Coping with logistics

We'll begin by spending whatever time is necessary to cope with logistics -- late arrivals, late registrants, questions. I'm still in the process of working out final details about what plays are accessible beyond The Hostage, and how they'll be scheduled; I should have final word on that by next Wednesday. I'll also know about whether I've been able to find a more appropriate classroom.

Beginning work on The Hostage

You should be coming, according to the last prompt, with "your annotated copy of the script -- with at least one marginal question for each couple of pages." I will set up some groups of three or four to share their questions, and create three lists of different sorts of questions, to be put on the forms I'll hand out. what you should do is go through all of your scripts and categorize the questions according to the categories on the forms, and select the most important of each kind. You should list at least six or eight for each category.

When you've finished -- it should take, I expect, a half hour or so -- we'll attend to two of the kinds of questions, and spread them around the class so that everybody has a number of the short-answer, reference-work sorts of questions, and at least a couple of the longer ones.

Your assignment for next Wednesday's class is to see what you can find out about your questions, using whatever resources you would usually use to find things -- the library, the Web, whatever -- and create two documents. One will be a set of answers to the short, reference based questions, and the other an answer -- or a beginning of an answer -- to at least one of your longer ones. In each case, you should not only tell the rest of us what you learned about your questions, but you should be as clear as possible about how you found your answers. If you drew a blank, it's important to be specific about what you actually did -- where you looked, what search terms you use, and so forth -- so that someone else might be able to make suggestions about alternatives.

You should save these as computer files (most people use Word -- but whatever you use, make sure you can open them with the computers on campus. In general, this means they should not be Microsoft Works files, or, if your computer has the Vista operating system, that the Word files are saved as old-style Word and not the newer version whose filenames end in .docx). You should make sure you have access to them when you come to class Wednesday morning. You can email the files to yourself, save them on a memory stick, or save them directly on your f:\ drive in the lab.

What we'll do on Wednesday is make those files available to everybody, by saving them to your Web site. (If you didn't know you had one, surprise! you do.)