With Patience

The title of my last entry was a line from A Midsummer Night's Dream. I've found that any time I am teaching Shakespeare, a few lines from the play always tend to worm their way into my consciousness and stay there, echoing in iambic pentameter through my thoughts and my days. When I teach Romeo and Juliet, I'll come home and get in the shower or start making dinner, and suddenly, I'll think, "Turn thee, Benvolio! And look upon thy death!" How weird, I know. "Full of vexation come I" started echoing lately, and I wondered where it came from. I'm not really teaching Shakespeare right now, so I suspected it was from MacBeth, which I saw with students a few months ago. But when I looked up the true source, it made sense. The Drama Club and I have been working on an adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream for the past few weeks. We don't do much actual reading of the play; my students decided it would be more fun to do a re-write with modern language ("Why you tryna play me?"), a modern setting (a corner store), and more modern props (a "spicy chicken slurpee" instead of "a little western flower"). My students were right. It is more fun this way. But despite the switch, that one line lingered.

It is isn't echoing as loudly today as it was in my last post. I'm not as full of vexation. One reason is that school politics are looking up (we're forming a new leadership team, and I'm on it!). Another is that I heard Dr. Leon Bass speak at the Youth Holocaust Symposium yesterday. And another is that my students keep giving me reasons to have hope.

The new leadership team is part of an effort to improve our school before the lease on our building ends in 2016. We have five years to increase test scores and student achievement and to prove to the School District of Philadelphia that it can't afford to close us. For me, it also represents an opportunity to put some decisions in the hands of "our least-consulted experts on education" - teachers. Thanks to a democratically-minded principal, the teachers on our leadership team will help determine the direction of our school over the next five years. Instead of just being blamed for education's failures, we want to have a say in how to improve things. I know it's only on a small scale, but it's a good start in a district where teachers are systematically intimidated rather than empowered.

The Youth Holocaust Symposium at St. Joseph's University yesterday wasn't all good. Some of my students had the disturbing experience of being racial outsiders for the first time in their lives. During one small-group session, they were the only African-Americans in a room of white, suburban, private school students, and they felt it pretty intensely. They felt eyes staring at them and heard unfair assumptions about their intelligence, and finally, they got up and left. Looking back, I'm really disappointed that the organizers didn't make a better effort to include a diverse group of students. The aim of the Symposium, after all, is to increase tolerance and respect for difference among young people.

However, the key note speaker, Dr. Leon Bass, was excellent, and my students and I really appreciated hearing him speak. First, he told his story: He grew up in Philly, trained for an all-black regimen of the army in the deep south, liberated Holocaust survivors at Buchenwald, returned to the US and earned his teaching degree on the GI Bill, joined the Civil Rights Movement after taking his students to hear Dr. King speak in Philly, and eventually became the principal of one of the toughest high schools in Philly. My students thought he was a good storyteller and a wise and passionate person. He speaks all the time and all over the world now, but I never lost the feeling that he was speaking directly to us and with the strong intention to inspire us to be better people. I know my students heard him. And when he was talking about the long way we have to go, I heard him too. I heard him say that we need to do right, to speak out, to work hard, to listen, to "learn to love the unlovable," but what really stood out to me was that he said we need to do it all "with patience." So I'm trying to let that echo around in my mind a bit too.

As for my students, I'm really glad they felt comfortable talking with me about the experience they had in the small group. I tried to be sympathetic (although I'm not sure I really know how it feels to be a racial outsider), and I promised to address the issue with the organizers of the event. On the long bus ride home, we talked about it some more, and they agreed it might be a good idea to write about it as well. Afterward, even though I was a little angry, I was glad that I had the chance to leave the classroom and face one of the world's challenges with my students. Their encounter with another world was disturbing, but it was real, and it prompted a real response. I hope I can find some more positive, less threatening ways to engage my students in these kinds of real examinations of the world.

One place I'd like to do this is in my playwriting class. Today, a visiting teaching artist was leading a brainstorm of different issues (global, community-related, and personal) that might inspire a play. One issue that I raised about our community was the pending school closings and school take-overs in Philadelphia. I showed the students a flier calling for a student walk-out during the PSSAs (high stakes state testing). I was surprised by the overwhelming interest in this topic, and I hope we can explore it further. My goal for the semester is to develop a collaborative, journalistic play (in the style of The Laramie Project) on an issue that the class decides to pursue. What appeals to me about this project is the possibility of all kinds of encounters during the process and all kinds of outcomes at the end. Of course, this is also what terrifies me about the project. Taking risks in the classroom can be incredibly rewarding, but it can also have unpredictable consequences for students and for the teacher. I've seen teaching experiments (other teachers' and my own) lead to hurt, anger, and the erosion of trust in the classroom. Not to mention the case of Hope Moffett. Her class's authentic conversations about their school's take-over led to the teacher's termination and to a heartbreaking situation for her students of almost 3 years. In the last crucial weeks before the PSSA, they are stressed, embattled, and without their teacher.

I heard Hope, along with one of her incredibly talented students, speak at a rally a few weeks ago. Both of them addressed the crowd eloquently and showed inspiring tenacity and aplomb. I really love the image I have of the two of them standing together before a throng of people in front of the School District headquarters. It reminds me that I need to stand with them, stand with my students, and stand with myself. I need to keep fighting for the right to have authentic conversations in my classroom, and I need to have some faith that my students and I will be able to figure things out how to do this. With patience.