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No Child - The One-Woman Show

I'm not going to spend too much of my time in New Orleans writing on a blog, but I had to say a quick something about the one-woman show No Child that a friend and I went to last week.

The woman performing the show, Nilaja Sun, was (might still be for part of the year) a "teaching artist" teaching theater in a Bronx high school. I won't review it because it has already been reviewed eloquently in many places, including the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. If you have the chance to see it - anywhere - do so. It is the best portrayal of teaching in the inner-city that I have ever seen/heard/read.

A few similarities between third graders in the East Bay and tenth graders in the Bronx:
  • The curious phrasing of questions: "What time it is?" "What page it's on?"**
  • Kids kicking over chairs because they have no outlet for their feelings and their feelings are too overwhelming
  • Surprise expressed when a student mentions having a father
  • Teachers wanting to quit or quitting on a regular basis
  • Unreasonable expectations; I think in the show it was the kids having to pass 5 Regent's Exams in 3 days, at my school it was an 80% pass rate on the tests
  • Not enough time to teach things: in the show, a play was being prepared in 10 weeks, once a week, with some of the days taken over for various reasons. I was told one year that I needed to provide 3 hours of testing each day and "You'd better not cheat those children. I still expect you to provide 3 1/2 hours of language arts, 1 1/2 of math and 20 minutes of PE every day!!" In a 6 hour school day? Are you that unreasonable or just pretending?
  • Kids losing family members to violent deaths and other kids not even being surprised
  • The fact that no matter how ghetto the kids are, once you earn their trust, they'll do anything for you

Comments

House Dreams said…
Similar to special ed.
Middle school, High school and K-3Same behavior, same frustrations...and we teachers have the same frustrations, too.

Sounds like a great play.
mmm

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