how has the internship contributed to the inmates’ educational development?

At the beginning of the semester, I didn’t know whether I should have high hopes for my students or if I should assume that it was going to be a difficult semester. From my mother’s experience as a social worker, I know that while you hope for the best, there are very few successes. I wondered if this would apply to the students Gabby and I would be teaching. Because our students are in prison, and from the Shakespeare Behind Bars video I had watched over the break, I came into the program assuming that there would be a general lack of commitment.

The first day of class was wonderful, though, and dispelled a lot of my fears about not being able to engage the class. While the students were shocked and slightly unreceptive to the idea of having to perform a Shakespeare play in addition to reading it, they were pleasant enough

• Week 1: The students laughed sometimes, seemed happy to answer or guess at other points. One or two were particularly quiet (Mikey and Victor), but I hope with time they will warm up to the class.

However, I did suffer from a lot of cynisim and worry in the beginning weeks. I noticed patterns in our activities that should not have surprised me, but disheartened me anyway. In writing, there was a general tendency toward violence, and in acting exercises there was a lot of references to drugs, stealing and women.

• Week 2: I noticed during "the exquisite corpse" (which we changed to "the exquisite snail"), I noticed the men picked words like 'stabbed,' ' prison,' 'exploded,' and other violent or malicious words. It wasn't necessarily all of the men that did this, but they were not afraid of using those words or talking about how much prison sucks. Granted, it is a part of their everyday lives, but it is sad how cynical some of them seem to be.
• Week 3: We did try some acting exercises in class, which spiraled downhill faster than I think Gabby and I had anticipated. It required two people to have a conversation, starting out in a car, and another person could jump in and take one of the two people's place and continue the conversation. It very quickly went to alcohol, drugs, stealing, women… Gabby and I would try to jump in and fix it, but they would go back to talking about those same topics. Steve-o got what we were trying to do and would divert the conversations back to what we had been talking about, but the other students didn't really catch on. It was rather sad to witness that.

I was happy to witness, however, that over time the students learned to not speak on these subjects in class and kept conversations relatively clean. They learned that they could have fun in class without having to talk about subjects Gabby and I felt were inappropriate. While Gabby and I did try to limit the opportunities for the students to have these sort of conversations, it was nice to not hear it at all by the end of the semester.

One of the frustrations Gabby and I faced during classes was the fear students had when it came to asking questions about the text.

• Week 3: What was frustrating about it, however, was that despite Gabby and I encouraging them to stop at any point and ask questions instead of waiting until the end of the scene or when Gabby and I chose to stop them, they would remain quiet and only read their assigned parts. Of course when we asked if they had questions they did have several, but often times they would forget where a point of interest or concern was. I really hope that this will change with the next few lessons.

I think that this hesitance on the part of the students had a lot of do with not wanting to admit that they didn’t understand. I can understand the feeling, because I suffer from it as well in certain situations – it’s a pride thing. However, over time, the students learned to be more prompt in their question asking, and they weren’t afraid to bring up silly questions; what I noticed as the semester continued was that the students were willing to help answer questions where they could, or that they would help clarify something after Gabby and I had explained it if the their peer still had a hard time understanding.

As I’ve stated in several areas of this portfolio, the students were very inconsistent with completing their homework, which really discouraged me. Because everything we did was ultimately geared toward the end of the semester performance, the incompletion of homework put a strain on Gabby and I to pick up their slack. As we stressed this fact to the students, and the closer we got to the performance date, I began to seen an improvement in their commitment to the work.

• Week 6: To his credit, Mikey did his homework wonderfully. He is consistently on top of the game, and I appreciate his dedication so much. Luis is also doing great; it is just that instead of rewriting his scene in summarization with dialogue, he summarized the scene in sentences and paragraphs. That is probably on me for not explaining clearly enough.
• Week 7: Steveo was very excited to be in class that day, and to have us read the work he and the other students wrote for class. I was happy to see him so thrilled about his work and excited to be at class. As Gabby and I discussed later on in the day, it's good to be able to see such a change in his attitude. I remember the first day Gabby and I went to the prison, he was so dismayed and seemed unenthused about having to put on a performance at the end of the semester. However, I feel like he is among the most enthusiastic, happily taking the part of Portia and making it his own.

It was moments like these that made teaching the class truly enjoyable. Although they may not have been model students all the time, I definitely saw an increase in their effort the more the realized that the performance was going to happen and that it was their responsibility to prepare for it. In Mikey’s case, he truly enjoyed reading Shakespeare and talking about it, which was a great surprise to me, especially since he was one of the quieter ones at the beginning of the semester. It was an interesting, and beneficial, process to me to watch the students go from general disinterest to active participation and dedication to putting on a performance. Where in the beginning they were wary of having to put on a performance for an audience, to the extent that when we first began acting exercises they would say “Don’t expect much from me, I’m not an actor,” the students were able to put on a stellar performance that they were even excited about.

• Week 9: Steveo walked in with the bottom of a mop on top of his head, and Mikey walked in with a homemade yarmulke and Jew-curls attached to his ears. The sight sent Gabby and I into hysterics, because these identifying props were completely unexpected. Since we had been limited in what we could bring into the prison, we assumed that the only things we could use to identify each person/their character were by the signs Gabby made for everyone. Steveo and Mikey walked in and changed that - they took the initiative to take the performance to another level, which Gabby and I were very proud and appreciative of. When they saw that I had brought tissue paper with me for the caskets (which I had just intended to cover chairs with), Travis, Steveo and Mikey rushed back to their living spaces to grab property boxes. Despite the fact that I told them they didn't have to, in fear that if they dumped their property out of them they would lose something, they all insisted on grabbing the boxes and covering them in the gold, silver and black tissue paper. Steveo said he wanted to make the performance as believable as possible, as well as the best. I admit it nearly put tears in my eyes.

What I witnessed throughout this semester was a small, yet absolutely vital change in the students that stayed with our program. Although they weren’t always great about getting their homework done or doing the reading ahead of time, they consistently participated in class and became dedicated to a project they were not keen on in the beginning. It was a small development as a result of the class, but it was more than I could have asked for from them, and it made me proud to have been able to participate in the process.