A Note From Ms. Thomas about Theatre Education

In William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, act II scene VII, Jacques states, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts.” A theatre program utilizes students’ existing talents and interests in their lives and the world around them enhancing a teacher’s ability to administer strategies to reach educational objectives by encouraging ownership and personalizing the learning, thus making education relevant to the students’ current and future roles in society.   Theatre is more than a representation of life.  It is immediate, and by its nature designed to educate and entertain.  My theatre program serves as a model for working across the curriculum, incorporating English (text, script, classic works, and playwriting); math (set design and construction, sound and lighting design, costume construction); science (text, character psychology, properties, lighting, sound); and social studies,(film studies, historical text, period costuming).  By offering such a myriad of activities, all students are given the opportunity to learn in a manner that interests them. From the planning process to the actualization of the event students, staff, and community work in tandem giving the students an enormous wealth of knowledge, opportunity, sense of ensemble, and responsibility.  Engaging students through educational experiences such as these not only aids teachers in reaching curriculum objectives, they give relevance to the student. Before the end of “this strange eventful history” of high school life, as Jacques so aptly put, my hope is that this theatre experience will guide students to their future choices and roles in the stages of their own lives.