|
Copyright © Louis Schmier and Atwood Publishing.
Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 08:25:15 -0400 (EDT)
Random Thought: The Play
Yesterday two students came up to me on campus. "Hey, Dr.
Schmier. We've signed up for the upper division class in the Fall." they
said as they introduced themselves. "We going to do another play, aren't
we?"
They caught me by surprise. "We'll see," was my feeble answer.
After we chatted, I left them, thinking, "Did I create a monster?"
These two people were referring to what some students on campus
call "The Play." It was something to behold; it was one of my experiments
in learning that I tried Spring Semester. Nursing a weird idea, I walked
into that first day of Soviet Russia senior history class and said to the
thirty or so students, "Want to put on a play about Soviet Russian
history?" I nervously explained I was trying to figure out a way how they
each could best grasp the spirit of the times, to approach understanding
its leaders and people. I made the project sound interesting, inviting,
exciting, and almost impossible considering the time constraints under
which we would be working. I explained that we would read and talk, read
and talk, read and talk until our face were blue, eyes were bloodshot, and
tongues were swollen, all the while struggling to put it all together into
some kind of a play. I think I was hoping they would turn down the idea.
There were all sorts of questions: "What do you want?" "What do
we have to do?" "What if fails how will we be graded?" "What if some of
us slack off?" "Do you think we can pull it off?" "How do we do all that
we need to do all at once?" After about a week of discussion, they and I
gulped, and agreed to jump into both a time and culture warp, and present
an original play. And, a week after that, they decided they may as well
go all the way and present the play on stage in public!!
It was all them in one way or another. In a short span of only
twelve weeks, they did the research; they constantly discussed and
reflected on what they had found in newspapers, articles, and books; they
wrote, critqued, rewrote, and rewrote again, the play; they directed it,
produced it; juggled their academic, work, and personal schedules;
struggled to learn their lines, got their cues, and rehearsed it; they
contributed to a kitty; they scurried around for all the costumes and
props; they bought some costumes and props; they made some costumes and
props; they arranged for the lighting and sound; they did the publicitiy.
All the time, they talked with each other about Marxism, struggled to
understand the likes of Lenin, Stalin, Khruschev, Breshnev; they fought
to get inside the hearts of the peasants and workers; they wrestled with
the spirit of the literaries; they grappled with the meanings and impacts
of the Revolution, World War II, Cold War. They toured the Kremlin, a
commune, a gulag; they traveled through the diverse cultural lands that
made up the USSR.
Day after day after day, I sweated through this process, wondering
"what hath I wraught?" "Why did I let them decided to go public?" Why
this and why that. My feet were constant jelly. My hands were numb. As
the weeks passed, I bit off more and more of my lip. I was a bundle of
nerves. I shook my head so much people thought I had developed a tic.
Many were the times I wanted to jump in and say--maybe scream--"Do it this
way," or "Put this in" or "You can't leave that out!" Occasionally, in my
edginess, I lost sight of the process and focused on the result. It was
not easy to button my mouth and clench my fist, and butt out. Many was
the times I lost sleep, memorizing the ceiling, sitting by the fish pond,
asking myself why I put myself through this anguish and didn't just
lecture, assign research papers, and test--or do tried and tested
projects. It was a good thing that I am not a drinking man, but I was
tempted to take a nip or two. And, having a strong heart from all my
pre-dawn walking was an essential, but there was a palpitation or skipped
beat along the way. I exaggerate not!!!!
Finally, opening night. All thirty-two students. Clusters
rehearsing scenes, going over lines, adjusting costumes, testing sound,
handing out playbills, ushering. One student, a football player with a
major role, going from person to person, exhorting, "Game face. Game
face. Game face."
Curtain parted. Before over two hundred people on the University's
main stage in the Arts Building. It was something to behold. Did they
ever cook up one delicious creative learning stew!
Now that I think about what was happening in that classroom and on
that stage, I am beginning to understand that four ingredients go into
making that or any other creative learning stew. The first is the meat:
information. The second ingredient is the potatoes and other veggies:
flexibility and openness. But, there is more to cooking a palatable stew
than just throwing the meat, potatoes and vegatables together in a pot.
This recipe calls for the right pinches and dashes of spices to give the
stew that tasty zest: an acquaintance with the mysterious, the striking
up of a friendship with the unknown, both of which are a beckoning finger
to peek in, to sneak a glance around the corner, and to wonder and marvel
and question about both the material and themselves. Now you have to cook
all that together. And so, you need the fourth element: a weird
combination of simmering all those ingredients together with the heat of
courage, passion, and foolishness.
"Foolishness?" Very bad word. To me, the students were being
anything but silly. They were engaging in a very rational,
critical-thinking activity though for many far from the traditional
written and verbal way of presentation. While they were working on the
project, as I quietly roamed among the triads during class work days,
answering questions, explaining issues, and ease-dropping on their
conversations before and after class, I saw and heard them exploring,
questioning, prodding, thinking, perceiving problems, solving problems,
synthesizing. They were struggling to break old intellectual and emotion
habits. Their decisions hinged almost always on the act of having to see
things yet to be, to see things in a unique way, to glue together
apparently unrelated shapes, colors, textures, sounds, movements,
occurrences, to answer the question in a novel way, to pose the question
in a unique way, to do something in an unexpected manner, and to accept
the unexpected result. I saw and heard an anxious reluctance, a hesitant
willingness, a newly discovered ability, and a hitherto unknown courage to
break through the wall of fear and barrier of criticism that threaten to
stop them in their tracks, to take the risk, to break out of the mold, to
go against the norm, to put habit aside, to trust, to walk the different
path, to open the other door, to go into the novel direction, to use a
different medium.
Each them, in their own time and way, took themselves out of their
comfort zone, went into new worlds, expanded their world, opened
themselves to contradictions and the inexplicable, exposed themselves to
the unpredictable and unsystematic and unstructured, rejected the need for
the guaranteeing "what do you want," prepared themselves for failure,
exposed themselves, ventured into the unknown, hugged serendipity,
accepted accident, rejected the traditional, defied order. And, in doing
all of this, started unleasing tremendous potential.
What I was watching was not just an intellectual thing. Having
the information is not enough; having the skill is not enough.
Information and skill alone do not create the power to choose, to respond,
to change. It's what you do with information and skill, what you are
willing to do with them, what you see can be done with them, that really
counts. Maybe that's what Einstein really meant when he said imagination
and creativity are more important than information. They're the blueprint
needed before and during construction.
And yet.....but, as Paul Harvey would have said, that is the
rest of the story.
|
|