As a part of teaching Modern Theater in the Fall of 2023, I chose to cover Sondheim and Wheeler’s musical of Sweeney Todd. Above are links to my slides to both lecture days, where I cover historical relevance in relation to genre and Sondheim’s career trajectory, characters and casting choices, differences in music, and more. In doing so, I strive to make Sweeney accessible to everyone, from seasoned theater majors to STEM students covering their first musical, and provide a means for outlining how this show is adapted today.
In Fall 2023, I was asked to design a syllabus for and teach a sixty person class of juniors and seniors on Modern Theater at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I comprised a series of American plays and musicals from 1953 to 2003 that I felt were both inclusive and could provide a basis for class conversations that would resonate with some of the issues that we’re still dealing with today.
I designed this lesson to be incorporated into a flip lecture-style class for an undergraduate course on pre-1700 drama. Ideally in this structure, students would be able to watch this video before coming into the class where we would begin to read the play together. I find pre-reading activities can help students feel more comfortable covering a Shakespearean work because it shows them that these plays are not as different from contemporary works as they may think.
This is a lesson I traditionally gave at the beginning of the year to my ninth graders to review the essential elements of a paragraph. I utilize the Jane Schaffer method of paragraph writing, but created the examples and the slides myself based on the informal/ formal feedback I received from students each year. This particular lesson uses an ‘I do, we do, you do’ style of teaching. I’ve removed the agenda, learning objective, state standard, and warm-up from the slides because they would normally be on the whiteboard. Also, students would generally take fill-in-the-blank notes throughout this presentation, which is also where they would place their paragraphs.
This is my ninth-grade syllabus from my time at CHAMPS Charter High School of the Arts. Aside from some of the school policies such as those on discipline, I have carefully crafted this syllabus over three years to make my space a comfortable learning environment for the thirty students I had each period (over a hundred each year). My syllabus was my guide for both myself and my students throughout the year and I tried to make my course as inclusive and organized as possible.
