Student Teaching...in a teeny weeny nutshell.

OK, so trying to explain/recap my entire student teaching experience in one post is ridiculous.  It's times like this that I get REALLY mad at myself for being such a blogging slacker because now there are hundreds of awesome stories that will never get put to paper (or to web...?) because I won't possibly be able to remember them all.  Luckily, I wrote a weekly reflection as part of my student teaching assignments, but even those are not very detailed.  Oh well, I guess I'll do what I can to give you an idea what my student teaching experience was like...

First of all, let me say that my student teaching experience was INCREDIBLE!  I student taught at Hillcrest High School in Midvale, UT.  Daniel and I moved from Provo to Midvale to make this a bit easier.  We're living in our cute Midvale basement apartment until we get jobs elsewhere.

One of the things that made my student teaching so incredible was this guy:

 

Mr. Joshua Long was my mentor teacher and the resident drama teacher at Hillcrest.  I was incredibly lucky to get paired with someone who I actually enjoyed being around and truly respected.  I learned SO much from him!

Another thing that set my student teaching experience apart--both the quantity and quality of shows we put up.  We did 2 straight plays, 1 musical, 1 one-act and coached about 40 students for both the region and state drama competitions.  CRAZY! 

The first show: Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman

Complete with Mount Olympus:

A 9-foot waterfall:

And a 16-foot pool (with secret entrances so actors could enter and exit the pool without being seen)...all on stage:

The second show: Time of My Life by Alan Ayckbourn

This was a dinner theater performance where we served a 3-course dinner during the show:

Next was the region and state competitions.  Let's just say we did pretty dang well.

1st place Comedic Monologue:

1st Place Dramatic Monologue:

2nd Place Comedic Monologue:

2nd Place Contemporary Scene:

First Place One-Act (more about that later), and basically all of these....

Here was our whole team after dominating (a.k.a. winning the Sweepstakes):

The one-act we did was called The Laramie Project.  It's a full-length play, but we cut it down to one-act length.  The play is about the murder of Matthew Shepherd in Laramie, Wyoming.  The students were AMAZING.  Two of them won outstanding performance awards at the region competition, and the whole show won Best Drama at state.  We were also invited to perform the show in front of all the principals and many administrators in the Canyons School District, which was an incredibly special experience.  The kids just gave so much and were successful at conveying a difficult but important message:

Here are a few photos from a rehearsal of The Laramie Project:

Next show: The Wedding Singer, the musical:

Basically, I spent a LOT of time after school co-directing all these amazing shows!  The time was worth it though, because I learned a ton, and I don't think I would have gained as much experience if I hadn't committed to all the after-school time.  Of course, I didn't just put on shows...I taught!

I taught Theatre 1 (my hardest class), 2 sections of Theatre 3/4/IB, and towards the end I took over Theatre 2.  I also helped out with Stage Crew and of course with the Productions Company, which is the group of kids that acted in several of the shows I described above.  

Here are some of the Productions Company girls with the poster they had everyone contribute to.  It was titled "101 Things We Love About Mrs. Faulk"

 My Theatre 2 class:

One of my Theatre 3/4/IB classes.  Yea, that was a SMALL class!

Basically, there is SO much I could say about student teaching.  I seriously just want to kick myself for not blogging about it, but maybe I'll share random stories as I think about them once I'm caught up.  For now, I guess this is good!