The Drama Teacher Part One

This is just part of the case from The Mouse That Roared.

 

 

Let me begin by saying I never should have been a drama teacher. I became a drama teacher with almost no experience. I'd been forced to put on a play while teaching a Mayfield Jr High school, ten years before getting a job at George Jenkins High School in Lakeland, Florida, but getting the job was a total fluke, a mistake, and at the time it happened it was intended to be a temporary situation. I was a place holder, a bookmark to hold the drama teacher position at this brand new, state of the arts High School, named after the Publix grocery store entrepreneur, George Jenkins.  George Jenkins High School was the new showcase High School for all of Polk County. I believe the school board named the new high school after the grocery store mogul, thinking this billion dollar industry would kick in a little money to help make a great new property even greater. It turned out that a billion dollar industries gets to be a billion dollar industries by investing their money in things that make more money, and not by throwing dollars into the black hole of public education.

When I took the job I believed that I would be a teacher in that school perhaps three weeks and would then be moving into a position at the school board. This is when my recent conflicts within the Teacher Union came back to bite me in the ass. The union was totally opposed to me getting a job working for “the other side.” I'd been the Associate Executive Director of the Polk Education Association, and I had burned bridges when I left there. Now PEA was burning me back.

So a temporary position at George Jenkins School became a permanent position.

I'd taught school before, 8 years at Butner Schools in Cromwell Oklahoma, one year at a church of Christ private school in Oklahoma City, the now defunct Living Word Academy, and about four years at Putnam City Schools, again in Oklahoma.  My efforts to do well in the teacher union was motivated by two factors:  I would earn more money for my family, and I would not be trapped in a classroom that I could not control teaching materials of which I had only a weak, moderate grasp.

The principal was being pressured to take me on as a teacher.  I’d asked the Superintendent to give me a job.  The Superintendent, John Stewart, ordered that his right hand man find a place for me in the classroom, and then find something at the school board.  He wanted me to go to Nova University to get my Leadership Master's degree, which would allow him to move me into a principal’s job.  The previous PEA President, Jose Farinas, had done something similar when he left PEA.  He was given some job at the head-head [the school board office], while Jose worked on getting his Leadership Masters at Nova University, then he moved Jose to Bartow High School as a discipline dean, and finally, Jose was going to be the first Vice Principal in charge of facilities at George Jenkins High School.

So I agreed to take the English and Drama teacher job at George Jenkins High School.  This was the newest high school and my son Ryan and I would be starting at that school at the same time.  Now I found out I was not going to be at George Jenkins High School for three weeks, I was going to be there until I could earn that Leadership Masters.

I was actually sick with crushing depression.  I knew the danger.  I was seen by most people as a competent person while in the teacher union, but if I was in a classroom for just a little while, I would be discovered as an incompetent, stupid loser.  Who would move me into administration if I had zero classroom management.

Classroom management is code for good control of your classroom, with students staying in their seats, not loud, and no need for frequent assistance from the office, and very few parental complaints.  The ability to actually get kids interested in your topic was mildly important, but it took a backseat to good firm classroom management.  I didn’t have that trait, and in all those years I never developed that trait.

I had always felt that I was weak in the areas of spelling, and grammar, a little stronger in the areas of literature and the teaching of composition [writing].  Now I found myself teaching a subject I had zero background for, and I was totally unprepared to teach:  drama.

I had never been in a real play. I had never taken a drama class in college. I had only directed on play, back when I taught jr. high school for Putnam City. I had no illusions that I was even modestly qualified to teach drama.

After a couple of weeks of depression over being trapped in the classroom again, I decided I needed to survive. I went out and bought some books on improvisation, and teaching drama to children.  

I had some experience teaching speech, and I’d taken some speech classes in college, so I started out my drama classes with activities that were appropriate for speech classes, but could also work in an Introduction to Drama class.  When school opened in 1993, I was forced to start the drama classes in a regular classroom designed for the subject of English.

