November 8, 2006

• SO…HERE IT IS.  I’M FEATURED IN A NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE, I’M A MINOR MINOR MINOR CELEBRITY.  HOPE THIS DOESN’T COUNT AS MY 15MINUTES OF FAME.

  On Education

  
  One-Woman Show Holds Up a Mirror to Teachers’ Lives
  
  

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  By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

  Published: November 8, 2006

  Six rows from the stage, Dan Lilienthal took his seat,
  placing his messenger’s satchel carefully between his feet. It
  contained his weekly planner, a couple of novels he was reading with
  his sixth graders, and a textbook from the graduate-school class he was
  taking. The bag went everywhere with him, even to the theater on
  Saturday night, when some people thought teachers didn’t work.

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  No Child
  

  Multimedia

  Audio Slide Show: A Lot to Work With

  In Mr. Lilienthal’s family,
  they knew otherwise. For nearly four generations, from his grandmother
  to his younger cousins, his relatives have been teachers, eight in all.
  Even now, he was sitting next to his sister Dana, who taught at a
  junior high on Long Island. They had both heard their mother say so
  many times: “This is a noble profession. Hard, but noble.”

  Around
  them, the lights dimmed and then rose in the Barrow Street Theater in
  Greenwich Village, and Nilaja Sun went into her one-woman show, “No
  Child.” She played every part in the story of a drama teacher, not
  unlike herself, trying to coax, cajole and inspire a Bronx class to
  perform a play.

  And then came this one particular scene. One of
  the students had stopped going to school, just days before he was
  supposed to be in the class play. Ms. Sun kept calling the boy’s home,
  leaving messages, all unanswered. Finally, reaching a grandmother who
  spoke only Spanish, she teased out the explanation: the student’s
  brother had been killed by a gang.

  For Mr. Lilienthal, looking
  on, the membrane between fact and fiction dissolved. He thought of that
  boy in his sixth-grade class who was 13, and still reading at
  second-grade level. One day he started shouting, kicking over chairs
  and climbing onto a tabletop. Mr. Lilienthal took him out of the
  classroom and to a computer lab, and told him to write about what was
  bothering him.

  When Mr. Lilienthal checked on the boy later in
  the period, he saw on the computer screen the letters “R.I.P.” and the
  words “sunrise” and “sunset,” each followed by a date. The boy asked
  him how to spell “remembering.” His cousin, 20 years old, had just
  died. That loss, Mr. Lilienthal realized, was what the day’s outburst
  had been all about.

  Now, on a Saturday night in an Off Broadway
  theater, Ms. Sun and “No Child” were reassuring Mr. Lilienthal that he
  was not alone. The struggles he felt were not just a function of being
  a first-year teacher in a tough neighborhood like Brooklyn’s Red Hook.
  They went with the work he had chosen.

  “Just to realize how
  common it is,” he said a few days later, ruminating on the play. “So
  many teachers in a city school have a kid who’s lost somebody. When a
  kid’s acting out, you learn it’s because of something severe. So you
  need to be extra compassionate and extra persistent. You need to be
  there even if the student doesn’t come seeking you out.”

  In six
  months and 170 performances, “No Child” has served this confirming and
  cathartic role for thousands of teachers. While the show has been
  lavishly praised by drama critics, these educators are the ultimate
  experts. The symphony of murmurs and sighs one hears from them during
  the show, the raucous laughter at jokes that elude the general public,
  attest to just how accurately Ms. Sun has held her mirror to their
  lives.

  It is her own life, too, for “No Child” grew out of the
  eight years she spent as a guest artist in New York’s public schools.
  During the last two — divided between Martin Luther King Jr.
  High School in Manhattan and the Bronx High School for Writing and
  Communication Arts — the state arts council and the Epic Theater Center
  underwrote Ms. Sun with the goal of developing a one-woman show.

  “When
  I wrote the piece, I thought I’d be doing it for three weeks for the
  standard theatergoing audience,” Ms. Sun recalled. “But by the third
  preview, I started to get this sense of teachers enveloping this show.”

  She has performed “No Child” for several hundred teachers at events in Rochester and at Hofstra University
  on Long Island. The teachers’ union in New York City had her do the
  show at a training session for new teachers. The schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein,
  attended one night. More typically, teachers in small groups find their
  way to Barrow Street, drawn both by word-of-mouth and $20 last-minute
  tickets for educators.

  After one performance, a teacher
  approached Ms. Sun to confide, “I have kids who are doing great things
  and I have kids who are in jail for murder and I don’t know how to help
  them.” Another time, a mother introduced her son to Ms. Sun and said,
  “My child is one of the ones left behind.”

  MS. SUN knows the
  teachers are out there by the sound. She hears the knowing laughter
  when, in the role of the principal, she says, “We need all these kids
  to pass five Regents in the next two months.” It happens again when the
  class revolts against doing the play and the principal retaliates by
  threatening to ban them from the school trip to Great Adventure.

  For
  all its humor, though, “No Child” is no palliative. At one point in the
  show, Ms. Sun as the drama teacher tries to resign. “I came to teaching
  to touch lives and educate and be this enchanting artist in the
  classroom,” she says, “and I have done nothing but lose 10 pounds in a
  month and develop a disgusting smoking habit. These kids need something
  much greater than anything I can give them. They need a miracle — and
  they need a miracle like every day.”

  A 25-year-old in charge of
  conjuring those miracles, Mr. Lilienthal understood the emotion all too
  well. So he took some sustenance from the fact that Ms. Sun did wind up
  staying and putting on the class play.

  “You come across this
  resistance and it shatters your idealism,” he said. “You experience
  this immediate frustration — how far below grade level the kids are and
  the way they’re acting out. You start to wonder why you’re teaching.
  You get so disillusioned. So just to know that Nilaja Sun was able to
  bring her passion to the students, and that it worked. You have a
  curriculum to teach, but you need to bring yourself.”

  Samuel G. Freedman is a professor of journalism at Columbia. His e-mail address is sgfreedman@nytimes.com.

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