Role play day in the 11th grade. My brow was furrowed all day yesterday and from the moment my alarm went off this morning, as I worried about what prompt to give them. Monica taught me that the hardest part of teaching is asking the right question. When I pose a prompt for role play I am asking a question that will dictate the rest of that class period, and hopefully the discussion and writing of the next class as well. The stakes are high.
I wanted the students to consider both the rigid nature of Umuofian society in Things Fall Apart, and the powerful fear Okonkwo, the main character, has of ending up as unsuccessful and disrespected as his father was.
Prompts I considered:
1. Unoka. This might encourage them to think about the father's legacy. But in fact this was too narrow, because we get a lot of information in the exposition about Unoka that doesn't reveal his impact on Okonkwo. So we would get a lot of text-based acting that didn't quite hit on what I was hoping to draw their attention to.
2. No prompt, but a single prop: Photo of an ancestor. This was phenomenally successful with the twelfth grade before we read Raisin in the Sun, in which the deceased patriarch's legacy wields influence on each character individually and on the family as a whole for the whole play. But again, this wasn't quite right, because Unoka has a very specific effect on Okonkwo, which he doesn't have on the rest of the characters, and which does not remain relevant the entire novel. So again, we'd get a lot of great ideas about ancestors that would never feel connected to our story's core.
3. This is what I decided on: Village life. I hoped it would reveal some of the forms of structure that exist in this community, and hoped that issues of respect and reputation would arise that would allow for connections to Okonkwo's determination to be seen differently from his father.
Bingo. It was amazing.
The role plays were stupendous. We saw children offered up for sacrifice for the sake of the village, we saw multiple wives receiving, in order of rank, their portion of palm wine during a ceremony. We saw labourers singing songs of war while harvesting yams. We saw native dances. We saw wise elders sought for advice. We saw ancestors praised and implored.
But the best part was how well the audience watched, reacted and supported. We sailed through five groups, with so little time spent in transition. I was so impressed. What has helped with the role play procedures is rewriting and reiterating verbally, on the board, the expectations of the activity:
I wanted the students to consider both the rigid nature of Umuofian society in Things Fall Apart, and the powerful fear Okonkwo, the main character, has of ending up as unsuccessful and disrespected as his father was.
Prompts I considered:
1. Unoka. This might encourage them to think about the father's legacy. But in fact this was too narrow, because we get a lot of information in the exposition about Unoka that doesn't reveal his impact on Okonkwo. So we would get a lot of text-based acting that didn't quite hit on what I was hoping to draw their attention to.
2. No prompt, but a single prop: Photo of an ancestor. This was phenomenally successful with the twelfth grade before we read Raisin in the Sun, in which the deceased patriarch's legacy wields influence on each character individually and on the family as a whole for the whole play. But again, this wasn't quite right, because Unoka has a very specific effect on Okonkwo, which he doesn't have on the rest of the characters, and which does not remain relevant the entire novel. So again, we'd get a lot of great ideas about ancestors that would never feel connected to our story's core.
3. This is what I decided on: Village life. I hoped it would reveal some of the forms of structure that exist in this community, and hoped that issues of respect and reputation would arise that would allow for connections to Okonkwo's determination to be seen differently from his father.
Bingo. It was amazing.
The role plays were stupendous. We saw children offered up for sacrifice for the sake of the village, we saw multiple wives receiving, in order of rank, their portion of palm wine during a ceremony. We saw labourers singing songs of war while harvesting yams. We saw native dances. We saw wise elders sought for advice. We saw ancestors praised and implored.
But the best part was how well the audience watched, reacted and supported. We sailed through five groups, with so little time spent in transition. I was so impressed. What has helped with the role play procedures is rewriting and reiterating verbally, on the board, the expectations of the activity:
Everyone participates
Watch without talking (important to emphasize it's talking we don't want. Laughing, gasping: OK)
Two claps (two clap treatment after each role play)
Feedback (comes after all groups have presented)
These are the notes from the feedback session
Once the discussion had run enough of its course, I spoke to the class for a few minutes about governance in a community. The challenge of any governing body, I said, is to figure out how to get citizens to follow the rules of the community.
"Imagine you are moving to a new apartment," I said. "You need some lamps and light bulbs. What stops you from walking out of this school building, going across the street to the lighting store, and walking out with an armload of merchandise without paying a shekel?"
Dana offered this explanation: "Well, first of all I wouldn't do it because it's disrespectful, but if I did, the police would follow me and I would get in trouble."
Perfect. She set us up perfectly to understand the two forms of enforcement I wanted to touch on:
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| Oh my goodness I misspelled coercion! |
We then read two passages, one of which showed Okonkwo's intense fear of being like his father, the other of which showed a wife's reaction to Okonkwo's threat of violence. In discussing the wife's situation, Sewar noted that the wife seemed to be reacting to both forms of coercion, internal and external. She wanted to avoid Okonkwo's violence, but she also had internalised that her role as a wife was to work hard to bring honour and respect to the compound, and she felt that was important. Beautiful.
The class earned my sincere praise at the end of the session, and a round of Basket of Doom, in which no points were won because exhaustion and encouragement were misspelled (hence the correction on the board in the last photo).
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