A Paedogogical Moment of which I'm rather Chuffed

So, for a couple of reasons I'm brought back to this past semester: I was thrown the task of teaching British and World Drama. I am something less than a drama expert or critique. Nonetheless, the class was mine. One of the things I did was assign them groups, each group at random drew a television show. I put 10 current shows, 5 comedies, 5 dramas, in a hat and a group member drew from the hat the show the group would deal with for the semester. The idea was that at each stage of the semester (Classical, Medieval, World), the groups would transform their shows into the genre we were studying....so for classical, dramas into a Classical drama, comedies into Classical comedy.

Some really got into the spirit of the exercises. Two that I revisited today were the group doing Two and a Half Men and Law and Order. The middle section of the semester was on medieval drama, chiefly focusing on morality plays, saints' plays, mystery plays, and bit on folk plays and interludes. Now Two and a Half men is easily transformed into a morality play and that's what that group did, though admittedly the timing couldn't have been better since they presented at the time that Charlie Sheen was in full-on meltdown mode! I could not have planned that better.

The other group I revisited today was the Law and Order group. They consistently did a fabulous job on their show in all three phases. But they really went over the top I thought with the medieval. Undoubtedly they wanted to earn brownie points, and they succeeded. In explaining the saint's life I had gotten WAAAAAYY off topic and did a little pony show about saint's lives and some of the oddities one finds there. I found myself unexpectedly talking about St. Mary of Egypt and St. Eugenia of Alexandria, particularly the latter. One of the points I was trying to make was the concern about sexuality regarding female saints vs. male saints...prepatory to reading and teaching Thais the Whore. This group did Law and Order doing the story of St. Eugenia. Priceless. Truly priceless. I wish I had film of it. They did marvelously well, complete with the "doink doink." At least they learned something about a saint....