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Teaching as Theatre

“Teaching, as we all know, is an essentially theatrical business, and it is this transformative power of the theatre that makes teaching the most glorious, the most fulfilling, the most profound of all professions. When we enter a theatre, the playwright and the director and the actors ask us to suspend our disbelief and give ourselves over to the illusion of the play. We teachers do the same, and we do it for even higher stakes. Today we shall begin to construct our stages from scratch. On Tuesday we shall ask our students to suspend their disbelief and leap into learning how to read, to think, to write, to speak, to imagine, to know themselves, to conquer fears and disabilities, to believe that one day they will indeed be able to give the world the shape of their own minds, that they will indeed discover what poet Robert Bly calls that ‘unhatched abundance, that winged life’ within themselves that they never dreamt could be made visible. We shall persuade them to give themselves to the work at hand and struggle with it and conquer it and feel joy in their achievement and say yes to themselves and to the creation of this magical classroom universe so that by June, both we and they will be transformed by our shared adventure.

Like good theatre, we shall begin the process of wooing and winning that is teaching, and we shall reap the satisfaction of the risks that our students and we take every day on our own stages. A friend of actress Meryl Streep told her that ‘a play colonizes the heart.’ So, also, does the drama that exists in every classroom.”

-Jeanie Goddard

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