News From The Front #5 | What Graduate School is Really About.

Over the last few weeks I have been talking with some of my fellow graduate students. Graduate school is different than undergrad in lots of ways. One of the biggest ones for me is the community. For the first time you really have an exclusive academic community. A community to which you are an important member.

Anyway. One of my graduate school colleagues put up a show. I was one of three people from the graduate school community to show up to support her. I was a little troubled by this. I think it is our responsibility to show up, whenever humanly possible, to show up and support my fellow graduate students. Now admittedly, I feel this way a little selfishly. I want my graduate school colleagues to show up and support me and my work when ever I put up a show. But I also feel that it is our responsibility to do so. We are here to pursue a degree in Theater. We should be seeing as much theater as possible. It was a free show for goodness sake. But I think we have a responsibility to each other to help critique and give advice and to help each other grow as artists and people.

This past week one of my graduate friends put up a show and some of the undergrads were acting in it. I think we have even more responsibility to show up to this show. Not only was a peer directing the show but some of our students were in the show. If we are supposed to be the teachers of these students we should be taking every responsibility show up and see their work.

Not only this but I think there is an attitude that we should have as actors and directors for people who come and see our work. One of my students thanked me for seeing his work, he said, "It means a lot when my professors come to see my work." I think that's important as an artist to have that respect of our audience. We as audience should also have that respect for the performers. To show up and support their work. It's important. It meant a lot to have him tell me that it meant a lot for me to show up.

I think that's what this whole graduate school thing is about. The community. Building a better community. Support each other and support student theater. It's a good thing.

News From the Front #4 | I learn that I can teach texts I have never read before.

The majority of my semester is spent right now in Teaching assistant positions. One of the classes I'm TAing is the 400 level Modern Drama survey. I met with the other teachers of the class and we divided up the texts we would be teaching. They gave me The Laramie Project because of my experience with Documentary Theater, but I also got given O'Neill The Hairy Ape.

Not only is this a playwright I'm not a huge fan of, it was a play I had never read before. I was going to be teaching it in about three weeks. That time has come and gone, so I thought I would debrief on it really quick. I had to fill two full class periods. My first instinct was to go to a class discussion. This way I can get the students talking about it and not have to do a lot of lecture prep. I also did do some prep for some lecture on expressionism in the greater art world and more specifically expressionism and the theater. Talked a little about O'Neil himself. After this short lecture I opened it up for discussion lead by some pointed questions I had planned.

The discussion went less well than I hoped the first day. Part of this was my fault, i think partially because I was so nervous. It's hard to get a good discussion going in a class size that is upwards of thirty-three students. I'm used to my small classrooms of my undergrad where we were about ten or less. The biggest discussion classes I had were my honors classes early on that had about twenty students. In addition to that discussion is always harder early on in the semester when the students haven't gotten the feel of the class itself yet. However, I made it through the first day of discussion pretty much unscathed.

On the second day things went MUCH better. I felt a little better prepared and the discussion went a lot better. The students opened up a little bit more. I know it must be a little strange even having a new grad student coming in to teach. Especially once they learned how old I am. Most of the undergrad students are a year or so younger than me. After all I am right out of my undergrad. But I know a lot of that is my own insecurity about my performance as a teacher and my insecurity about what I do know about theater.

All I really needed to do was believe in myself, in my researching and in my abilities. In many ways these teaching sessions are our grad school tests. I passed the first one. I can breathe now.