student+work+greece

Greece: This project was met with a very mixed reaction. There were many groans of students who saw this as a challenge and then were the voices of excitement who saw this as an opportunity to write and direct their own Greek epic. Nick and Lance, in separate groups, set about to create the next Hollywood blockbuster. Lance went about this in his usual methodical style. He is never one to get really excited about a project, but just attacks it and gets it done. After 2 days a script was complete and they filmed the whole thing outside of school leaving them with a couple of days to relax in class. I was nervous about them not working in class, but I knew Lance was going to create a solid end result. Lance brought in a DVD of his “play” and in complete costume his group had recorded a very good play that covered all the necessary material with good characters and an interesting story line. This was Lance’s favorite project and the one he felt he learned the most with because you had to do so much with the material. This is also the area that Lance scored the best on his final exam. Nick with his group members really saw this as their time to shine. They were going to create a true epic that would blow the rest of the class away. Their class time was filled with discussion of plot lines, characters, various scenes, and costumes. I was excited to see what the end result of this project was going to be, with the amount of enthusiasm being applied to it and sky was the limit. Unfortunately most of the ideas never got off the planning stage. The guys ran out of time and ended up with a shortened version of their ideas and no performance. While the script its self was not the best, I knew they had learned a lot during the entire unit. The discussions I overheard and the ideas that were trying to be incorporated into this project showed a solid understanding. With this project the enthusiasm, excitement and creativity got the best of Nick and his group. As a teacher this was a thrilling problem to have and one that was hard to dock points for. Arriel and Sammi both settled on creating a poem. I knew Arriel would do this route as she does not always enjoy working in groups and a poem is an excellent way for her to express herself. Even though she was given work time in class, most of her work was done outside of class. When she presented, her poem was filled with a lot of imagery as she brought in the required information about Athens. Her poem while not long was very well done. Sammi, also doing a poem, did most of her work during class. She wrote a poem dealing with Sparta and the harsh life people lived from the perspective of a wife/mother showing concern and despair for the condition her boys are living in. Sammi, who is not always the most creative, really excelled with this project. She is always going above and beyond but not always doing so in a creative way. I thought the way she presented the material and how well it flowed made this one of her better projects.