So much to be learned from a play: Guest Opinion Capital Times Madison, Wisconsin June 12, 2022

https://captimes.com/opinion/guest-columns/opinion-so-much-to-be-learned-from-a-play/article_f9ebd478-b71b-54a9-b8e9-02e4def0bc25.html

The Scene: 1969, Sauk Trail Elementary School, Middleton, Wisconsin. With my fourth- and fifth-grade students, I am producing "A Midsummer Night’s Dream." It is right on schedule, as much as anything can be on schedule in an elementary school.

The rural landscape is the perfect setting, with huge rocks for Puck to leap from, woods for sprites to hide in, and lovely green grass for the court of Theseus. These students, the Sauk Trail Players, are the young local talent, becoming characters for one more play before their summer begins. Complicated names of characters, such as Hermia and Lysander, Oberon and Titania are no problem for them. An abridged play with the poetic meter of iambic pentameter, no problem.

The plot, a clever story, is filled with magical events that change lives. Children become their characters, suspend their own disbelief, as they hide among the rocks and behind trees. They create action, interpreting lines as they go. The play is the important thing, after all.

Going through scenes, children see what life is, feel what their characters feel, even if from old times and old places. They experience the vulnerability of being in a play, showing who they are by what they know about their characters. They figure out how to use gestures and pauses to make their characters "real.” They learn how to work together in order to create a play, and, at the same time, they learn how to keep their own characters’ identities intact.

The play is a huge success. The audience claps. The characters come out for bows. Standing off stage, in the grass, I am absolutely certain that drama is a way to show what it means to be alive in our time, in any past time. As characters, the students have gone through adventures, solved problems, and changed along the way. 

Scene: 1973. Evening. I am finishing up my Ph.D. at UW Madison. The phone rings. One of the former Sauk Trail Players, a junior high school student, is on the line. “I learned to read from being in the plays,” he says. “Do you remember me?” he asks. Of course, I did. But somehow I wasn’t aware that plays performed years earlier had helped him learn to read.

Scene: 2003, Boise, Idaho. The memory of the play is tucked away, far away in the past of 30 years. I see Mike Hoffman’s film version of "A Midsummer Night’s Dream." The film captures my interest, but I don’t expect it to capture my heart and carry it back to the 60s. Once again, I see my students as characters in the play, then lined up center stage front, bowing and ending their parts in a dream.

Such a dream of my own — that drama would make such a difference in their lives. Yes, I thought in l969 that drama would enrich their lives. Yes, I thought that they could learn to appreciate the form of theater and understand what actors went through to become characters. But students also became literate by reading to learn lines as they began to understand more about their characters and themselves.

The world of the play and their own worlds combined to change them in ways that I, as a beginning teacher, could not have predicted. And they did it all themselves, really. And so to the Sauk Trail Players, where ever you are, for what you learned about drama, about reading, about yourselves, more applause, like fragile notes on a butterfly’s wing. 

Norma Sadler is professor emeritus at Boise State University.

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At the Victory Girls Blog: my poem No Exit: Afghanistan Then and Now

I am the Guest  Poet at https://victorygirlsblog.com/ 

 

I have written a poetic piece about Afghanistan. The poem is an important one I think, entitled, No Exit Afghanistan Then and Now.   The first part of the poem I wrote in 2000 and the second part in the last two weeks 2021.   

 

Here is poem as it appeared on victorygirls.blog August 31, 2021

President Biden,

You have destroyed the truth of this earlier poem.

 

2000 Women In Afghanistan

If you wander far enough
You come back to the beginning.
On T.V.  a woman was
Executed in the open space
Of a soccer stadium
in Afghanistan.
A public spectacle of a woman,
In a burka.  You couldn’t see much
Or understand why she was there.
Before drawn weapons,
People came to see the sport of killing.
That was then, this is now.
Other women are coming out of hiding.
They bring schools into the open.
Into the cold, crisp air of the fall
In Afghanistan.
Schools that had turned into barracks,
Where books were knocked about, bruised,
Where wooden beams were torn down,
Falling apart even before
The Taliban fell together.
But so,
Women shrug their shoulders,
Take off their burkas,
Take back the space
Around them with children.
The stadium is empty of corpses.
The beginning will be the first soccer game,
The first child at a desk,
The book open, its spine trembling
At its history.

