Learning to Express Experiences in Creative Ways (genre reflection #1)

This is my Genre Reflection for my methods class at Wichita State. It takes an experience I've learned from my placement and tells it in a creative and interesting way. This reflection is in monologue form, or a short scene performed on stage by a single person.

Scene in a Class

Two boys sit across the room from each other. Mentor Teacher is speaking with a “Charlie Brown’s teacher” voice. The boys glance back and forth, clearly disengaged from the discussion, and making vague hand gestures to each other. Periodically, the boys glance to the larger student beside one of them and laugh, making gestures that may signify bullying of some kind and mouthing jokes to one another.

Lights on the class cut to black, single spot on Mrs. Watkins. She breaks the fourth wall and looks frustratingly into the audience.

WATKINS: And in that moment, I felt helpless. The class moved along without me, my mentor teacher explicating on the complexities of assimilating to American culture, and yet I couldn’t get past these two smug teenagers. You see, they sit right across from each other in the u-shaped formation that I saw a diagram of in Core 1. Discipline for the Secondary Classroom calls it “excellent for classroom discussion but an inefficient use of space,” which I was beginning to take issue with. My mentor teacher, highly experienced and innately confident, chose not to dignify them with a response, but I was worried they were starting to attract attention. Do I step in and say something? Let it be? My intervention came to me as an epiphany and at the time felt brilliant. I meandered my way into the center of the U, nodding along with the analysis and encouraging discussion, and just planted myself in the boys’ line of sight. I had magically dissipated the problem, and was thus a paragon educator. Or was I? Because now, the boys were shifting left and right, giggling at this new challenge to their little game. Students beside them were watching my fleeting attempt to assert control and were completely checked out of the lesson. As the bell rang, the class scurried away and my confidence felt like the big swinging boat ride at the amusement park: moving from extreme high to utter failure in a few sweeping seconds. But hey, that’s learning to teach, I guess. You try, you experiment, and you realize what works and what doesn’t. You show back up the next day and you try something new. These boys won’t become my nemesis, nor will they be my defeat. They’ll be back with more games, but I’ll be back too. And one day I’ll figure them out.