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  1. After giving the above topic of modern-day witch-hunts to my Year 12 class of 21 students in the past two days, things have been a little tense! Understandably it takes some time for this many students to organise groups of 3-6 people, but for a while there it was looking a bit like an episode of the reality TV series Survivor, with some students in two alliances, while others were switching back and forth. After five groups were arranged it then took another lesson to organise who would choose which topic, all the while ensuring no topic was repeated. Normally, I would give the same topic to the entire class, but with such a large class and a topic that allowed for multiple examples of the same concept, I didn’t want any repeats. The chosen topics by the students were “Muslims in America post 9/11”, “David Hicks (Australian) and Guantanamo Bay”, “Aung San Suu Kyi and Burmese elections”, “illegal aliens in the US”, and “Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses”. When the students perform them in early June, we will perform the topics over two nights in rough chronological order. With two groups of three, one of four, one of five and another group comprising six students, these dramas will likely be between 25 and 45 minutes each. Topics that did not get a guernsey were “Julian Assange (another Australian) and WikiLeaks” (a surprise to me), and “climate change skeptics”. I reminded my students that this long process was not (as it appeared to several) dark days for our senior drama class. If they didn’t love drama so much and care so greatly for their grades, they would not have taken the group-creation and topic-selection processes so seriously. It has all been a very positive experience and as teacher, I’m pretty confident they like the topic I gave them for their group ensembles, especially when I saw at one point three groups fighting to obtain the same topic. One student summed it up on the way out of the classroom at the end of the lesson when she said “I only wish I had filmed all of this!”