how has this internship helped me gain teaching skills?

Going into this internship, I did not have a lot of teaching experience, and none whatsoever in the field of Shakespeare. All I had was my experiences with various plays by Shakespeare in high school to rely on, and the teaching methods my teachers had implemented. In the weeks leading up to our first class with the students, I was very apprehensive over the chance that someone in the class would know more about Shakespeare than I did and would therefore get nothing out of the class. However, my worries were mostly abolished after the first class.

• Week 1: We took our time going through the scene, and I could tell (and I'm sure Gabby could too) right off the bat that meaning was completely escaping them. I think that Gabby and I played well off each other in trying to explain passages. She did so well keeping them involved. I'm lucky she is my partner.

Because Gabby has had more teaching experience than I have, I was able to learn a lot of new skills from her. She always knew when to stop in the middle of a passage and ask the student questions, and she seemed to always been in control of the conversations, and brought them back on topic when the students became too absorbed in something unrelated to the class. I did my best to follow her example and find places where we might be able to ask questions of the students, and if there were confusing words I always tried to write them up on the board so that we could work through them together as a class.

One of the things we were able to do, and this semester taught me to pay more attention to, was out-sourcing to previous classes I’d been to in order to find activities that would keep the students involved and engaged in the classes. I recalled a lot of the activities I used to do with my drama class back in high school in order to prepare the students for the final performance. Gabby and I were able to come up with several activities that the students seemed to enjoy that we could use in every class to help break up the reading. In one particular instance, we were able to use an activity we did the week before at a meeting with Ken Lamberton.

• Week 2: We started the class with "The exquisite corpse drinks the new wine" game, the same one we played at the writing workshop with Ken Lamberton. Although it was slightly difficult for them at points and they didn't understand exactly why we were doing it, they said at the end that they really enjoyed it. I felt it was a good segue into the sonnets we read with them. It was an opportunity for them to be a little creative, as well as see that poem writing can be fun at times, even when they don't make sense.

One of the things we had to do as teachers was assign the class homework – something I’d never done before. It was a difficult process for me, to hope that they would do their work but expect them not too. It taught me to examine what homework we wanted to assign, and what was reasonable for them to do in a week’s time, especially given their circumstances. More importantly, it required that Gabby and I select homework that would benefit the students in the long run, relating particularly to the performance at the end of the semester.

• Week 4: This week we assigned actual homework. After reading through all of Act 2, Gabby and I divvied out the various scenes from the first two acts to the students present and asked them to condense and rewrite them for our performance. Gabby feels that by having them rewrite the scenes instead of us, they will be able to understand and memorize the lines better, and I agree with her.

I think that for all my years as a student, I’ve taken for granted the value of homework and how it help prepare me for certain things – like tests or performances – throughout the years. What I learned by assigning this specific type of homework, the students were better able to understand what was going on in the scenes and it made it easier for them to memorize their lines for the performance. Where the scenes they provided were incomplete, we were able to explain the importance of certain aspects of Shakespeare’s writing and why certain things happen in the play.

Because I learned quickly that the students were more likely to not do their homework, I was able to accept that the lesson plans Gabby and I put together were subject to great changes. I learned how to adjust our plans accordingly and still manage to get the majority of the work done that we hoped to accomplish in a given class period. While our classes were more spontaneous as a result, I learned that so long as we had the bones of the lesson plan figured out, we could still manage to get things done that the students hadn’t done themselves beforehand.

One of the frustrations of teaching and not receiving the homework for the students was the lack of a completed script for our performance. As a result, Gabby and I had to make certain decisions, like write parts of the script ourselves, as well as find solutions for worst case scenarios. As the performance was approaching and we feared we would not have a complete script or enough time to perform, we had to come up with some possible solutions in order to be able to have our performance.

• Week 6: One solution might be to have Gabby and I act as narrators for the play. Scenes that aren't necessary to act out could be told in summary by us, and then the students could act out the most vital scenes (or complete scenes that we have). This could cut performance time… possibly.

I feel that this semester has been very beneficial to me and that through Gabby’s example and our teamwork, I have learned new skill sets and confidence in teaching, especially something as difficult as Shakespeare. While a lot of it required adjustments to plans, I feel like I can better appreciate some of the frustrations teachers face and the effort it requires to teach students something they may not have an interest in.