WANISAN

This week in my discussion class, we talked about the topic of success.

It’s always interesting to me to see what other people think about success: what it is, who has it, what they want or need to feel success in their own lives.

There’s a different answer for every student.

That is a great topic for a discussion class. Any time there is no really set, black and white, right or wrong explanation for your topic it can lead to some really healthy discussion.

We have covered a lot of ground in this class, and we have had some great discussions.

I thought this week’s class was great. Success is one of my own personal favorites as a topic, so it’s fun for me to get to share that with these students.

We started off with some quotes. There were quotes from Tony Robbins, Michael Jordan, and Bill Gates.

Each group had to decide what they thought was the meaning of the quote, come up with a story example to explain it, and to talk about whether they thought the quote was a true statement.

Luckily they all started off with agreeing with the quotes, and they had some good examples, too.

We followed that up with a general discussion on what was success to them, for them in their lives.

All in all, class was, well, a success 😉

Last week we had our 2nd annual skit performance contest at Chukyo University.

It’s a contest where all of the 2nd year students in the BACS Dept. Oral Communications VI classes get together and perform skits they wrote themselves. The performances take place in front of the combined 3 classes for each of the 3rd and 4th period groups.

Each class is divided into teams of from 3 to 5 members each and they choose a movie to dramatize in a summary fashion.

The students write scripts to tell the stories in their own words and actions. Since the players are limited, the stories have to be adapted to fit the available actors. Some actors have to play multiple parts with each performance lasting from 5 to 7 minutes.

The stories are told through dialog and action as much as possible with very little narration.

This usually makes for some very interesting takes on some well-known, and some not so well-known stories.

This year performances ranged from retellings of Toy Story to Gokusen to Heidi.

Students voted on the best performances and awards were given to the top 3 groups in each class period. Awards were also given to the top two individual performers from each time period as well.

Here are some photos of the winners: