Early on, I was a poor learner. I really was. The sort who liked to have books around me but couldn’t get through them. It wasn’t the teachers’ fault. Perhaps I was too socially conscious to pay attention to being educated as a kid. I knew how to read, but didn’t have much attention span for reading comprehension. As an almost all right-brained person, math and science were beyond me. The sinking feeling of getting my first F on a Math test has never left me to this day. So, when did I become an avid reader and writer?
Part of what helped was acting in plays in drama school. Plays were certainly shorter to read than novels and I had to memorize my words. Early on, actually, I memorized the entire play—everyone else’s lines and mine—to make sure I truly comprehended it. This was, perhaps, the first time I learned to read.
Then, in my 10th, 11th, and 12th grade years, I finally learned to read with utility. 10th grade’s World Literature introduced me to writers I still read today—Raymond Carver, Chinua Achebe, Joseph Conrad, and others. 11th grade American literature turned me onto Native American myths, great American poetry (particularly of the Harlem Renaissance), and novels like The Grapes of Wrath (which was the first book to make me cry). 12th grade English Lit. deepened my appreciation for poetry, though I preferred American novels. This period was the second time I learned to read.
I learned to read all over again when I was working on my second Bachelor’s in preparation to become a secondary education teacher. I was introduced to James Joyce’s Ulysses and much more complicated works. By the time I took my praxis test to become certified, I aced a test that focused exclusively on Transcendentalist Literature, which I hate but apparently know a lot about.
I learned to read even deeper in Seminary, reading Scripture in depth. It was my third reading of the full Bible. But, this time, I read the sixty-six books in their proper context (time and place). Today, I can read and internalize pretty much anything. But it was a long road to hoe. I have finally became a serious (and almost professional) student. But not all students who have mastered material should teach. I learned that the hard way.
In a period of malaise after college, I was trying to find a career path that would still allow me to write. Someone said, “You know so much—you should teach.” Worst. Advice. Ever. However, it just so happened that a Theatre Arts teacher position was opening up in the Birmingham metro area and the person leaving the job knew me and could give me a recommendation. Still, he told me I would stop writing if I took the gig. I brushed this off, but he turned out to know what he was talking about. From 2009-2014, I wrote little original work—composing work mainly for teenage actors, some of which were was successful, but not quite as fulfilling as my earlier work between 2002-2008.
All in all, my teaching career lasted four and a half years. The first three were spent as the Artistic Director of a high school theatre company. I was no disciplinarian and most of the games and activities I’d learned in drama school were lost to time and filling up ridiculous “block” scheduling (an hour and a half) was very difficult. Rehearsing and producing plays after school, however, was the good stuff. In those years, I mounted eleven full productions and a workshop reading. We did the usual things—participated in festivals, conferences, contests—but we had a family of actors of techies who loved to put on shows.
I never wanted to be a director. To me, it is the most thankless job in the theatrical world. I see it as the work of an interpretive rather than creative artist. So, my choices were very commercial—at least for the first two years. By choosing to direct Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s Grease for my first Spring musical, I never found myself short of male actors after. Grease has most likely been the way many people find interest in the theatre. This many years after its’ initial productions and the glitzy big screen version, it is still a perennial classic while it has all the intelligence of a rotting tooth in an empty head. The mainstage show for the second year was Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s Little Shop of Horrors, another musical that always entices audiences.
The first two years were good. I was voted Co-Advisor to the Arts Education director for the school district, I was nominated for the feeder pattern Teacher of the Year, and I had bonded with a group of marvelous kids who I felt like all I had to do was open the doors and turn on the lights and let them do their magic.
In Year 2, the more advanced students were selected to act in a “Classics Unit,” where we mounted my translation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (which was my first work to be published professionally), Cry of the Native Children (my Pocahontas play), and Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God. We also broke some ground in producing a Neil LaBute short play (an unusual choice for a high school).
But that third year was a mess. Shortly after the year began, a massive rain resulted in the Auditorium being flooded. Without a second drainage unit on top of the building, we walked into the place, looking up to see a massive hole in the ceiling. The force of the drop wrenched bolted seats from their spots and sent them spilling to the far corners of the large space. We had to do our Fall show at another high school, our one-act night in the classroom, and our Spring musical in the Auditorium Lobby. Also, the Administration began to show their true faces.
The third year for any public-school teacher is a major test. No matter what great things I had done before—how much money the shows made, the laudatory exclamations of parents and teachers—if they hire you back for the first day of your fourth year, you are tenured, and they can’t get rid of you. That year, the Philistine, pig-ignorant principal scoured all my work for mistakes and didn’t even attend the two last productions. The writing was on the wall. Not only do teachers who become administrators become, in my opinion, evil “yes-people,” but they treat teachers much the way they do the students—as if they were morons. I never once felt like a professional in my teaching years.
So, the ball finally dropped. Just as I thought I was going to make it, they hand-delivered my letter laying me off. I can still feel that chill that went up my arm as I held the envelope. After I left, two of my students dropped out of high school. Those who were not doing well in academics or did not fit in with athletics found the theatre a place they could call home. When they didn’t have it, they gave up on educating themselves. I don’t think this had anything to do with me. It all had to do with what we had built together as a department.
While the county I worked for claimed no one was blackballed if they were not tenured, we were. Certainly, I was. I knew there was no hope of being hired in the same county, so I looked elsewhere and ended up in the state’s capitol, Montgomery, working in what we would call inner-city, failing schools. I taught Drama and Speech for one year and then English for another semester (In Alabama, Theatre is not classified as an Art certification, but part of the Language Arts). The situations at these last two schools where I worked were so bad, I regularly had panic attacks, and I don’t know how I survived as long as I did.
With a Master’s in Religion, I still hope to teach community college someday. I think I could handle that. But never a four-year institution with all these radical kids bullying professors. It would have to be close to home (or online) and in a more rural setting.
But teachers are born, not made. There are some souls meant to do it. For me, it would only ever be something on the side. If your heart isn’t in it, there’s no point. I always loved my kids, but everything else—it’s for the birds. People talk about the lousy pay, but that’s the least of it—standardized tests, dealing with parents who are either helicopter moms or seldom involved in their children’s lives, the censorship of art—pick your poison. If it’s for the birds, perhaps they can find a bird to do it, but the school hallway is not a hall I will walk down again.
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