 

2021 And now a different truth

The Taliban are back.
A woman in a burka is shot,
Dies in the road.
A sports coach tells her girls sports team,
Burn your uniforms, hide.  She knows.
Women and girls sold into slavery.
A child thrown over a fence at the airport
To a British soldier:  Save that child.
Sharia law.
Watch out.
Door to door,
Taliban harassment and death.
Christians, hide your Bibles and your beliefs.
The killing fields of Afghanistan
Are operational.

President Biden,
You have erased my truth
About Afghanistan
And left us
With despair and
We aren’t even there.

______

Our Guest Poet is Norma Sadler, Ph.D., a published poet in literary journals online and in print.

 

 

Old Hiking Boots Gone

 Old Hiking Boots Gone

My hiking “boots were made for walking” (you could sing here) and hiking and they have bit the dust.  Long ago in 2007 I bought my La Sportiva boots the day before a several day 35 mile hike in the Seven Devils in Idaho.  They fit like gloves, but as I sat in a parking lot while fellow campers  went in to make sure the trails were open, lots of snow that year, I had the car door open.  A guy from Texas sat in his car. His door open too.

I asked him, “Did you just do the trails in Seven Devils?”

“No,” he said, “we just drove up to the top to see the view. “ I, of course, had to show someone my new boots.  “Be sure,” he said,” you leave them loose going up and tighter going down. Ah ha, tight in the toe going down, tight in the heel going up.  

So I did the 35 miles in several days, up and down, lots of switchbacks, high elevations, crossing streams. No blisters. Perfect.  That was the first trip.  The shoes became part of my life.

My boots have made history, my history, hiking around Idaho, traveling to Europe, England, tromping around Venice, always near canals, quietly surveying d’Avignon, sitting in St Chappelle in Paris for a concert, standing on the Bart in San Francisco, winding around the Sequoia National Park, hiking in Montana, climbing stairs in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, walking with Russians on May 9 Parade to celebrate the ending of the Great War.  Finally, so many years later in January 2021, the boots that even made it through the Pandemic, hiking most weeks in Wood Canyon gave out. How could they do that to me?  One separated sole, slightly worn heels, a hole in top from one of my hiking poles, yes, they were worn out, but they were supposed to last forever.  

So now, after trying La Sportiva which now has changed their shoe lasts, and the fact that my feet have also changed, I can no longer fit their shoes to me.  I try on a pair of Oboz, I can’t believe it.

The young woman who helps me at our local REI says she wears them hiking. She points to a guy working near by.  He has them, wears them every day.  I put them on.  Fit like gloves. I don’t believe it. How could they? But they do, and the next day, just like in 2007, I hike many miles, through live oak, sycamore, near a stream, up to the ridge and around the circular route and back down.  It is great to be with my hiking friends, great to be hiking again, great to be in my brand new boots.  My history continues.  My boots are keeping me healthy, physically and mentally, I am sure,

You Don't Leave Your First Amendment Rights at the School House Door or "Gate" as Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas Said.

 You Don’t Leave Your (First Amendment) Rights at the School House Door
                      or “Gate” as Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas said.

You don’t leave your First Amendment Rights at the school house door.  You don’t leave your rights at the door of a college or university either.

You take your First Amendment Rights with you, and you may call on local, state or federal government officials to protect you as you profess those rights through the freedom of speech, which can take many forms, but you shouldn’t have to go to court to preserve your rights.

One of the most important Supreme Court decisions that dealt with freedom of speech was Tinker vs. Des Moines, 1969.   Mary Tinker, a 13-year old, argued that wearing a black armband to protest the war in Vietnam was her right, an expression of free speech.  The court ruled in her favor.  Wearing the arm band did not cause “substantial disruption” to her school, and the rights of students to express political  opinions were upheld.

Recently, in  Florida, an l8-year old in high school, with a painted wooden elephant in his truck in his school parking place, (which they could decorate as they wished) was told he had to remove the elephant because someone or some people didn’t like an elephant, Republicanly-painted with Trump on the side.

