Sigh. Apparently I’m too good at being scary and that means I have a lot of work to do in the next few days.

A few days ago I wrote about he sales pitch I had to make for my third year high school class elective. I mentioned how we had to temper our pitch to chase out the wrong types but keep enough of the right types to have a viable class.

I didn’t temper very well, apparently as only one student signed up.

This means I have to do a lot of rethinking and revising by Monday. My class was based around acting techniques and acting exercises and it works best with a lot of people. With one it will be possible to do a monologue but extremely difficult to do a dialogue. It will also make the entire second term impossible as my students do a staged reading of one three person play and then write another as their final project.

The other problem is that even when I do have a few good ideas, it doesn’t take that much time for one person to finish the activity and leave me with lots of time to fill. (I had the opposite problem when the course jumped from six students to 14 a few years ago.)

Oddly, this phenomenon affected my other colleagues as well. Another teacher got only one student; a second teacher got only five; and a third got 15 for a class about music. This is a huge surprise as the teacher is actually likable and music classes usually attract almost twice that number of students. There wasn’t much love for the foreign staff this year as we gathered only 22 students between us.

I have a few ideas about what to do and I suspect a lot of videos and discussions of acting decisions will be involved. (I’m imagining watching scenes of the different Jokers from the Batman movies and talking about the differences.)

At least I’ll only have two exams to mark this year. I’ll just have a lot of work before that.