Adventure in instruction #4532881

So it seemed like a good idea at the time to lock myself in a theatre overnight with a group of aspiring young playwrights. And, spoiler alert, it was in the end. Because sometimes, not often, but sometimes, everyone is their best selves. Sometimes the students push themselves to do some hard work and even then, know when to edit themselves. Sometimes the grown-ups (ie TEACHERS in my universe) are there for said students and help them make their ideas into something legible to the wilder world. Sometimes actors actually learn their lines and sometimes jokes actually work. Sometimes ideas mush together and become more than mush, become more than the sum of their parts and give real meaning to that mysterious word “inter-disciplinary” which only a few people care about but they care about it very much. Sometimes the stoner jokes are really funny and watching who are people not yet 20 struggle with their secret thoughts on a public stage is actually not cringe-inducing but sweet and honest and a bit brave. I had a good weekend, and I drank a lot of coffee and got to be glad, once again, that I am a teacher. But since I suspect that the very witty and black-humored teenagers who I spent all of Friday night with would cringe at that last statement, let me just say that my lesson learned is really this: put a kid in a tiger suit and let him pretend to be high and the humanities come to life.