At the University of Kansas recently, a woman in a sorority was being “disciplined” for questioning on social media and in speech where the money for black lives matter was going.   Someone she lived with was offended and made a complaint. The student was not breaking any rules for her sorority or for her university in expressing her opinion. 

But these kinds of incidents are not new:  At Orange Coast College in California, immediately after the 2016 election, an instructor called out students in the class who had been wearing Trump t shirts.  She demeaned students who expressed their support for President Trump and used her classroom for her own forum, attempting to silence dissent, by her position and authority. I mean she did give out the grades after all.

Today, universities (most of whom receive federal funds, even for construction of buildings on campus or student aid) could be violating students’ first amendment rights. Surely, the universities are aware of 
Tinker vs. Des Moines, and that federal funds could be withheld for violating student rights.

Nothing good can come of those in authority who are unaware that students have rights to express their own point of view.  Do schools and universities really want to go to court every time a student exercises a first amendment right?  Universities pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for officials, who seem to be glued to positions that outlaw some sort of speech they don’t like.  Perhaps those officials are not aware of Tinker vs. Des Moines.  Could someone please let them know?

An Orange, a Banana, and an Apple

                                            An Orange, a Banana, and an Apple

It would come as no surprise to all of us in our seventies that many of our relatives, now gone, experienced quite different gifts from what we receive now.

Take my mother, for instance.  For Christmas in a family of eventually eight kids, before the Depression, she received an orange for Christmas. As did her brothers and sisters.  One orange.  With much enthusiasm, she would say, “It was such a treat.” My grandfather, like some of Vance’s relatives in the book, Hillbilly Elegy, worked in the steel mill. Tough work but since he spoke several languages, he could explain to newly arrived immigrants from Europe what to do, so he ended up as foreman  

 My grandmother made almost all their clothes, my grandfather repaired all their shoes. They canned produce, smoked meats, had geese and a milk cow.  One orange at Christmas for each of them.

Shifting to my husband’s family, with grandparents growing up in the wilds of Canada, a treat for his mother at Christmas was one banana, cut into three for her and her two sisters.  Such a different world from Reading England where they lived in somewhat of a more civilized fashion among others rather than out on a prairie, alone, in a small house that I would call “a cabin.”  My husband’s grandfather was a wheelwright in England, and when cars came in, wagon wheels disappeared.  So on to the promised land of Canada and later the U.S. where he became a general mechanic and custodian in a department store.

And then we were talking to a neighbor, who grew up in the Philippines.  He could remember his grandfather getting an apple for the holidays, trying to explain the smell and taste of such an exotic fruit from abroad, perhaps from the U.S., to his grandchildren, who saw apples in stores everywhere. Hard for them to understand joy at such a present.  

So each gift was exotic, something from somewhere else that was special, unique, and cherished.  I hope that it is the same for all of us this Hanukkah and Christmas, that family, health, and time together are not taken for granted, and remain simply and exquisitely part of exotic future memories, like an orange, a banana, and an apple, as we grow older and maybe wiser.

J.D. Vance Hillbilly Elegy Netflix

I didn’t think that Hillbilly Elegy, being a long narrative about growing up in a holler, could turn into a film with immediacy, dialogue and action, but under the direction of Ron Howard, it did become a story that works on the big screen.  A grandmother (Glenn Close) wants her grandson , J.D. to become someone. J.D. without a father at home, an addicted mother, somehow manages to escape this world, get educated, and find a woman to love.  Still, it is a mournful elegy of a tough childhood and adolescence.  Having grown up in Appalachia, I could see some of my family and friends bump into the people in Hillbilly Elegy, and fit right in.  A story well-told with a message to all of us  about the importance of believing in oneself and becoming self-reliant and holding on to love for those in the past that made it possible.  Sometimes hard to find good stories that hold together in feature films these days. Thanks to Netflix for getting this one out to us.  I hope you find it, not delightful or fun of course, but important as a way of seeing the world through a different lens.  

 

From Italy to the U.S.A.

From Italy to the U.S.A.
                 
He was five years old
When he got off the steamship
To the pandemonium of Ellis Island.

His mother's arms
Let him go.

Hands passed papers
Over his head.

Noise flowed from the mouth
Of the man in uniform.

The boy shrank back,
Leaning against a stranger
Who spoke Italian
Because it sounded good
To him.