It was seventh period; the students came in a little less rowdy than usual - surprising since it's a Friday and about a third of the class is sophomore boys. It's more surprising since they're coming directly from lunch and into a Drama class. I hadn't really thought about what time of day it was - I've been teaching since 8:15 in the morning - and then one of them said "Ms. Baranoff, everybody in Geometry was watching the inauguration." I looked around at this sea of faces staring at me, wanting to know what I thought, wanting to know if I shared their fear and their concern. The student who initiated the conversation said, "Fuck Trump, right and. Baranoff?" That was the end of my teaching plan for the day. It was clearly time to change gears.

I sat down on a table in the middle of the room and I told them that I can't talk about politics because as a teacher in a public school my job is to make sure that all voices and all opinions are heard and respecte, but that I would but that I would in fact be marching on Saturday if that told them anything. I reminded them that schools are places where everyone's perspective has to be heard and respected. They asked me what the Women's March is about. I asked what they think it means and what they know about why people march and why they protest. We talked about the history of activism; they talked about the need for visibility; they talked about the refusal to retreat into the shadows. We also talked about the kinds of activism that lead people to actually physically impose themselves into situations that might be dangerous. I brought up Tiananmen Square and we talked about the people who are at Standing Rock physically placing themselves between bulldozers and sacred ground. The kids were shocked. "That's still happening." they asked. "Oh yes," I assured them. A kid said, "Let's go to Standing Rock."

I was proud they care. I talked about what theater has to do with that - how my hope for them is that when they leave my class after a year, or two, or four that they go equipped with the skills, the confidence, and the ability to advocate and to speak in front of one or 100 people that they know or don't and to put voice to the issues and problems that they see in the world. We talked about how theater is a practice in empathy, in learning the stories of people who are not like you and figuring out how to portray those stories in a way that makes those characters into real people. That led to a discussion about the dance party in front of Mike Pence's house and what it meant for people in the LGBTQIA+ community to be visible to tell their own stories and to have their stories told by others. We talked about how theater practice is also a practice in remaining calm in the face of adversity, of thinking through problems, of building ensemble. We considered how important those skills are when you're trying to bring together a diverse group of people to achieve a goal and how, even when everything is going wrong, you still have to move forward and bring as many skills and talents as you have to bear to solve the problems that are getting in way of achieving what you're trying to achieve.

I asked them what they needed, and a lot of them said they wanted to just sit quietly, but some of them said they needed the distraction and they wanted to work so I split the class and half. Anybody who wanted to sit quietly did that while anybody who wanted to work came to the other end of the classroom. We did warm-ups, we played games, and they worked on their monologues. For the students who wanted to work, I think it was a relief they could do something with this energy that was building up inside of them - shake it out, dance it out, laugh it off - not because they want to forgot what's going wrong in the world, but because they needed to invest that energy in doing something to make something new. It was an exercise in feeling like they had a choice. It was a moment where they got to decide how invested they were in their own work and their own learning.

And that is what I taught today.