What made things worse for me was that I was a traveling teacher, so I had to carry everything with me when the bell rang and I was required to change classrooms.  I taught Sophomore English, Drama, and I had one class of Advanced Senior English.  

Me teaching Advanced Senior English was a joke.  I’d been out of the classroom long enough that the rubrics of writing a research paper had changed.  When I taught the research paper we started out with footnotes, where the documentation was placed at the bottom of the page where the supporting documentation was sited, to endnotes, where all your documentation was placed at the end of the research paper.  As I started off teaching the research paper in 1993 I was informed that now the standard practice was something called parenthetical documentation, which was when you just interrupted your sentence with a parenthese inserted the documentation and closed it off with the ending parenthese.  I bought a book and got up to speed on this method.

I was most afraid of the drama classes.  I just had few ideas of how to keep the kids occupied.  In the beginning that was my goal:  not to educate them, but to keep them occupied.

I remember one of my first activities was to have the kids tell their most embarrassing moment. This activity had several advantages:

1. I had the kids come up to the front of the class and talk to the class. Part of the goal was to get kids to fight their fear of     speaking before a group.

2. Secondly, it was almost always funny which keeps kids slightly more     cooperative.

   

3. I had 32 students, so this activity had the potential of requiring us two and perhaps three days to complete.

I remember one girl telling what I thought was a wonderful story.

Well, Tiffany said, and yes this is just approximate, I have this brother that is close to my age. When we go to the mall, I would sometimes see some guy and start flirting with him. Well my brother would come up, put his arm over my should, kiss me on the cheek and then glare at the object of my flirty interest.

This was her exposition. She was giving us the background information needed to understand her most embarrassing moment.

Tiffany continued. One day my brother and I went to the mall and we went different directions to shop solo. I'd been shopping around for a while and I went into that Sonic Entertainment store, you know, the one that sells records, cassette tapes, and video tapes. When I went inside I saw my brother with his back to me, and he was studying the cassette tapes. He was also obviously with some girl. I decided this was my chance to get him back. So I walked over to my brother, pinched him on the butt, I said, 'Hello there sexy,' and I kissed him on the cheek.

That was when I realized he wasn't my brother.

I was so embarrassed and I tried to explain by saying, 'I am so sorry. I thought you were my brother.'

One lesson I learned from this Most Embarrassing Moment exercise was to start off with some instructions:

1. Don't     tell something that is private and embarrassing to anyone else,     without first having permission to tell the story from that person.

   

2. Don't     tell anything that you don't want anyone to know.

   

3. Keep     your stories at least PG-13.

I got these prohibitions from one of my Persian students who had an older sister in the school. Afari told a story about something that happened when she and her older sister Nafisheh were both young children. Afari said that they were on a car trip with their parents and she and her sister needed to go to the bathroom. Their father stopped at a Gas Station, got the bathroom key chained to a short piece of lumber, and the two went to the bathroom. When they got inside they saw there was only one toilet. Since both girls needed to go really bad, they decided that they would both try to sit on the toilet at the same time. Somehow each girl got one hip stuck in the opening of the toilet seat and then they could not get out. They had to call until their daddy came and opened the door and rescued the girls.

This was mildly funny, and did not seem to be a big deal, but by the end of the day the story had spread throughout the school and had reached the ears of the older sister Nafisheh.

Nafisheh went home and told her parents what Afari had told in the drama class. Not only was Afari in trouble at home, but this turned out to be the first time a parents called the principal to complain about my drama class.

Throughout my life I have felt like I was stuck in situations that were unendurable, and yet I had no choice but to endure. Teaching at Jenkins was just one more unbearable  situation that I had bear.  Obvious this insecurity and pain is not unique to me.  The truth is many if not most people have had much more difficult problems they have had to cope with, so I don’t want or deserve sympathy

“Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”  

― The Princess Bride by William Goldman

It is clear to me, now, that I suffered from a horrible lack of imagination. There were other jobs I could have found, but I felt like the only thing I could do was teach. The fact that I hated teaching, and that I was not good at teaching did not seem to matter, the only thing that mattered was that I was teaching, and I needed the income so I had to put up with whatever happened.

