Role plays are always terrible

I studied Speech and Drama for about twelve years, and then I taught both Drama and English for two years.

I have, on more than one occasion, flirted with the idea of undertaking a thesis on the confluence between performance and language learning by examining whether drama class activities designed to improve performance can be successfully used in a language classroom to improve oral language skills.

It is my considered opinion that role-play activities suck.

They just do.

It's like there's something in the genre that is inherently terrible.

You know what I'm talking about.  You have to pretend to be Harold, who has something terribly ordinary or mundane to do.  Your partner plays Mildred, who wants to talk to Harold about something equally mundane but clashing with Harold's mundane plans.  You must pretend you care about these mundane things and try to negotiate some sort of conversation or compromise.

Blah.

Scripted drama/sketches have the benefit of actual thought.  Improvisations (proper improvisations - like those found in theatre sports) are kept aloft by the participants entering into the spirit of the game and have an air of anything-can-happen danger.  Role-play activities lack both the game and the thought, and always seem to trudge along like a lame duck caught in an oil slick.

Role plays in classroom situations can have some limited benefit, in that they get the participants to start thinking about ideas from different perspectives, and they prompt the use of conversational skills like listening and turn-taking - but they're almost always boring and horrid.

Turn a role-playing activity into an assessment item, and then they become boring, horrid and terrifying.  Not a good combination.  Role plays can, possibly, be used as a spot of scaffolding on the way to a less horrible assessment item, but I would really recommend something else.

Anything else, really.

Might I suggest: a proper script, a proper improvisation or a decent vox-pop?  These are all good alternative to role plays.

Chooseable path?

So, I’m currently reading “To Be OR Not To Be” – a chooseable-path version of Hamlet written by Ryan North, who I suspect may be some sort of genius.  Or an idiot savant.  I’m not sure.  Maybe there isn’t a difference.

And “reading” is a bit of a loose term for this book.  “Playing” comes closer.  I’m playing a book.  I get to a point where the book says “do you want to go back to Denmark or become a pirate?” and I can’t help but shout “Pirate!”  Which causes no end of consternation in my household.

What is causing *me* no end of consternation is the fact that, if I loose my place, I can never find it again.  This book is labyrinthine.  I’m deliberately making choices I know will send me down dead ends, just so I can see which end it sends me to, but when I try to go back to find the original thread I branched off...

Judicious use of bookmarks hasn’t saved me as often as I would have liked.

I always hated “choose your own adventure” books when I was a kid.  They seemed unnecessarily light on plot, and that whole second person thing was always a bit naff.  This one, however, is totes rad, bro.  It’s oozing radditude.

There’s even a “chooseable path” book within the “chooseable path” book – to replace the play-within-a-play in the heart of Hamlet.  Sweet.

It may have also been written entirely in that weird post-surfer/skeghead slang that often perpetuates internet chatrooms and is notable in movies like “Dude, Where’s my Car?”.

Anyway, I was just sitting here, flicking through a grammar book for a German assignment, when it suddenly hit me:

Do you know what would make an awesome chooseable path book?  A book on grammar, that’s what.

No, seriously. 

Although, by “awesome”, I may just mean “seriously interesting to people who like this sort of stuff”, and possibly useful for other people”.

Imagine it:  You are given a sentence or some dialogue, and then given options as to which mini-lesson you want to branch off from that passage.

Das Mädchen will nicht sein Frühstuck essen, weil das mit der Katze spielt.

To a) Find out why the conjugated verb is suddenly at the end of the sentence, go to p18

b) Find out what happens when you use “mit” in front of a feminine noun, go to p26

c) Find out why we call the girl “it” rather than “she”, go to p29

d) See what happens to this sentence when you change the tense, go to p35

You pick “b” and are taken to a minilesson that uses that sentence (and others) to explain that “mit” is a preposition that must always be followed by the dative case, and feminine nouns switch their articles from “die” to “der” in the dative.  Then:

To a) See more dative prepositions, go to p15

b) Find out what happens to feminine nouns in the genitive case, go to p21

c) Try an exercise to test your knowledge of noun genders, go to p42

You choose your own grammar lesson!  And it’s based entirely on prompting you to ask a question and go looking for the answer - which means the answers are likely to be more meaningful for you, and you might be more likely to remember them!

It takes parsing sentences to a whole new level!

That’s exciting.  Try to at least pretend you think it’s cool.