ABSTRACT
By my second year of teaching, my theater classes that met on the old, raised stage at Dawson High, a school north of Chicago, were packed, and sometimes the auditorium fi lled with visitors as well. Visitors consisted of other students who either wanted to watch my class or to miss their own. When the classes functioned, kids did credible work that went beyond acting. One student, Lily, said to me, “In your class people can be themselves, it’s like a home.” My belief that students should be themselves had drawbacks too. In my afternoon acting class, on a Friday in the dead of winter, Antonio LeBlanc mooned me and I, enraged, charged after him down a series of hallways. Later, he and I ended up in a meeting with the dean and his parents in The Offi ce. In my fi rst year of teaching, I had the strange feeling that it was not Antonio who was in trouble, but me.
