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• Characters, Dialogues and Interior Monologues! Pathways School Gurgaon
  
  September 28

The school is nearing the two-month mark since the start of this year for students – but MYP 4D’s English classes make it feel like it has been way longer.

For this unit, we have been reading, analysing and enacting the play “Pygmalion” by George Bernard Shaw, a classic that most would recognize as its iconic movie adaptation, “My Fair Lady.” The most recent classes have been spent scrutinizing the characters and how they behave, speak, think and feel.

Why? Well, it’s to grasp the concept of how to write interior monologues. In these classes, we’ve been engaging in various activities that allowed us to act as characters, understand the elements that make a good interior monologue, and finally, practicing it for ourselves.

Day 1 – The Hotseat Activity

This first class initially came off as a surprise. For this activity, the students take turns acting as five characters from Act 2 of Pygmalion – Eliza, Higgins, Pickering, Mrs. Pearce, and Alfred Doolittle.

By constantly rotating who acts as what character and improvising in unexpected situations, we enhanced our ability to embody a character’s feelings and thoughts and express them on stage.

The following include pictures and videos of the activity, along with reflections from two students.

“The hotseat activity was a fun way to delve deeper into the minds and mannerisms of the characters of the play "Pygmalion". The aim of the activity was to show what different characters would think about situations such as "Mrs. Pearce scolding the main characters" and how they would converse amongst each other about it. This activity was unique because of the way it engaged and entertained the audience. Everybody who was not participating at that time was either giving prompts for the actors to perform or just laughing and having a good time. I think this was a great way to be able to enact and explore the minds of our favourite characters from the play. I hope we have another activity like this soon!”

– Ekagra Fuloria, MYP 4D

“Putting yourself into the shoes of another person really helps you grasp their situation. In this L&L unit, our class performed a hot-seat session with the students of 9D in context to the Unit book, which is Pygmalion. We spent our class time to delve deep and understand the perspectives, intentions and thought processes of the characters in Pygmalion, while we did obtain insightful knowledge about the perspectives of the characters, we also derived a bit of fun in the process.

Utilizing the peculiar accents in the play during the hot-seat sessions made the learning process all the more interesting. These hotseat sessions were truly a fruitful time for all of us.” – Drona Kapoor, MYP 4D

Day 2 – The Auction

The second day, which was held during the online classes taken due to G20, we integrated AI into our learning in order to find the ‘best’ interior monologue through an auction. By using both AI and our own knowledge to construct an interior monologue on any prompt, we were to try and persuade others as to why they should buy the text based on its redeeming features as an interior monologue.

Here is a better insight as to what transpired during this activity:

“When we started with English this year, I was looking forward to wonderful, engaging activities conducted in class. I would be understating if I said that the ante of our English classes is anything less than a gameshow, and it quite literally transformed into one on the online classes that were conducted during G20.

Online classes are a great opportunity for us to orderly communicate, and present different points of view (all varying and equally interesting). While effectively using these characteristics to our benefit, our class staged an auction in an English class. The auction, probably one of the most elite online auctions, was to find the highest bid on the best monologue written by ChatGPT.

Ms. Shweta, our English teacher, makes it a point to educate us that AI can also be used to learn and educate oneself outside of just “cheating”. Students from our class asked ChatGPT to write monologues on different topics, and it was up to us to be able to create a pitch persuasive enough to empty the pockets of our friends.

Costumes, makeup and new personalities were adorned to sell our point, and the auction picked up heat within minutes; great deals pouring in from everyone’s turned on mics. In my opinion, it was not only one of the most entertaining online classes I have ever participated in, but it was also one of the best English-related experiences I have had.

I learnt that AI can be used positively as well, and my mind was changed for the better. I used to believe that students from our grade wanted nothing to do with AI other than to use it to cheat or copy off from, but I saw that it can be a source of inspiration, something that we can all be a part of. Just like an auction.” – Aadya Amritesh, MYP 4D

Day 3 – The Final Practice

“My strength is that monologues are amazing to write for me because it works on conversational writing. Where you are just expressing your thoughts and feelings for the character, which comes naturally to me.

One weakness I faced was portraying the characters English in the way that they speak in the play, substituting those words with ones which the character would know was pretty challenging for me.” – Siddhant Pandita, MYP 4D

A lot of us felt the same. We felt strength in terms of framing an interior monologue and what are the ingredients to making a strong one, but we lacked in experience and confidence in how and what words London society was familiar with talking with in the 1910s. The words they would use to express themselves, or the casual terms they would feel comfortable to talk to themselves with.

Through this practice, we were able to recognize this weakness, and Shweta ma’am provided feedback to each and every student’s work for the FA the next day.

Overall, these activities have been incredibly successful in engaging students with how to capture an interior monologue, and there have never been more interactive classes!

By: Trisha Rajkumar, MYP 4D