Confessions of a Second Semester Student
Ben Lewis
I have a
confession to make, a dark and terrible secret that I can no longer keep hidden
from the world: I was slightly apprehensive about starting grad school. Sure, I
had several close friends who had raved about the program at City College, and
yes, in recent years I had discovered a passion for teaching that I never knew
existed. Still, the prospect of returning to school was a daunting one.
My
undergraduate years were split between a giant liberal arts university and a
tiny theater conservatory. At the university, I spent my time hauling comically
enormous books from lecture hall to lecture hall, reading and writing and
regurgitating in the manner I had been taught my whole life. My conservatory
training consisted mainly of rolling around on the ground in sweatpants while
frantically weeping, because every ‘serious’ 19-year-old theater student knows
the quality of your Tennessee Williams
performance is measured by the ounces of tears you can secrete
in a ten-minute scene.
Going into
my first semester, I wondered where on the scale between these two extremes
CCNY would lie. Thankfully, Educational Theater turned out to be it’s own
wonderful and unique creature. I spent the first semester being bombarded (in a
good way) by a near century’s worth of thoughts and methods towards teaching
theater and understanding it’s role in a child’s development. Others on this
blog have posted more eloquently than I about the joy and fascination of
discovering people like Dorothy Heathcote, Augusto Boal, and many others. I
will just say that after spending two-thirds of my life completely immersed in
the theater, I didn’t think it was possible for me to think about it in a whole
new way, but that’s what the program has started to do for me. The difference
between my grad school experience and everything that came before is that our
goals here are not merely to improve ourselves, but to empower us to improve
the lives of others.
If any
first semester students are reading this, I’m gonna give you the big secret I
have learned. Many of my classmates figured this out right away, but if you’re
a little slow like me, I will tell you how I view the program differently now
than when I started. First semester, I viewed the program as the time I spent
twice a week in class, the time I spent outside of class doing the homework,
and the time I spent in schools doing fieldwork. Now I see that all those
things are just components in an even larger network of opportunities and experiences.
As the semester went on I met dozens of interesting professionals at networking
events, I had one of the best master class experiences of my life one Saturday
morning deconstructing Hamlet in a series of brilliant games lead by the even
more brilliant Jonathan Neelands, even the simple act of reading and
researching the constant stream of emails being sent my way by the Ed Theater
department has seriously expanded my understanding and awareness of the field.
While
assisting during the performance of Fable Talk (you can read the great blog
entry by my classmate Lisanne Ware) I was waiting back stage when a colleague I
just met turned to me and said, “ I need you to paint my nose green with this
crayon.” Only in this profession is that as mundane a workplace request as
“Pass the stapler.” As I sat in the
auditorium, watching throngs of young children enraptured and enchanted by a
group of actors, some face paint and a few sheets of paper, I was struck by how
lucky I feel to be a part of this group. We are peddlers of magic, seekers of
truth and catalysts for growth in the next generation. As a second semester
student, I have a new confession to make: I dig being in Grad School, and I
look foreword to what the future semesters will bring.
