Student Blog: A Cautious First Foray

Spring 2025 is my final quarter of undergrad. In my pursuit of training to become a theater educator, I spent a few dozen hours at a local high school paired up with a choir teacher. I assisted her in lesson planning, choral rehearsal, and even led the classroom myself for a chunk of the day one week. There was a lot to learn from this experience, but unshakably, I rode the trolley back to my place feeling rather anxious about the future.

In the past few months, I saw so many horror stories on Twitter about how difficult it is to teach the kids of today because of their indifference to learning, their refusal to display effort, and their symbiotic bond to their phones. And unfortunately, there is a grain of truth to these ideas. Even something as simple as taking roll was an ordeal because nearly everyone had earbuds in and was completely tuned out from minute one. So rarely would a discussion question be met with more than one hand raised. I felt like there had to be some sort of change in order to facilitate some semblance of a conversation. 

When it came time for the first running of my guest lecture, I was granted the grace of a few students’ attention, which I personally thanked each of them for after the bell rang. But upon repeat deliveries in the afternoon periods, I was met with complete silence and vacant, off-center stares. I had fine-tuned a lesson about the music of Revenge of the Sith and Into the Spider Verse to grab as much interest as I could, but it seemed like there wasn’t a ton I could do. I asked multiple times for their attention and for their phones to be away, but since I was a student guest in another teacher’s classroom, I didn’t really have the authority to do anything about it. My teacher told me I was doing the right things on my end, so I’m not sure how to bridge this gap.

There was something admittedly unsettling about asking questions into the void. I'd taught students of all ages in the past, but never formally in a classroom setting like this, so it was a strange atmosphere I don't know how to effectively describe. I know that kids being addicted to their phones is the kind of generalization that future educators need to avoid, but it was something that posed a major obstacle while I was working at my site. 

This experience made me realize just how lucky I have been in the latter years of my degree path to be taking theater classes among theater people. These have consistently been populated by smallish groups of like-minded students who all want to be there and have an intrinsic drive to be an active member of the group. For example, right now I'm taking a text analysis class with the sparkling Vanessa Stalling, and the discourse we've had about plays like Cost of Living has been nothing short of electric. Granted, this is not something I can hold against the high school students, since a significant number of them were placed in choir involuntarily as a means of stuffing them into a class bearing an arts credit. But I truly understood the value of my own coursework from how little they saw in theirs.

All this is not to say that I had a bad time, or that I can't stand these darn kids, or that I feel holier-than-thou for having a different outlook on arts education than students who have never taken an arts class before. I had some lovely interactions with a handful of students who showed their passion for music and engaged with the material on a daily basis. They ensured that my takeaways had an asterisk of hope affixed to my big pile of worries. I recently was accepted to this fall’s teaching credential cohort at San Diego State University, meaning I have a lot of classroom time on the horizon. I can only hope that I am assigned to classes filled with students who care. For now, I need to have faith that they’re out there. I know that the future of the arts is in good hands. It has to be.

Thank you for reading! After three months of writing profiles about other people— as fun as that was, I mean, I got to talk to Keiko freaking Green for this project— I had almost forgotten how to approach writing about my own thoughts. I’ll have one more piece for you soon, and then that’ll be it from me as a member of the student writer crew!