Popcorn Writing

Last week (February 20th) while Kim was teaching away at Augustana College, Kristi Jones and myself (Ashley Schwab) ventured to Joe Foss to work and write with the students. We had the students do a little popcorn writing—one of the student’s, Jess, volunteered to write the six song titles from the musical down on the board while the rest of the students got in groups of five to six (or three or eight, however they saw fix). Miss Mills gave a short synopsis of each song title, and then each student picked a song and began writing a scene.

Randomly (roughly every five to ten minutes) I would go to each table and tell them to switch, and they would then pass their paper to someone else in their group. The objective was to have them proceed with what was previously written, to write a consistent scene, and to stay on task.

The outcome was phenomenal. Some students passed the papers back and forth themselves, others worked together in groups writing, and some insisted I wrote as well, so I wrote a song and a scene with a few of the students. At the end of the hour and half, I collected everything and read a few of the scenes out loud to the group.

There were more students present then there had been in the previous few weeks; around thirty attended this session. It was unbelievable. These students are outstanding. I have so much fun hanging out and working with them; they are amazing personalities with so many talents and so much potential.