Lexi, Matt, and I have been very much looking forward to meeting the kids at St. Joseph’s Villa these past 2 weeks but unfortunately we have not had the chance to do so yet due to some complications. During our initial meeting with Timone, the coordinator, he seemed very excited and hopeful about the prospect of Lexi, Matt and I coming to St. Joseph’s for the Shakespeare class. He was confident that there would be a solid group of kids that would be interested in the class and he planned to get them signed up before we returned later that week.

After this meeting, Lexi, Matt, and I came up with a plan for how to tackle the project – we wanted to make it fun, informative, and productive for everyone involved. We agreed that we should start the first class by taking the time to get to know the kids. Understanding that they would already know each other we worked to come up with ideas that would keep them engaged with each other but would also give us the opportunity to get to know their names and their personalities. We decided that we should begin with a quick name game and then get into some general team building exercises, followed by more theater based games. We figured this would allow the kids to become comfortable with us, with each other, and with the subject matter we were going to be exploring together. If time permitted we were also planning on doing a quick briefing of the project with a summarization of the entire play of Twelfth Night and its characters. Assuming that this would take up much of the hour we would spend with the kids we decided that we would wait until the following week to fully delve into our specific act of the play (Act 3).

 

When we showed up for our first day, no students ended up being available for the activity. As it turns out, many of the students who Timone was hoping would enroll have another weekly commitment during the time slot we were assigned. Despite being disappointed that we were not able to work with students that week, we coordinated with Timone to arrange a new time slot that worked for all of us as well as for the interested students. We left looking forward to our next meeting. Unfortunately, that meeting was cancelled as well because of an event that all St. Joseph’s Villa students were attending that day. Again, it was a bummer that we had yet to meet the students, but we are keeping our hopes up for the next meeting.