentary writing on prose. 

In May these students will write a commentary on an unseen extract of prose or poetry. We've worked a lot with poetry, but not so much with prose. They are reluctant to try the prose because it contains more words and looks less manageable on the page. I wanted to show them that the tools we use for poetry transfer to prose analysis. 

The opening stage directions and character descriptions in Raisin are quite lengthy and detailed. At some points they are even poetic. Here for example is the prologue:

I had the students look closely at these non-dialogue passages to identify which words felt important and contributed significantly to  the feeling and meaning of the passage. 

Then they wrote poems using only words from the passage. 

The group that wrote about the prologue came up with this:

No longer remembered

The furnishings of this room were already selected with taste and color

But living itself has long since vanished

Weariness

Its furnishings typical,

Undistinguished

That was a long time ago

Too many people for too many years, a depressing uniformity

No longer remembered

Those writing about the character Mama, wrote

She is beauty
She is grace
A dark brown face
Lights a rather dark place
Slurry words
Around the world 
Hair so white
She can fight
In her sixties
Looks like she's sixteen
She is beauty
She is grace
A raisin in the sun
Just as delightful as a bun

(They added a few words)

Those writing on Beneatha captured her nicely:

She is about twenty 

Slim and intense 

Her face had a handsomeness of it's own 

In an intellectual sense

Her speech permeated the room with sleepy vengeance 

Those writing about Ruth, the caring mother, used the words to describe an alternate scenario in which this loving mother smothers who child! That's what I call productive counter script! Here's what they wrote:

Ruth enters,

Closes the door,

Passes an alarm clock,

reaches down,

muffles his face,

the boy feebly shakes,

life has been little,

settled

They then wrote body paragraphs on the passages of stage directions, incorporating significant evidence as they worked linearly through the passages. I wonder about collecting writing like this. I like to think that it can be useful for them to practice writing even if they're not going to have feedback on it, but last year I discussed with Monica that it feels useless from their end if they write something that won't have other eyes on it. I'd welcome input.