I Pray You, Remember The Teacher

"What’s done cannot be undone.” Macbeth (5.1. 2189-2190)

Day 4                                                               (7-8-16)

Looking back at the work we have done so far in the intern ensemble, the word that best describes my mind is Conflicted. My mind keeps raging in a constant battle between the Teacher and the Actor.

The Teacher must juggle so many different roles over the course of a day – content expert, lesson planner, troubleshooter, crowd controller, psychiatrist, social worker, role model, etc. – that I feel like I usually take one deep breath at the beginning of the day and then take a second one seven hours later. (Ask any teacher at the end of the day how it went. I bet they’ll take a deep inhale and exhale before they answer.) I try to listen closely for the constantly changing needs of my 150 students, many times ignoring my own needs for food or bathroom breaks. For the most part, I feel like I do it all in isolation. (I can be so focused on what I do in my classes with students that I go days without seeing the teacher in the next room.) And I am told that “failure is not an option.”

In our Actor work, we’re reminded constantly that we need to breathe and to listen to our bodies. We’re taught to support each other as a team. And we’re told that failure is to be embraced.

Okay, wha…?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not considered the stereotypical “old school” teacher by anyone. I remember one student who went on a two-page rant in his class journal about my teaching a few years ago, “Why do you expect us to change everything we have learned in 12 years just for one class?” I responded that I was trying to prepare him for success in college and career in the best way as I see it. (And seeing as how it was his best and longest written piece in the two years I had him, I thought maybe I needed to get him and others angry more often.)

But it’s easy to have the answers when you’re in the driver’s seat.

In my work with Saratoga Shakespeare, I’m the passenger sitting in the way back of the station wagon without a seatbelt. Everyone else is facing forward with varying levels of expertise, while I bounce along with little knowledge of where we are or where we’re heading. And while that is disconcerting to an adult, I was totally okay with it as a kid.

And so I must be here as well. After all, I wanted this opportunity so I could myself in the place of a student. To learn something completely new, having had little to no experience in acting. And the Student me loves the not-knowing.

The danger, I fear, is that I move too far away from the Teacher, or, as Shakespeare put it, “what’s done cannot be undone.” That our exercises in destructuring and restructuring (see Day 3 post entitled “That Sits Not Well With Me”) will not result in creating a new switch that I can use for the different roles of Teacher and Actor, but rather I will remain conflicted and less effective in both. As I work through the Conflict created by each new exercise, I can feel the movement toward a new Me. I can see how my old thoughts are comparing themselves with the new thoughts and changing many of my perspectives. That’s something that will not go away.

How can I approach my normal job in the same way after this experience? How will it be accepted by students? By administrators? By the community? I feel the modern-day teacher is being shoe-horned into a common mold that strips away the excesses of individual interests or talents in favor of conformity. And admitting mistakes, while laudable in many situations, is not so much so when you are a teacher under evaluation for your level of effectiveness. And how can you celebrate failure in a culture where, as I said, “failure is not an option.” (For the record, I disagree with that premise wholeheartedly; it’s always an option.)

This puts me in mind of one of my favorite characters and scenes from Macb… er, the Scottish play. Paraphrasing the Porter, I would say of my experience so far:

              

     “[Acting class], sir, it provokes and unprovokes;….

it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it

takes him off; it persuades him, and disheartens him; makes

him stand to, and not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates

him in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him.”

Hmm. Think I’ll have to sleep on this. (If this conflicted state has not murdered sleep.)

You can see the full blog of my experiences this summer on the Saratoga Shakespeare Company website at www.saratogashakespeare.com and on my own Out of the Centrifuge blog at www.outofthecentrifuge.blogspot.com.