As my first year of teaching regular education progressed, I worked hard to create events to liven up the year. Compared to teaching my angels with special needs, I was finding the job a bit boring. When I taught special education, every day was an unexpected adventure; however, my job this year was very predictable for the most part. I had a few kids that were daily challenges, but I seemed to thrive on dealing with those challenges and had a knack for creative problem solving.
When Halloween came around, the kids were extremely excited about dressing up for the school parade. I had made a friend in the library assistant, Ellen, who was a fun and crazy lady just a few years older than me. We conspired to play a joke on my class. Ellen, who was about the same size and build as I was, and I decided to dress up (she as an Arab sheik, me as a clown) and then we were going to change places after lunch and see if the kids noticed.
We both donned our costumes after lunch. She went directly to my classroom and stood in the front of the room while all the kids marched in with their Halloween costumes on. I couldn’t resist watching from the hallway and laughed hysterically when after all the kids had sat down, a first grader shouted out, “Hey Mrs. Miller, what are YOU doing here?” I went into the room laughing and the kids knew immediately it was me even though every inch of my face was covered.
The Halloween celebration was fun for the kids, but then we were right back into our routine. I decided to add some variety to our day by reading a book about Squanto and the pilgrims to my class to prepare for Thanksgiving. The kids were enjoying it immensely and we all decided to write our own play based on the Squanto book. As a class, we went to work writing a condensed version of the book in play form. The kids were proud of their work and wanted to actually work up a production of the play, which we did. Our November days were spent working on props, costumes, and memorizing the lines. We added some corny humor to the play. For example, when the narrator talked about the Indians and pilgrims sharing a feast together, the actors mimed pulling chicken out of a KFC bucket and pizza slices out of a Pizza Hut box. After a week of practicing our play, we invited the parents to join us for our Thanksgiving play on the afternoon before Thanksgiving break. A couple of days before performing for the parents, classes from the entire school took turns coming to our room to see our performance of “Squanto and the white men.”
This was a life-changing time period of my teaching as I was bitten and then addicted to the “drama bug.” From this moment on in my teaching, I worked hard to make sure my students had opportunities to perform, practice communication exercises, and entertain before a group. I have always been a nervous performer and I made it one of my goals to help students to be comfortable in their own skin while delivering messages, plays, or laughs to an audience.
When we returned to school after Christmas break, I was so happy to see my students again. We had become a “family” and everyone was excited when I held up our next project and informed them, “I have a surprise for you…we are going to do an opera this semester!!”
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