"Theater Gave Me a Voice"

“Well, I shared in class about my elementary school. And I've been doing a lot of reflecting on that lately about how much that impacted who I am as a teacher, and just kind of like how I see the world.

So I went to an alternative school that was Native American based. So it wasn't on a reservation or just for people who identify being with a tribe. And it was in West Seattle, and it doesn't exist anymore, so I'm one of very few people that went. But I think elementary school is pretty like, foundational -I think- as far as building who you are, finding your identity and how you interact with the world. And obviously, you know, middle school, high school, you still develop that, but just the school was really focused on the environment, and more so knowing your own gift and what you contribute towards the community. And also, education wasn't necessarily the typical way they do it here in the United States. So I never had grades. I didn't really have homework, we just did all the work in class. And then every couple of months, my parents would come in, and we'd have a conference with the teacher. So rather than just having one parent teacher conference a year, you had multiple, and that was how they did basically assessments, because even as a little first grader would put together a portfolio of my own work and like, show my parents and show my teacher and talk about it, and what what I was excited about learning and what I'm struggling with. So, I mean, we had so many things that I think now we kind of take for granted that my elementary school was doing early- like composting. We did that, I mean, in 1990s, right? So we like, had a school garden, and we made solar panels, and like, all this stuff, right? That was like our science was like, ‘Oh, let's, raise salmon and put them in the creek, or, like, Let's build a solar panel or something. So, you know, everything that we did was tied to a community learning piece. And so I think, you know, early as a teacher, I just did what I knew from college, or what is expected of me, but as I've grown and becoming a teacher, I've been really thinking more about what are ways in which you can take the curriculum, and what more you can do with that. 

I mean, I also like to have fun with my students- it’s not like you get paid more to be mean to students or fail them or those kinds of things. So I think the best way to like have a student engaged is to get to know them, and get to know what their potential gift is, and then asking them to bring that to the classroom. So I think that's, that's the full circle of just like, seeing ways in which I can modify the curriculum or use what the curriculum is to help students gain confidence and gain, you know, just an identity. I really enjoyed teaching public speaking for that reason. Because it was a fear for a lot of people but really, what I modeled that class after was just building your confidence in being able to articulate who you are as a human being, and feeling confident, just like describing who you are, and your identity. So you know, public speaking comes with it, but it's really more just about strengthening your confidence. 

So I have a pretty deep reflective practice that I do personally. I do a lot of, like, goal setting and personal reflection on, you know, what are what are aspects of my life that I'd like to improve? So I think, you know that that setting really made me think about being a part of a larger community. And so, for example, when I move to a city, I don't typically think about just setting up my home, I also think about what are ways in which I want to interact with the community at large, being a high school teacher gives me a lot of access at times. So you know, but like, other people that have jobs that are a little more solitary may not have that access. So, yeah, so I think the school, really asked us to think about who we are and what we contribute in the greater scheme of the world and your smaller communities and what you can control. So I think personally, that's, brought me into my practice of reflection. And, I think it also made me a really curious and creative problem solver. I don't generally look at a challenge and think that I won't be able to find some way to make it better, I may not be able to fix it, right. You know, these classes, for example, are just like, you know, if you've got a noisy classroom, you know, just yelling at them to be quiet is never gonna fix it. So there's gotta be other ways that you have to get kind of creative. So I think that's also just who I am as a human being, even if it's like, something simple, like, I don't know, like a gardening task or something, like ‘I want this move to here.’ But you know, I'm maybe not strong enough physically or I don't have the materials. But how can I still achieve the same feeling, right, I want with the abilities and the skills and gifts that I have. So in a way, I feel like it helps me have more satisfaction in life just being like, well, I know what I have. And I know where I need to outsource help from other people.

When I was 10 years old, I had some pretty intense social anxiety. And I typically share this in classes eventually. So it's okay to share it now. And I actually had a stutter. And my mom enrolled me in a program with a Seattle Shakespeare Company, that technically only took 13 and 14 year olds, but they made an exception for me. And so I started working with Seattle Shakespeare company from the age of 10. And what I found was practicing other people's words in theatre helped me overcome a stutter and also gain my own confidence. So that's where that sort of connection is, like public speaking. And so I like personally understand and have a lot of empathy for what it's like to show up to, a learning environment with maybe some deficits. And you know, again, you just kind of have to get creative in finding ways that support that confidence and that growth. So when we get to Romeo and Juliet, I'm gonna get really excited. So basically, Shakespeare is kind of a weird thing in that, for me, it's kind of like stored in my language brain. So when I started learning Spanish, I found when I went to go, speak like Shakespeare later on, I immediately wanted to speak Spanish. And that told me how that was, stored in the same place. But that really helps me understand teaching it, because it's like learning a new language on some level right? Yeah, obviously, there are some similar English words, so there's there's some similarity there. But yeah, I think just like spending that time with theater nerds and just finding myself there and finding my tribe, that’s really shaped who I was, really opened myself to a lot of perspectives and that made me think well as a teacher.

I think it (theater) gave me a voice. And it also gave me a way to like, play with the psychology of other people as a way to process my own thoughts and feelings that I think a lot of people don't think about with theatre. A lot of people assume that it's people who just like to perform. And so I have tons of friends where we all agree we did theater, because we just liked the psychology of the characters, understanding them and getting into those deeper things and, obviously I’m an English teacher so that naturally, was kind of where it headed. I actually went to college to be a theater major, and then that's why it changed.”