Teaching Was My Art
And room 3030 was my canvas
I’m still processing what it was like to get forced out of a teaching career because of the pandemic. Without it, I feel a bit like an artist without a medium. I miss my creative teaching career. I miss my medium.
I was not a great teacher — but I was a really good teacher. I was a teacher who pushed creative boundaries with my students in my classroom: Room 3030. Teaching was a creative outlet, and not everyone understood my approach. My teaching wasn’t liked by some colleagues, parents, and students, but they couldn’t deny that when it came to having some magical moments in Room 3030, they happened.
I was a curator-artist teacher and not above using whatever theatre performance, visual artistry, painterly, street scene-y, pop culture, or film inspiration I found engaging as a conduit to enliven content and bring concepts to life in my classroom.
I inherited an ugly basement classroom: cinder block walls, poorly designed, and a room given its last rites with a coat of beige paint. The lighting was shit. The room had a stained drop ceiling with florescent squares in alternating tiles. There were some windows, but they didn’t work or open. There were too many desks in too small a space; it was the worst use of space. Feng shui had left the building a long ass time ago. It was dusty. There was exposed plumbing with stained insulation taped to it and likely code-breaking asbestos covering. The floor was a light blue industrial tile. The kind you see in a movie sanatorium shower scene where “wards” line up for a hose down. It all made sense once I learned that my classroom was once the Freshmen boys’ bathroom. This 100-year-old brick school building with a basement classroom sporting a “pissoir aesthetic” finally made sense once I learned this fun fact. I embraced the room’s history. It became the centerpiece for Room 3030’s lore. As a storyteller, being able to tell a history that included the ghosts of thousands of Freshmen taking a leak in your classroom was … well … “quel scandal.”
Where ever I traveled, whatever enlightening or inspirational encounter I had, I put it in my pocket to bring back to Room 3030. I wanted to take my students around the globe on my travels, to the Bushwick Collective, to the theatre, to De La Guarda, to Lincoln Center, to shows, to afternoon tea, to the Globe Theatre in London and Gdansk, but I couldn’t. So I, humbly, tried to bring it to them. I tried to push my dislike for the education system, its bureaucracy, pettiness, crushing workload, and soul/vibe-killing de-professionalization and constant demoralization out of Room 3030 and out of my disposition. I used Herculean attempts to make my classroom a protected space, in part with art, to accomplish this.
I wasn’t always successful. Some days I was so physically sick and depressed as a teacher (because the system literally tries to grind you beneath its wheel), I was a totally impatient asshole with the young people I care about so much. I still hate that part — because I have to own it. I regret it. I hoped, and hope, my students forgive me if they experienced the cracked teacher veneer on difficult days. When I see them in the community, where I buy my coffee or get a burger, I ask them to forgive me if I ever contributed to their stress or made them feel “less than” in any way. I literally, and humbly, ask for forgiveness if I was guilty of moments when I did not fully honor their greatness or humanity. God forgive me for those moments when I was a teacher-asshole. The system will do its best to fuck you up when you’re a teacher and it’s so hard to plant that perma-grin on your face and hide your pain “for the kids” when the system is actively trying to destroy your joy and peace (don’t get me started on that toxic positivity shit the system shoves down your throat). It’s not an excuse; it is something most of us have tried to hide at one point (or every day).
(In true teacher form, I’m bird-walking mid-lesson here. You know those moments when students are just so damn wonderful and the conversation is so engaging and enjoyable, you just ditch the lesson plan to kick it while the room fills with joy!).
I can’t share all of my lessons (maybe later), but I do want to share one of them. I had taken my son to NYC to watch an iLuminte performance. He was about 8 years old, and it was a show filled with music, dance, and a visual spectacle with LED illuminated costume design. In 2015 it was still a new technology and quite novel and engaging. After the show, I decided I would create a lesson based on the concept. Sure. Why not?
We read the short story “The Scarlet Ibis” as part of our curriculum. There is a dream sequence in the story. Brother, a medically fragile child, imagines a beautiful peacock in a garden and idealizes life with his sibling free from his disabling condition. The peacock dream sequence is like a drug-induced trip, and it’s a vivid bit of imagery. I decided I was going to “iLuminate” my classroom, create an LED suit and props, and re-enact this moment in the plot in my shitty little classroom space because, damnit, I’m a teacher-artist.
I asked my husband to help me create an LED suit. I asked him to help me create LED props to match the narrative in the short story. I sourced material on the internet. I found an old jumpsuit. I bought loads of black sheets, tape, batteries, LED wire, and little power boxes, recruited students to help me set up, and act as classroom ushers and readers, and made the peacock-like suit, and made LED garden-y flowers and grass.
I hung black sheets with duct tape over the windows — -and made it pitch black in my classroom. I made a sign for the outside of my classroom with trigger warnings about the darkness, explained that it was going to be an immersive experience, invited adult colleagues, and let the mystery and buzz build as kids entered this completely transformed and darkened classroom. We had some lights to usher kids to seats and to make getting to desks safe. Kids had the option of opting out and a backup plan for a study hall was in place. I forgot how I communicated this crazy plan to my parents. I made allowances for non-participation without any penalty. I had a student volunteer on the plan and they agreed to read the passage in the short story. They were my “stagehands.”
I moved desks and filing cabinets and metal classroom closets around to create a stage and hidden “off-stage” area. When the classroom settled (it took a long time, no surprise that there was a lot of chatter and laughing), my student reader would start reading the passage. I would emerge in the LED suit as a stylized peacock (LED lights on foam board cut out like the NBC logo peacock), act the scene with the LED props, and then disappear off stage at the end of the scene. When the “house lights” would come on at the end, it was usually quiet for a bit. There would be still faces — staring. Just staring. I don’t know what they were thinking. Do you?
The colleague that I invited was talking about this lesson years later. The students that were there are all grown and in their 20s now. Did I make a dent that day? Did my effort to share the magic I saw in the world translate? Did they understand I wanted to bring my whole heart and creative energy to 3030 and transform that shitty, cinderblock, former bathroom for the day?
I don’t know if it had any impact on the students. I won’t know. Did we share a moment? Was the concept of imagery brought to life? Teachers are technicians and performers who survive on hope rather than applause (and definitely not on monetary reward). Some teacher-artists, like painters “discovered” posthumously, as Maxine Greene stated, do the work because they “may change human beings who might change the world” even when it goes unrecognized. A teacher can be an artist and craftsperson and a classroom is an immersive experience in possibility.