I got some books on actor practice ideas that I used or modified.

[This is a side thought, but there is a movement today toward all education having some connection to a future job.  People want to leave college and walk into a high paying job.  In the past the idea was that a person would be exposed to lots a wide range of things, get a general education, and that the hope is that a student would learn how to learn.  Knowing how to learn something new is, in my view, more important than learning an employment skill.  Turning colleges into career training centers might be a mistake, and I believe it is a mistake.  When I was young TVs and Radios were filled with tubes.  There were people that were trained to repair these devices filled with tubes.  Remember, there were so many tubes that sometimes, when the TV didn’t work, your dad could slap the top of the TV set, which sometimes drove the plug-in tubes back into its place and the TV would start to work again.  But one day tubes were replaced with transistors and only the workers who could translate what they knew about vacuum tubes to transistors could continue to work.  Knowing how to teach yourself something new is one of the greatest traits of education.]

OK back to my drama job:

I developed some acting games.

Games LIKE:

The Name Game:

   

• I     would have 6 or 10 kids line up in front of the rest of the class     and each kid was suppose to step forward, say their name, and then     strike a pose that reflected their personality.

Letting Loose:

   

• Students sit in a circle to observe one another’s expressions and actions. I would stand     or sit in the center and gives them an emotion to express through     voice, gesture and expression -- for example, sorrow, joy, fear, ecstasy or hysteria.    

Guess Who?

• I would divide the class into two teams, Team A and Team B. I would put slips of     paper in a box or basket, with each slip containing a description of     a physical action, such as "Jumping off a bridge" or "Rescuing a cat from a tree." One student from Team A performs the action while Team B guesses what the action is. Winner gets to force the next team to perform.

Get Into Character

• I'd have the kids sit in a circle with one kid sitting in the center. The kid in the     center assumes a character that they've pulled out of a coffee can.     I, being the teacher, had to fill out slips of paper to make this work. Those sitting in a circle ask center him or her questions,     putting him or her on the spot. The ones in the circle can prompt     her or question him -- helping to give the character more depth and     testing the skill of the student actor. I picked characters off     popular TV shows and movies and maybe something like Romeo and Juliet if the kids happened to be reading that in their English class.    

Prop It!

   

• This game involves using ordinary and simple objects as props. I had a laundry     basket that I filled with junk I had collected over the years. I'd have the kids pass an object around a circle and each kid would     pretend it was something that it obviously wasn't. A bowl could be a helmet, or a shy turtle perhaps. The student could find an     imaginative use for. Maybe I'd have two kids have one object and     they would use it as a prop for and improvisation.

Everything I did didn't work, but I kept trying. I would go to GoodWill and buy dresses and sport coats and hats and keep them on racks ready to help get kids in the mood to mess around.

Over time, kids started telling each other that in drama they got to play, and there were not tons of tests and worksheets. More and more kids would sign up for drama. Within my third year at the high school I had so many kids wanting to take drama that I was able to stop teaching English and I had 5 classes of drama. The demand was high even among smart kids who don't have time for to fit in a throw-away elective when they want to get into an Ivy League school or to be doctors or lawyers, et cetera.

I was urged to teach a class of drama in Summer School. I ended up teaching drama in Summer School for years.

Was I really good at teaching drama? No. I was doing the best I could, and I was trying hard, but I knew I was faking it. I was a fraud, I was a scam artist and for awhile I was getting away with it. I can't say that some good stuff didn't happen along the way, but that was calculated luck. I was trying. I tried a lot. If you try anything enough you can't fuck up continually. It is hard to hate or disliked when you gave unhappy students a chance to play and be silly.

THE PLAYS

One of my responsibilities was to have a school play.

