Learning from the past

I have two new groups of high schoolers that are excited about learning some improv over the summer. This is my second batch, and second batches are notoriously better than first batches, simply because the teacher has been seasoned properly. (I must be hungry for cookies.)

When I look back on my first year teaching high schoolers, I often feel sorry that they didn’t get the Mr. Robison that I became in the following years. I gained a great understanding of how to create a balance between being fun, presenting necessary information, discipline, and dealing with administrative pressures. I didn’t have that understanding my first year. I imagine I was exactly the kind of boring teacher that I never wanted to become. Thankfully, with experience, I was able to overcome that shortcoming, at least according to student reviews.

Though I’ve got even more experience now, there’s still plenty of room to learn.  This year, I wanted to really get off on a fun foot, and we played lots of games. Mission accomplished in one sense… they had a lot of fun, and so did the audiences. In another sense, they kind of got the short end of the stick. My first group of high schoolers this past year had a great time, but I feel like I didn’t quite give them a proper grounding in the improv that they did. I really didn’t help them develop their fundamentals as much as I should have. There are plenty of fun games that help develop those basics… so why didn’t I use them?

It’s all about experience. The students are definitely better than when they started with me, but if I had had a bit more focus, they could have been even better, and still had just as much fun. So starting with these summer classes, I’ve expanded the time by a half hour, to make sure we can have tons of fun as well as get those fundamentals down. This way, they not only have fun, but I also get my semi-selfish dream of creating a huge army of young improvisers to help transform the city into one that matches my image of an ideal artsy community. Long ways off, yes, but mighty oaks grow from small bits of squirrel food.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 2, 2008 at 12:12 and is filed under Background. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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