In this reflection, I’m going to discuss about advantages and disadvantages of various interactions. Starting out with Private reading. When doing private reading, there are some advantages but also disadvantages. The advantages are that you can read it at your pace and re-read the play anytime you want but the disadvantages are that you wont have anyone to share your opinions or discuss with , when reading all by yourself. This could lead to doubts and confusion until you discuss it with someone , like while reading the play I wasn’t sure what kind of person Nat exactly was, as in if he was really emotional or if he was kinda cold who doesn’t show emotions a lot but after discussing it with my friends at class I found out he was really emotional.
The other part is the Powerpoint presentation we need for the summary and research, this had few advantages but only some disadvantages, first it encourages you to go in detail which means since you are presenting the power point to the whole class you know it cant be incomplete and that makes you want to complete it, hence encouraging you to complete your powerpoint. The other advantage is it helps you learn about other’s opinion and discuss among the group. This means when you make your presentation you learn about everyone’s opinion in your group which helps you improve your understanding of the play, this is kinda similar to the disadvantage of private reading , as I mentioned I found out more about Nat when we discussed in the group for our presentation rather than learning more about him during private reading and the disadvantage is that it encourages you to only look at some specific areas and not every thing, for example in the presentation we only looked at few scenes and not the whole scene this would have lead to lesser understanding of the other scene as we would be too busy trying to understand just few scenes. Another example is when I was in charge of doing the slides for the Theme, while doing this and researching I found out how much grief is a part of the book, as in you need to understand how much grief there is and why the characters experience it , in order for you to understand the play more. I learnt that Nat experiences a lot of Grief as he sees his father suicide and can’t do anything to help him also his mother dies of cancer which causes him more grief. I learnt all this while doing my powerpoint presentation , hence this was really helpful for me.
The third part is the Dramatic Reading and in this we did an actual dramatic reading of our specific scenes. The advantages are that it helps us understand the character more as we need to sound like them and speak like them, and to know that we have to research more about the character which in turn increases our understanding of the character and when we understand the character we know when they use different tones and emotions. Hence this is really a great advantage of dramatic reading. The disadvantage is that since all of us have different ideas it means different interpretations might be misleading , which means one group might make Nat sound a bit feminine and the other group might make him seem like someone who doesn’t show a lot of emotions. Hence this could be misleading and also confusing.
The next one is the Ensemble Rehearsal , these rehearsals are very important and play a major role in how we perform for the main drama play and it helps us know more about the character and we get to actually learn our lines for the first time which makes us understand the play more as when we learn the lines we get to know more about the surroundings , for example in our scene we had to at the bear fighting through the peephole this made us know there were a lot of peepholes in the area at that time , hence making us know more about the surrounding. The disadvantage is that it might cause arguments because not everyone in the group might agree with you and this might be bad for your group.
The last but not the least is watching a presentation , this is basically what it sounds like. Watch others present, this has quite some advantages and shares a disadvantage with the other parts. The advantage is that you get to know what others think about the play and you get it watch it from a different perspective , this will broaden your knowledge as you get to see the whole play from a different perspective and this helps you learn a lot more about the characters , setting , their time and much more. But the disadvantage is that it might confuse you quite a bit since every time you see a group , they might be having the same characters but the way they portray the character might be really different.
In conclusion, I think the most helpful interaction for me was the private reading , since I like being able to read and re-read at my own place and own method compared to other methods where I had to work in a group and also work a lot slower than my own pace as our group’s members would have really different pace compared to mine. Also organising group meetings is really hard and requires a lot of time to organise where as private reading doesn’t need any time to organise and all it requires is for you to pick up the playbook and read it. Hence i felt private reading was the most helpful for me, and the least helpful for me was the dramatic reading as it caused me to get confused because every group had a different interpretation and different opinions of the characters and most of them were really different from each other. Hence trying to understand all of them resulted in me getting confused.
adityareadingjournal09 