JWDrama-and-play PDF

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Jenna Wyns

Jenna Wyns Markham Isler Drama and Play April 19, 2016

Drama and Play

A discussion and reflection on the class as a whole, and the impact it had on me, is simple and complex at the same time. Simple, because I am writing a paper about things that happened to me in this class and telling what I thought about it, why I liked or did not like certain things we have done, why it was important or why it was not important to me and if I had benefits from it. Complex, because a semester is long and with two classes week and we did a lot of different kinds of playing in class, this makes it hard to describe a detailed paper. The questions above make it a little bit easier to give answers about the course. The easiest thing to answer is the course in general, it was an exciting class that did teach important real life related things from a different perspective than other classes do. When I say real life, I mean, things that are happening on a daily basis but which we do not realize, because these are just ordinary things that we see every day and never really wonder about the background and a purpose of those things. In the beginning of the semester, most of us were strangers to each other. We might had ideas about who is who, depending on how the person looks and acts, but we obviously did not know each other well enough to describe the person`s personality. This has changed a lot from day to

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day while we were moving towards to the end of the semester. We have played a lot of different games, individually or team involved, mostly creativity testing games, and without realizing that, we get to know each other better while playing simple and sometimes not so simple games. We also played games, where we had to remember ach others names, we did this multiple times, which really helped to memorize them. Remembering names is like studying, you have to repeat it often to remember what you are reading about. Right now I could say most of the people’s names and also categorize them in the class depending on how they did act in what type of games. I can truly tell, we had some serious competitors in our class. They just wanted to be a master of any game. They even broke the rules sometimes in order to win the game. I would put to this category most of the athletes and some competitive minds. The other big part of the class was the people with high creativity skills. Whenever we played something where we had to come up with a new idea, these artists, explorer type of persons were just creating wonderful things. I was amazed that with some games, we only had a certain amount of material and still we could create beautiful things. Also every one encouraged everyone, we put our heads together and created one big brain with problem solving skills. No one said a negative word about anyone`s idea, which made this class atmosphere friendly and more comfortable to everyone. We obviously had director types of persons. They were the people who always had plans and execute scenes and events. They naturally could organize other people and encourage the team. When a team had more than one person like this, it mostly resulted complete chaos, that sometimes led to even more brilliant solutions, but most of the times just ended up with arguing why the others idea is wrong and why we should do the things that he or she thinks it good. The storytellers, every time they came up with stories, like it was nothing. The moment they opened their mouth, words just

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kept flowing out, like they came straight from imagination land. When we created stories adding only one word per each person and in the end someone had to summarize it, they told the made up story like it really have happened and even if it was the most ridiculous story that I ever heard. The way they were telling it, it sounded authentic. When we were not playing games, we talked about things that surround us, such as our educational system. The program called No Child Left Behind (NCLB), is meant to raise the quality of our education, and so might it did on paper and statistics, I feel like it has more negative thing than positive. The program came alive after The International Math and Science test, that tested different countries` students and ranked the countries` education level based on the students` results, and as the American students scored quite low, the NCLB program passed Congress in 2001 and was signed into law by President George W. Bush. This is one of the reasons why we get multiple choice exams now. With this type of exam, you have to circle the right answer. The only thing that matters in multiple choices to circle the right answer for the specific question and move on to the next question. The exam scores are going to be higher than open questions exams. You always have pretty much 25% chance to circle the right answer or sometimes even more when they give stupid answers options or if they give you a safe pick answer “C”, or if “All of above” or “Both A and B” listed in the answers. The problem with this system is that students are not developing original ideas or thoughts. They can’t write their own opinion about interesting topics, because as long as you know the dates for specific historical events you will score high in history exams. This makes the students clever on paper, but no one really seems to care about what students really think about things and how the see the world. And students living in this system, they are afraid to go to take tests because they might will score low and that score they will get, is measuring their knowledge and their intelligence and will

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influence their life later on, for example when at the job interview, employers checking your grades. Every year students are giving up, because there is too much pressure on them in the final exam week or just generally in every school-week. This class opened up my eyes about problems, that aren’t meant to solve, but realizing their existence I can protect myself. I used to be scared from exam, but now I know if I fail a test, the world is not going to stop. I still do my best to get better grades every day, but I realized it is not what life is all about. Life meant to be fun at some point. I need to do thing that fulfills my happiness. Playing games in a daily basis, reliefs my stress and also makes me feel better. I should not get addicted to playing games though. It happened to lot of people that they got addicted to their habits that made them happy at the beginning, but ruined their life after they did nothing else just that specific activity. It is all about the perfect balance.

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References:

U.S. Department of Education, No Child Left Behind http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/beginning.html#sec1...