Once I told my students about our upcoming opera, I saw my remaining task as a teacher clearly—to provide them with the opportunity to successfully complete this production in a way that might change the course of their lives. Of course, the administration of our school district saw my remaining task just as clearly—to provide them with all the knowledge they would need to successfully complete the statewide test in a way that might change the course of the school district. Nobody seemed to appreciate my “confidence” when I would say, “I have taught what was laid out for me to teach and if I have done that well, my students will succeed on the state test—why get so obsessed with it?”
Although I continued to teach the curriculum each day and reviewed concepts we had learned earlier in the year, we spent our afternoons practicing the songs from our “opera” which told the story of the “stone soup” fable. The songs were fun to learn and the kids loved singing them. Once they learned the songs, we added actions and character parts. Once a week, we would work on props. We made a huge cooking pot out of paper mache’ and made the town homes and buildings out of huge cardboard boxes. As we began to put all these parts together, the kids changed from helpless first and second graders to empowered soon-to-be second and third graders. Their reading skills were improving on a daily basis as they sung the dialog in the opera and acted out the words they saw printed in their scripts. The week after spring break found us once again performing for each class as they came to Room 108 to see our Stone Soup Opera.
An interesting side note to this story is that I am not a singer. I can kind of carry a tune and if you have been following my blog for very long, you know I can play a very rough version of “Happy Birthday” on the saxophone, but as far as actually being able to lead people in a musical “project,” well—I never thought to question whether or not it was possible.
Finally the day to perform for the parents arrived. It was magical to me. We borrowed chairs from the janitor and packed our classroom full of parents and some extra staff—including Mr. G, our principal. But the real magic happened when the kids performed the opera. We had solos, duets, trios, and songs sung by the “chorus.” It was perfect. Oh, there were mistakes, miscues, and I vaguely remember a cardboard tree collapsing at the most inopportune moment—but it was perfect. I watched as 18 first and second graders took the world in their hands and created moments that they would remember forever. I can’t explain the feeling I had, but I would liken it to the awe I felt the first time I watched the film in science class showing the different stages of a Monarch butterfly. I felt I had lived to watch these wonderful students move from caterpillars to beautiful winged creatures emerging from a chrysalis, to testing their wings in a world so much bigger than they were and finding strength in the knowledge that they could fly! I was in awe of each of my students, astounded at how drama empowered them to be different people, and I felt I had handed them an opportunity that might change the course of their lives. I felt like a REAL teacher and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that what I was feeling and what they were experiencing would NEVER have happened just by scoring high on a state test.
Later, Mr. G evaluated me. He was very affirming of the opera project and my teaching style. He acknowledged that I had received a “tough assignment” but had risen to the challenge. In reviewing my first year teaching regular education, his recommendation was that if I decided to incorporate a class pet the next school year, perhaps I should invest in a book on how to care for it.
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