What I have written here is hard to write. It may seem somewhat scattered. It probably is. I am dancing around the subject of losing someone who I had a solid teacher-student friendship with as a teacher. I'm not the most qualified person to talk about what an absolute treasure this person is, but I write because I don't know what else to do.
When I was about 11 years old, I was camping with my family in the Payson Lakes area of Utah. I remember that I was sitting in a camping chair (I love camping chairs) drinking a soda (I love soda), and listening to my dad read us "The Princess Bride" as coals were heating up to cook dinner over in a firepit. My younger brother Jacob, who was about 3, was walking in circles around the fire, and in a flash, he suddenly tripped and fell into the pit. He screamed in pain, and I've only seen my dad move that quickly a few times in my life (interestingly mostly to save Jacob) as he ran over to get him.
Listening to his pain was agonizing. There were three very distinct circles on his arm where he'd fallen on coals.We immediately broke camp, took down what we could, and loaded my brother into the back of our van and drove down to visit our neighbor who was his pediatrician. He was crying intermittently, and so I think was my mom who I remember holding him, but we were all rallying around him trying to keep him positive on the way home. We were told that my dad needed to scrape all of the burned skin before he could get any further treatment.
It took one of my parents holding Jacob and telling him to "put on his big brave dog face" and another of my parents carefully but painfully scrubbing his arm, but they eventually got all the burned skin so he could be treated properly.
This story doesn't have a ton of relevance to what I'm going to talk about in my blog post today, other than it feels like what I'm going through right now.
I'm not the person who is hurting, and I'm not the one who can or has to hold the ones who are. I'm not the person most qualified to talk about the truly lovely person I'm going to talk about. Who I am is a person who is strengthed by this person, and who has to be like Jacob and put on my big brave dog face to talk about this while it's still painful.
Because talking about the people we lose in life is hard.
When I finished my undergrad, one of my favorite professors said, "I guess you're my colleague now since we have the same degree!" We did lunch as friends, and we talked as friends. In that vein, I don't really consider any of my students as "former" students unless they graduate from high school, and even if I'm not contracted as their teacher, maintaining that relationship (or at least leaving it open in case of need) is something I care deeply about doing.
C.S. Lewis wrote, "To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
My heart was broken today, and so, I know, were many others. Some much more broken than my own. This person I write about today is one of my students, someone who is great.
When I first started teaching, two memorable things happened in the Drama 1 class that I took over for right away. The first is that as I was playing games trying to learn names, two of my young female students who were good friends and standing next to one another kept calling themselves by one another's names. Their names started with the same letter and mostly consisted of the same letters (Like Josie and Jacey, but not that). They were just different enough to be thrown off, and so I mixed them up. They were the last two for me to remember, and my memory of their names was impacted until halfway through the year when they'd been such great students in the class that I was forced to remember their names.
The other thing that happened was a student vomiting spectacularly. The student I write about today was one of the former, and not the latter.
This student is cut from the cloth of some of my favorite people. She's is school smart without losing touch with humanity and being unable to be socially successful as well. In my book, it meant that while she did well on the assignments, it also meant that she would mock me as well. If my students don't engage in playful banter in class, I wonder why they're taking theatre. This student did that from day one.
This student also made her presence known in class. She lead without being someone who felt the need to steal the spotlight all the time. I can rememeber many times when she and her friend (whose names I used to mix up), would ask probing questions that would get to the heart of my lesson, and I'd have to find a way to misdirect them a little so the whole point of my lesson wasn't blown. That kind of critical thinking is what I hope to instill in my students, and what gave me glimpses of her great potential in the future. It's the kind of skill that you hope to see in everyone, and not just in theatre makers.
I'm a person with a loud laugh, and who appreciates good jokes. I love to put my students in situations that are ethical and emotionally safe, but give them the freedom to be challenged and make mistakes. This student was in a class where I taught an improvisation unit, a radio drama unit, pantomime and public speaking. She excelled at everything and did so without acting like I had nothing to teach her. She committed to characters, and used her strong voice, and expressive face to communicate things on the stage of our class that were impossible ignore, and deeply praiseworthy.
Most of all, I remember something that pushed me. I pride myself on my ability to connect with people. Mostly by trying not to be a jerk. But I knew that students are a different ball game. The goal is to connect them to content; of special importance is to do that in a setting where you know your impact is temporary. As a student teacher, I didn't want any of my young drama students to like drama because they liked me. I wanted them to like Drama because they liked themselves in it.
I think I succeeded in that count for the most part. Though this student I speak of, this total wonderful sweetheart of a student, made me see that it is possible to do both. On my last day as her teacher, she hugged me and said that I was the best teacher she'd had (something I know not all students say because 99% of mine don't!), and then the dear mentor teacher I work with told me that when he took that class back over she went out of her way to remind him that I was a better teacher.
This is hard to write because the world lost them absolute gem yesterday. Youth is hard. I don't know everything there is to know about what happened, but I know that the news of it broke my heart. My three year old saw me sitting at the table sobbing, something he had never seen, and asked why I was sad. I told him that one of my friends got hurt, and I showed him a picture of her. He said, "Daddy's friend is so nice."
Which is true. She is. May God bless and keep her, always.
