Laura asks:
Is it a good idea to assign jobs as permanent actors? Actors are not listed as jobs in ANATTY. I have always just picked someone on the spot, or had the owner of the character be the actor when doing invisibles. This last hasn’t proved so productive sometimes such a student is to shy or too something. It seems that permanent acting jobs could allow for improvement overtime, but lose the variety component. What do you think?
My response:
I have never thought of the job of actors as permanent, like the others in the four hubs. I have always simply waited until a student stood up and walked up to the front of the room by their own choice to a big round of applause, and, if the student is notably shy, to a thunderous round of applause.
This process of waiting for the actor to present herself is delicate and intuitive. It is not our choice, really. One time I was being observed (luckily by a wonderfully warm-hearted assistant principal) and literally no one got up. The class was that way. I put my feet up on the desk and felt the burn. The AP offered free Lincoln HS tee-shirts. We waited. We did not rescue the situation. It turned out to be a great story with actors who never would have stood up had I assigned them.
So for me, each new story implies/needs a spontaneous appearance of new actors. Otherwise, when one or two students are the actors all the time, there is a quiet resentment in those who don’t get the opportunity for this kind of unmatched personal growth, of simply being in front of people. Shy kids valiantly summon their courage for the day when they would be actors, and this is good for them, because when they finally do it, their lives change in ways we cannot know.
Moreover, when actors are chosen for the entire year, they tend to get too full of themselves. And the class gets tired of it, I would imagine. I would rather allow all my students the great chance of performing in front of the group to the best of their ability, no matter how bad. All they have to do is stand there anyway.
This is not at all true for the other jobs in the four hubs. The nature of the jobs in the other four hubs is that we need them to be good and trained and solid. That’s how the Invisibles system works – it NEEDS those jobs to help the classroom run like a well-oiled machine. Replacing all those other jobs on a daily basis would be impossible, especially the key jobs of Artist 1 and Artist 2.
You correctly say that permanent actors “lose the variety component”. The one thing I never want my classroom to look like is when I was doing TPRS, where just a few dominate, as per this article:
https://benslavic.com/blog/five-to-seven-kids-can-ruin-a-class/