Energy theater in the first year class: My group is doing a lot of talky negotiation that I think they could accomplish more efficiently by walking. For example, one teacher kept saying that "at the end of the scenario we all need to dissipate," and only when they actually walked it through did we see her back out to the edge of the room, away from any object they had designated, with her hands lifting up in a gesture I interpreted as "fading out." If she had just kept talking, I think she would have said the word "dissipate" about 100 times and I would still not have intuited that she meant something a lot like disappear. Another teacher, representing thermal energy in the floor, said they should all "do this," which was to sink vertically downward in order to show that they were "being absorbed." To me, to be absorbed into the floor is to stand at a normal height within the floor-circle, but I think she was either trying to go out of existence, or was using the physical floor and not the floor-circle designated by the string. This is all very critical information that I (AND THEY) only get by them doing what the energy does rather than talking about it.
The point for me is that instructors should be helping teachers get right to it. People can negotiate verbally all day and not learn what they would learn in five seconds of energy theater. I want the instructors to be always saying, "Can you show me that?"
"can you show me that" is better than the usual alternative: "what do you mean by that?" in which the stimulus for the challenge, the challenge itself, and the answer to the challenge are all exchanged in a verbal, vocal currency. Let's break the cycle!
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