Student Teaching - Week #9

by Kristin Trease - Kelvyn Park High School

Life in the City

This has been the weekend of performances. It’s been wonderful.

Chicago Symphonic Orchestra

Thursday: Chicago Symphonic Orchestra. I’m not the biggest fan of classical music, but I can appreciate its value and beauty.

Friday: Blue Man Group. If you volunteer to be ushers for the show, they let you watch for free. It was quite the experience. It is a theatrical concert, with lots of paint, music made on PVC pipes, and silent sketches. Very fun, but probably not anything I’ll ever need to see again.

Blue Man Group

Saturday: “Kinky Boots.” This is the new musical written by Cindy Lauper and Harvey Fierstein, based on the true story of a man in England who inherited his father’s failing shoe company. By a stroke of luck, he ran into a drag queen who turned out to be the savior of his company: he would make boots for drag queens. It was a very fun, very energetic show that we really enjoyed. And we only paid $25 for $60 seats.

I love weekends full of art. Granted, it was also full of homework, but we’ll try and forget about that.

Life in the Classroom

I planned my first failure of a lesson. Monday was pretty rough. There’s nothing quite like being reminded five different times that the lesson you planned was completely awful. The students knew it, I knew it. It was best to just move on and try to forget it.

Tomorrow will hopefully be the last schedule change for our freshmen. The school is hopefully getting all of that mess straightened out. I feel so bad for the students, but they are troopers.

I also got to join the after school drama club’s first meeting on Wednesday. It was so fun, playing theatre games and meeting some upper classmen. Sometimes I forget there are students other than the ones I see every day. The theatre director also talked to me about helping them out with their production of “Bye Bye Birdie” that is having auditions pretty soon. It waits to be seen how big of a role I can take and whether I’ll be able to see it all the way through, considering I have no idea where I’ll be in February. Hopefully in Chicago, but it’s hard telling at this point.