14th July 2009 Fancy having theater again, anyone?

Yesterday Miss Dzeelfa assigned us with a reading task based on two diluted versions of Ovid’s works- “Pyramus and Thisbe” and “Daedalus and Icarus”. “Pyramus and Thisbe” was easy to understand and I could almost immediately recognize the similarity of this story to William Shakespeare’s most famous wretched lovers of all time- “Romeo and Juliet”. However the Ovid’s latter work was quite challenging for me to make sense of thanks to the micro-small fonts, missing words probably a result of printing error and the English language that sounded Greek to me. However after reading the story for a few times, I roughly get a gist of what “Daedalus and Icarus” was all about, say 70% out of the overall text. During the lecture today, my group was assigned to summarize “Daedalus and Icarus” in not less than 200 words while some other groups did dialogues for “Pyramus and Thisbe”. It was quite a huge let down for me when my group was assigned to such boring task. Summarize? Oh, for heaven’s sake summary is so out-of-date and I already had a splendid blueprint in mind specially designed for the dialogue between the two tragic lovers! As the five of us were struggling hard to understand the story suddenly the idea of making the summary task fun and applicable for Malaysian schools hit my mind. “Why not we localize the story. Make it funnier with the Ah Beng-style of talking. Let’s do something that deviates from the boring and old-fashioned summary task that haunts us until now!” I told my group members and we were thrilled and shared many laughter during the construction of this one-of-a-kind ‘summary’ (if I am allowed to call it so J) As the five of us pour wacky into sentence on the piece of paper, the brainstorming session allowed me to fully understand the story which lead me to realize the importance of peer-tutoring in class. When it came to the presentation session, those groups who did the dialogue between Pyramus and Thisbe easily won giggles and laughter from the class. Many of them added humor and also songs to make the dialogue interesting which I believe it is crucial especially if we are to catch the attention of our students during the lesson. Iskandar’s rendition of “Pyramus and Thisbe” ala “Brokeback Mountain” style opened our eyes. Iskandar as Thisbe and Khai as Pyramus. Now that is something worth mentioning! Seriously it was dead hilarious and queer to see two men lovingly chasing each other in the jungle like those scenes in Bollywood movies! Situation became quite different when it came to the turn of those who did the summary task for “Daedalus and Icarus”. Sorry to say, but some groups were still stuck and bounded by mentality that summary task is boring and nothing can be done to make this task appealing to themselves (what more their students in the future). Please do not get me wrong, I am not condemning the traditional style of summarizing text, in fact I think Rachel’s group did a wonderfully-detailed summary for this hard-to-understand text! They x-rayed the whole “Daedalus and Icarus” text and had not missed a single detail! (I admit that we over-looked many small but significant elements scattered here and there in the story.) But my advice to the other groups (this includes mine), take a good look at Priya’s group! They almost made a play out of the story, adding monologues, dialogues and also the narrator’s voice. The whole story became alive with actors reciting the line extracted from the text with full of expression and emotion. I mean, wow! They were great and would that certainly win the audience if today’s lecture was replaced with a drama competition! Though my group did quite well in this presentation, my group still needs a lot of brush ups in terms of idea formation and also speech synchronization. Miss Dzeelfa suggested that it would be out of the ordinary if we were able to compose our rendition of “Daedalus and Icarus” into a choral speaking-like presentation. Today’s lecture was definitely fun-tastic, I do not know about the others but I indeed had enjoyed the lesson though some unbearable noises were produced but I know it was for the good since so many of us were able to open up and better express ourselves and this element of fun and excitement is definitely going to work in Malaysian classrooms where these elements better enhance the teaching and learning of English Literature lessons.