For the last 16 blogs I have shared exercises and assignments I did in my drama classroom. These were developed over my 37 years of teaching. Hopefully you have found some of them helpful in your classroom. So how did I arrive at this coursework? I would like to share some of my curriculum writing with you. When I retired, my beginning students were in a class called Drama 1, which ran for one semester. The advanced students were in Drama 2, a year long play production class, performing two full-length plays for the public. Additionally, they put together an evening called “Bits and Pieces” (I will cover that in a later blog) and a children’s show, both of which were written by the students. However, it started out quite differently. When I began teaching, way back in ’63, there was one, one-semester drama class for juniors and seniors for the entire high school of 1,800 students with no curriculum guide or text. Two years later we became two high schools and in 1968 a decision was made to change the sophomore English curriculum. The sophomore class was divided into sixteen sections with one quarter of drama, one quarter of speech and a semester of English/literature, which meant that I would teach every student. What a super opportunity to build my program! I taught four classes each quarter and then switched with the speech teacher. At the semester we switched with English/lit. As the students were given English credit for my drama section, I designed the course based on a literary approach. We spent most of the time reading and discussing two classic plays, Antigone and Julius Caesar with little attention paid to performance. Let me tell you, teaching those plays SIXTEEN times in one year was more than I could stand! I needed some performance-based activities, and so did the students. Drama is a “doing” course — it is not static. The students needed to be active. I also had to give them enough “English,” so the following year I added a different Shakespeare play each quarter, teaching the same play four times a year, which I could handle easier than sixteen. I also used Charles Aidman’s adaptation of Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology for an acting segment. The English staff was very pleased. This curriculum changed again in 1981 when a third high school was added. My program was thriving; however, the program at the other high school was not. The individual who was teaching drama did not have a theatre background so he had his students doing socio-dramas that parents and administrators couldn’t wait to eliminate. I was presented with the opportunity to create a one semester Drama 1 class and a year-long Drama 2 play production class. Our district’s budget did not have money for a major theatre text so I prepared everything from scratch — remember, there were no computers or Internet to scour for ideas when I was developing these classes (of course I availed myself of both in the 90s). As my classes were still given English credit, care had to be given to include some basic literature and writing. By studying a play and its author, producing two full-length productions each year, using poems for my Interpretation unit, writing three critiques (not unlike the five paragraph theme), as well as in class presentations, the requirements were met. In the mid 90s another decision was made to have drama under the auspices of Fine Arts, rather than English. The students would no longer get English credit but could use Drama 1 and/or 2 as their one credit of fine arts and/or some of their seven elective credits. This allowed for much more freedom, but interestingly, the curriculum really didn’t change. | 
