Merry Wanderer Teaching

A young girl stands on a tiny platform under a spotlight and tearfully tells her classmates about the night that she held hands with her siblings in the bathroom of their home in Syria while the Russians bombed their street. A fourteen year old boy admits a vulnerability hiding under his swagger. A sometimes combative teen with a lot of talent recounts the sensation of her father's car flipping in an accident that took his life on the way to the birth of her sister. Two girls who previously had little interaction connect over similar stories about drug-addicted parents and coming to live with their grandmothers. There are days when my classroom is pretty factual and practical. We learn to make scaled set drawings. We study the differences between Greek and Roman theater. We memorize lines by rote. And then there are the days when my class gets pretty emotional and almost therapeutic. We journal. We build box forts. We reveal something about ourselves like we did that day when we

The first month of my technical theater class, I had grand designs on repeating a project I was assigned in college: we were asked to take measurements and build a replica of a theater in downtown Savannah. This replica was to be built neatly and entirely out of black foam board, and they were to build our stage. It was step one to a longer goal of building a model set design on that stage, and it exercised a bunch of skills from measuring to scale drawing to making neat cuts (the key is patience!) to using new tools (like the Rabbet cutter!). As a theater teacher, it's exciting when your content gets to cross over to the core subject areas that people don't scoff at. A fellow bridesmaid in a wedding in Connecticut last year scoffed at the idea that I was a full-time theater teaching unit. "Alabama needs to get its priorities straight," she said. And instead of arguing with her that my job actually helps those other priorities  or that our school is large enough i

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When I first started teaching theater, as I excitedly told my friends and coworkers what I was planning to do for my fall production, I was met with doubt. Romeo & Juliet?   Why would anyone want to direct Shakespeare? Why would anyone want to direct Shakespeare with teenagers ? My decision was threefold. I love Shakespeare. I want to spread my love of Shakespeare. I needed a royalty-free play that I could perform that fall because we were left with $100 in the drama club budget. I had already written a plan for a college directing class, so I had an idea of how to tackle R&J. I also knew that we could put up a Shakespeare play with one minimalist set (set build shown right). I knew that directing epic fight scenes would draw some of the boys back into the theater program, and if there's anything high school theater directors can agree on, it's that it's hard to get boys to audition. But as I was met with incredulous looks, scoffs, and questions, I sta