Tip & Exercise: The 1-minute bad poem

I believe that we can have more different types of people as improv teachers. To encourage you to start, or to improve your teaching, every month I will share with you a tip and an exercise.

Tip: Don’t try to be ‘good’

I know you. You want to do well, as an improv teacher. How do I know this? Well, you are reading this section on my blog. You want to keep getting better.

Your students are the same. They want to do well. But...

This wish to be ‘good’ can be the greatest enemy for improvisers. An improv scene can definitely be good (great even!).

But the urge for it can mess it up: players will try to control, or play it safe, or disconnect, or something else unhelpful.

At times, we need to remind our students (and maybe ourselves) that we need to be okay with the possibility of not being good. Especially for my fellow high achievers out there: get comfortable at being ‘bad’.

How? If the wish for ‘being good’ gets in the way of their play, let your students try to play bad scenes. Or introduce a fun game to stretch their comfort level with ‘bad work’.

Exercise: The 1-minute bad poem

This exercise works great online. When playing it offline, make sure to have some pens and paper ready.

Have the students each pick a short sentence for themselves. It can be: ‘What is an advice you got as a child?’. Another option is to get a line from a book at home. Or connect it to a previous exercise: “Say something positive about your fellow player in 1 sentence.”

Then (and only then), introduce them to the 1-minute bad poem.

Put one minute on the clock to have everyone write a bad poem, starting with the sentence they just picked. It can be short, or long, rhyming, or not. The only assignment is: it needs to be bad.

If you want, count down the last few seconds before the end. Everyone stops after 1 minute and can share their bad poem in the chatbox. Or out loud, preferably with as much conviction as possible.

Celebrate all poems: mediocre, bad, and super bad.

Definitely write one yourself, too. It reminds us that as teachers, it is good to show our ‘bad’ too.