Drama High Quotes

“You have become so good that every mistake you make has a spotlight on it.”
― Michael Sokolove, Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater

“Theater gives them what a computer takes away, what no classroom teacher can teach. They learn to work with other people. They learn patience and tolerance and how to be deferential to each other. They learn to be good citizens. It’s unifying. It has an impact on kids that can’t be quantified. Educators don’t know how to measure it.”
― Michael Sokolove, Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater

“There is a difference between people who strive and those who merely work hard. Levittown was full of hard workers, hourly wage-earners who eagerly stepped forward for overtime shifts and spent what extra money they had to repave their driveways, build rec rooms, or buy RVs....it was full of people who felt they had *arrived*.”
― Michael Sokolove, Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater

“What I know now is that I would be a different person, or at the least a better version of myself, more rounded, more fulfilled, more in touch with myself and everyone around me. In so many ways, theater teaches the opposite of what I learned in sports, in which the model is that there is no self, no emotional landscape or core. Team sport is all about grit and team, about submerging self. To look within, to feel or imagine, is not encouraged. At the time, I couldn’t conceive of myself being up onstage.”
― Michael Sokolove, Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater

“If you’re comfortable you’re doing something wrong - you have to be in it for the heart.”
― Michael Sokolove, Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater

“Cynicism is romanticism turned sour.”
― Michael Sokolove, Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater

“She likes to use the word “realistically” which I come to realize is a rationale, an excuse, to not plan ahead because much of what she might want for herself, upon reflection does not seem realistic.”
― Michael Sokolove, Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater

“The rest of us do “high school theater.” Lou does “theater.”
― Michael Sokolove, Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater

“I’m sorry, but this is musical theater, guys. Okay? You’ve just got to do it all.”
― Michael Sokolove, Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater

“Along the way, he published a novel about the music business with the title Sweetie Baby Cookie Honey.”
― Michael Sokolove, Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater

“series The March of Time visited”
― Michael Sokolove, Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater

“There are amazing stories of people who made it from the bottom to the top. But what happens on average? What is the chance of somebody from the bottom making it to the middle or somebody from the top who doesn’t work going down? In terms of basic statistics, the U.S. has become less a land of opportunity than other advanced industrial countries . . . All markets are shaped by laws and regulations, and unfortunately, our laws and regulations are shaped in order to create more inequality and less opportunity.”
― Michael Sokolove, Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater

“some ways, this is the most difficult aspect of the role; it demands that Mariela portray a wealthy, professional, and mature woman, accustomed to control and decorous behavior, whose world has just been upended by her own child. One of Volpe’s favorite things”
― Michael Sokolove, Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater

“One part of the study looked specifically at the impact on students involved in theater. Between ninth and twelfth grades, their reading levels increased at a rate of 20 percent more than a cohort of similar students—as measured by academic ability and socioeconomics—who were not getting arts education. The authors theorized that the theater students benefited by spending time “reading and learning lines as actors, and possibly reading to carry out research about characters and their settings.” In 2011, the President’s Committee”
― Michael Sokolove, Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater

“In April 2012, The New York Times published a heart-wrenching essay by Claire Needell Hollander, a middle school English teacher in the New York City public schools. Under the headline “Teach the Books, Touch the Heart,” she began with an anecdote about teaching John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. As her class read the end together out loud in class, her “toughest boy,” she wrote, “wept a little, and so did I.” A girl in the class edged out of her chair to get a closer look and asked Hollander if she was crying. “I am,” she said, “and the funny thing is I’ve read it many times.” Hollander, a reading enrichment teacher, shaped her lessons around robust literature—her classes met in small groups and talked informally about what they had read. Her students did not “read from the expected perspective,” as she described it. They concluded (not unreasonably) that Holden Caulfield “was a punk, unfairly dismissive of parents who had given him every advantage.” One student read Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies as raps. Another, having been inspired by Of Mice and Men, went on to read The Grapes of Wrath on his own and told Hollander how amazed he was that “all these people hate each other, and they’re all white.” She knew that these classes were enhancing her students’ reading levels, their understanding of the world, their souls. But she had to stop offering them to all but her highest-achieving eighth-graders. Everyone else had to take instruction specifically targeted to boost their standardized test scores. Hollander felt she had no choice. Reading scores on standardized tests in her school had gone up in the years she maintained her reading group, but not consistently enough. “Until recently, given the students’ enthusiasm for the reading groups, I was able to play down that data,” she wrote. “But last year, for the first time since I can remember, our test scores declined in relation to comparable schools in the city. Because I play a leadership role in the English department, I felt increased pressure to bring this year’s scores up. All the teachers are increasing their number of test-preparation sessions and practice tests, so I have done the same, cutting two of my three classic book groups and replacing them with a test preparation tutorial program.” Instead of Steinbeck and Shakespeare, her students read “watered-down news articles or biographies, bastardized novels, memos or brochures.” They studied vocabulary words, drilled on how to write sentences, and practiced taking multiple-choice tests. The overall impact of such instruction, Hollander said, is to “bleed our English classes dry.” So”
― Michael Sokolove, Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater

“Everything now has to be fully accountable,” Peter Plagens, a New York painter and art critic, told the online magazine Salon in a 2012 story on the declining status of the artistic classes in America. “An English department has to show it brings in enough money, that it holds its own with the business side. Public schools are held accountable in various bean-counting ways. The senator can point to the ‘pointy-headed professor’ teaching poetry and ask, ‘Is this doing any good? Can we measure this?’ It’s a culture now measured by quantities rather than qualities.” Jonathan Lethem, the novelist, lamented”
― Michael Sokolove, Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater

“He does not tell her how. He never does. It is the essential aspect of his genius as an educator. The world is full of people who cannot wait to tell you what they know. What animates Volpe is creating moments for his kids to figure it out for themselves. His ego, though not small, allows for great patience. Very few high school directors could be more versed in theater, more knowing about what the finished product should look like. But he lets his kids find their own way there. His”
― Michael Sokolove, Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater

“Maybe that kid was in the back of the ensemble and he wasn’t even good, or he was an abomination. I don’t care. He was onstage and he was having a ball, and I’m absolutely thrilled because I’ve taken that kid to a place he never imagined and may never be again.” •”
― Michael Sokolove, Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater

“Volpe expands their worldview and shows them that struggle and suffering are universal, but so are hope and resilience.”
― Michael Sokolove, Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater