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Timothy Guzman

Professor Sophia

English 110

December 17th 2017

Theater and Literacy

I have never considered myself a good student. Especially in English classes. The

pressure to put my own thoughts down onto paper stuck me with paralyzing fear leaving me

with a bland page two hours before something is due. When going to elementary school I

believe that the teachers that I had didn’t have the time to support my writing skills and explain

what I have to work on and how I should go about doing that. Vague notes scarred the top of

my paper stating “more detail” or “slow down” or “be more concise” many of these metaphors

and words I had yet to discover the meanings of. I grew up hating metaphors and similes and

English classes outright, and due to this hatred, I didn’t give myself the chance to learn what

these metaphors and words meant. Teachers saw me as a lost cause, and I believed it. My

perception of the teacher’s behavior towards my work wasn’t one that allowed me to feel the

care that they actually had. The care that so many great teachers have but are unable to act

upon it because of the non-individualized approach schools have taken. You cannot focus on

one student and ignore the other twenty-four or twenty-nine. It is impractical and unfair. So
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there I was lost in metaphors and oxymorons that I couldn’t comprehend nor had the want to

comprehend.

I did not lose my love of reading. I love books. Many books that I have read were those

required readings so many of my friends despised, and truly the novels never caught my full

attention, but the plays did. Through these plays, I taught myself how words are used and

where they are used.

I was enchanted by the works of Edward Albee, August Wilson, and so many countless

other playwrights that have defined American theater in the past century. They create works

that use language as it should be, as it always has. They use language in conversations. These

conversations shape the world and through the world you can understand the human condition

just that much more. Greed, selfishness, lust, love, happiness all came through the

conversations and I learned to better read pretext as I finished the plays. Grabbing the late Sam

Shepard and reading his plays about the starving class, or Stephen Adly Guirgis’ work on the

lower-class struggles these playwrights spoke to me through their pens. I learned to write from

these mentors. These playwrights gave me the power to express my thoughts through dialog.

They gave me masterclasses on the power of the pen. They became better teachers than the

teachers I met in real life. They were the catalyst to my affinity for theater and plays and

musicals.
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Students who are disenfranchised with schooling don’t always find a different way to

enhance their skills like I have. Most of these disenfranchised students don’t have the same

accessibility that I have to different mediums of writing and art. They become lost. Lost

because there seems to be only one path to growing skills. Lost because they feel they are alone

in trying to find the way. Lost because their guides have given up hope on them. Lost because

the only way they know has become inaccessible. So they give up. They give up on education

and look for alternative ways to live life without caring about education. They circumvent the

mainstream way and cut their own path through life. Sometimes their successful, but most

times, without finding out their own way to be interested in education, they become lost.

Art is how I grounded my interest in education. Art, however, is sometimes inaccessible.

A lot of art has barriers to entry. These barriers to entry deter those who are unable to cross

those barriers from experiencing the human condition through those mediums. This makes the

students, yet again, feel aby abandoned in a strange world in which education seems to be the

only way up.

Plays and musicals are a perfect example of the tough barriers to entry. Broadway

shows and off-Broadway shows are those once in a lifetime experience that, if the cost of it

were more affordable, could change the disenfranchised students’ perspectives on language,

careers, and give them a better understanding of the human condition.


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Seeing a performance can resonate with these students so much because they may be

able to relate to the families portrayed or they can see these characters overcome the same

problems that these students face. The beauty of all of this is that it’s a magical experience.

They can feel and see and listen to their parents onstage. They can listen to their grandparents’

stories. They can learn history through watching it unfold before them. They can learn valuable

life lessons by watching someone else learn it the hard way, and they can do all of this while

laughing through their tears and crying through their laughter.

Through discovering plays and playwrights, these lost students can find their voice in

a world that drowns them out. They can listen to a playwright use the same words that they

may use. They can read passages that force them to take out a highlighter in a more productive

way and a more self-assuring way than highlighting passages because their instructor told them

to do so because their grade doesn’t ride on it. They can learn metaphors and pretext and the

effects of language on humans.

When I saw “Jesus Hopped The ‘A’ Train” I was thirteen years old. When I sat in the

theater there was a palpable energy in the theater. when I looked around I saw faces the same

as mine. I saw the actors enter the space and it began, and there I was. I was thirteen years old

listening and watching what I read. I was listening to the actors play with the words. They were

like poets adding their own spins on the world they create.
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I improved my literacy skills by listening to words and watching the effect they had.

From there I categorized the words by their effects; negative, positive, and neutral. I defined

them by their effect, and that was one of the ways that I kept myself interesting in English

class. I wanted to learn more words that I can use to affect people. I defined my own literacy

not as just the ability to read and write but as the ability to express myself.

Many students who find themselves drawn to the artistic side of schooling past middle

school find that the traditional methods of teaching and traditional schooling have been

difficult for them. These lost students who are directed under their own guidance down the

path of art have been extremely relieved with the new methodologies of teaching they’re

exposed to. Using theater to enhance the experience of learning is a unique method. Watching

shows and listening to radio recorded versions, give context to the vocabulary the students are

being exposed to. They put into practice stringing together sentences with the vocabulary.

Theater, then, can be defined as the practice of using words to disguise, direct, or expression

of thoughts, feelings, and solutions in a performance setting.

The uniquely conceived conversations in works of theater give new tactics for audience

members and performers to use in their day to day lives. The theater pieces allow playwrights

to create a world in which the conversations are idealized versions of themselves. They are

used to carry along ideas of what the playwright, performers, and the creative team believe to
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be the truth. What they believe the human condition is, and how that can affect the world

around them.

When looking back on my lucky stars, there is nothing that I can attribute more credit

to my literacy than theater community. Theater combined with teachers who took the time out

of their day and taught me what proper grammar is are the main two factors to the development

of my reading and writing. If theater were to be more accessible many more disenfranchised

students, it could be another tool that instructors may use to get some of their students more

invested in their own education and expose them to a different method of education that they

may relate better with.

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