This was huge. I was afraid. First, I had never been in a play, and I damn sure had never directed a play. I'd never build a set. I didn't know how to work the light board. I had no money to pay for the stuff I needed to put these plays on, so how was this supposed to happen?

I can't remember the title of the first play, but I remember the first play very well. It was actually several short plays, shorter even than one act plays. I guess they were scripted skits.  One play was about three couples struggling with the stresses of dating.  I went to the principal and begged for a small budget of $500.  This money enabled me to build some set pieces.  

I had three couples, and three cars. I made cut-outs of plywood, and painted the front of three cars. I went to one of those PULL -A-PART junk yards to buy grills and headlights, so I could dress the cars up and make them look like real cars. I made paper mache steering wheels, and sat two chairs behind these car cutouts. Because I didn't know how to work the light-board I used a single spotlight that had a way to point the light and uncover the beam sending a sharp light on the couple that was talking. We would switch from couple to couple as they said their lines.

I had another story about a boy standing on the edge of a building about to commit suicide and his girlfriend comes out and gives him a reason to live. I building a wall, I used a 2 x 12 as the ledge. I painted the wall to look like brick including the mortar between the bricks. I made a real looking window.

It was my first high school play directorial experience, and it went OK. We made enough money to pay the principal back for an advance on the money I needed to build the set pieces.

It is likely that I have forgotten more of my work than I remember. I do remember the following plays, that I directed while working as a drama teacher.

• The Clumsy Custard Horror Show
  

  

  
  

What I remember most was the building of the set. I built a large structure on wheels so one side looked like an evil cave where the Clumsy Custer lived, and then we could wheel it around for the next act and it was a traditional look of a castle. I used paper mache for the cave side and big sheets of thick Styrofoam where I could use acetone and a brush to melt away some of the Styrofoam to cause it to look like a stone castle wall.  I bought a couple of plaster gargoyle.

It turned out that my skill with painting pictures translated well to creating stage sets.  I could make props and sets and make them look, well, OK.
 

Again, I do not claim that I was really good.  Actually, if I ever achieved OK, I was an overachiever.     
 

One piece of stage magic I had to think up was how to have a wizard like staff that could flash on cue to establish the power of this wizard. I end up using a porch-light cover to place on the end of a long staff [a found tree branch]. I used a camera flash powered by batteries and triggered by punching the button. I put the flash part of the device inside the porch-light frosted glass cover, ran the electrical line down the back of the branch, and the button that triggered the flash was in the same area where the wizard would hold the staff. Any time the actor needed a flash they could punch the button and the camera flash would flood the theatre with light. Dim the theatre and the flash from the end of this staff was all the more dramatic.

• THE JURY

In this stupid play there was a scene where one of the members of the jury was the bad guy.  

There was a part in the play where the bad juror takes a knife and backs everyone up against one of the set walls.  The play required that the bad guy throw is knife, and one of the other jurors was supposed to be standing there as the knife hit the wall inches from their head.  

I had to think, think, think how to pull that off.  

What I did was buy a spring hinge from the hardware store, one of those hinges used to make a privacy fence gate to shut by the power of the spring in the hinge.  I attached the hinge to a 2 by 4 that was supporting the wall.  I bent the end of the hinge and used screws to attach a knife so that the spring would slap shut and that would drive the handle of the knife through the wall.  I cut a square in the wall, put a frame on the wall and made it so I could slide a print into the picture frame.  I scored the paper so that when the butt of the knife hit the paper it would go through the picture easily.

I needed some way for the spring to not shut, and then to shut on cue.

I used one of those little locks like you put on a screen door, a Hook & Eye.

I tied a string to the hook and ran it behind the set and pulled the string through the wall.  When the actors were lined up against the wall, one of the actors was charged with the duty of pulling the string when the bad guy fake threw the knife.  They pull the string and the knife pops through the framed picture so suddenly no one notices if the knife was thrown, or if it came through the wall from behind.  Stage magic.  Yeah.