Summer 1932: the time had come to pick teachers for the next school year.
Arranged in a line in front of a long table, the members of the School Committee shuffled through a stack of applications, calling in their authors one by one to testify on why they’d be the right fit for the job — and then arguing amongst themselves about why that particular candidate wouldn’t work out.
They eventually settled on Ms. Pogoda, a college student on the verge of graduating from Fitchburg State College, and it may have been the first and only time in the history of a little brick one-room schoolhouse in Gill that a committee of fourth-grade students picked their own teacher.
That’s because the whole scene was part of a play, “The One-Room Schoolhouse,” based on a story relayed by a senior citizen to the Discovery School at Four Corners’ fourth-grade class, who wrote, adapted and performed it on stage before the school’s entire staff and student population in mid-April.
The students were guided through the process by Jonathan Mirin and Godelieve Richard of the Piti Theatre Company in Shelburne, who’d spent about six weeks mentoring the class in performing arts through an artist-in-residency program that started in February.
The program was funded by a STARS (Students and Teachers Working with Artists, Scientists, and Scholars) grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Mirin said. The grant provides money for schools to promote the arts, science and humanities among their students.
After Miss Pogoda’s selection, the committee dissolved and the rest of the class, playing — of course — a class, milled around the stage, led by their new teacher through a rendition of, “This Land is Your Land,” some spelling and grammar lessons, and lunch time.
This year, the Discovery School’s theme is “bridges,” and, Mirin said, the stories conveyed to the school’s students by their elders, to be turned into skits, represent a different, intangible, type of bridge. Mirin and Richard worked with both the third- and fourth-grade classes to develop the plays.
“It’s a generational bridge,” he noted. And the students realized that, too. At the beginning of the performance, Mirin asked the assembled youngsters to puzzle that notion out for themselves, and it didn’t take them long.
While some fired back with “suspension!” or “arched!” when he asked them to talk about different types of bridges, one of the perceptive students got straight to the point.
“A story is a type of bridge because you can tell it and pass it on to your kids,” he said.
“Right,” responded Mirin. “You can make a connection, not between places, but a link across time. And that’s the kind of bridge we worked on with the third- and fourth- graders.”
Mirin said having the students hear the stories from their elders gives them the opportunity to intimately experience recent American history, straight from the mouths of those who lived it. That’s especially important, he said, because of the way culture has been changing so swiftly in more recent times.
“It was not that long ago, in the ’40s and ’50s that television was just arriving in the home, and there were less programmed activities — you’d just go out and play,” Mirin said.
Student actor Marina Osit agreed with Mirin after her performance: “Some of it is not that different from now, summers are kind of the same,” she said, noting she and her friends still play games like make-believe, “but in school it’s a little different because they didn’t have computers or technology.”
Mirin said he and Richard spent eight sessions with each class, coaching them in how to become a character from the play, or express themselves through song.
“These are all valuable skills later in life,” he said. Learning the theater techniques now, Mirin
That, and some kids just learn differently, he said. Experiencing theatrical instruction has the potential to give students a sense of accomplishment that they might not otherwise get from taking tests or other traditional academic practices.
Fourth-grader Jackson Caron said he and his friends found it difficult at first to memorize the lines, but after practicing for a while, it felt they were “stuck in our brains.”
Caron’s only other experience with acting was with a play he was in last year, he said.
Caron’s classmates, Layla Prescott and Lorelei Kanzler, said they were both quite scared of going up on stage at first, but once they got used to it, found they enjoyed it.
“It was scary to get up on stage, but once you’re into it, it’s easy and it made me kind of happy,” Kanzler said.
Prescott interjected that she’s always wanted to be an actress and a singer.
“It was nerve-wracking, because we had to stand in front of the whole school, but when we kind of got the play into our brains it felt easier and more fun,” added fourth-grader Willa Punches.
Suzanne Sullivan, the school’s principal, noted that Mirin’s and Richard’s residencies were the second this year.
In the fall, students worked with Sarah Pirtle of Shelburne to create plays about various historic bridges in their area.
“They did an amazing job,” Sullivan said of the residencies. “They were in each classroom probably only four or five times, but (the students) looked so polished. Not only did they know the songs, but you can tell they also worked on stage presence.”
Tom Relihan started at The Recorder in 2014. He can be reached at 413-772-0261 x 264 or at trelihan@recorder.com