CEPA kids

I’m being impressed like I haven’t been in quite a while.

Earlier this year, The Heart of Pell City Downtown Revitalization approached me with a proposition. “We found a play about Pell City,” Urainah Glidewell said. “Do you think we could put it on at CEPA?”

The script was written by Vickie Harmon, then a teacher with the Pell City School System, in 1990 for the city’s Centennial Anniversary. She called it “Our Town,” and it featured narrator Rob Skelton walking the audience through the founding of Pell City and some of it’s most notable characters. It’s fantastic, and I was on board.

Well, a week or two later, Urainah, Vickie and I approached PCHS Drama Teacher Ginger McCurry with a proposal of our own: Would her classes like to put the production on? Ginger loved the idea. So, we decided to update the script a bit and have a final version in front of the students on the first day of school.

Of course,  that didn’t happen. Mostly because updating the script fell to me, and I didn’t do it. I’m rather embarrassed about that now, but at the same time I’m really not. What we’re doing is so much cooler.

Imagine yourself in high school, third day of your senior year, and some strange man you’ve never met before wanders into your class and tells you that over the next week, you’re going to write a play. He freely admits that he has no experience in this department, and he’s fairly sure you don’t either. Of course, that doesn’t matter, he says. We’re doing it anyway.

That really happened. I was staring into a room full of dinner-plate eyes, the ones looking at me anyway. The rest just went back to their own conversations. It took a minute, but with Ms. McCurry’s lead we broke two classes into seven groups and proceeded to write the first play that would be credited in part to the Pell City High School Drama Department.

Now, let me tell you how I thought this would go. I assumed the classes would read Mrs. Harmon’s script and collect a few characters, we’d write a handful of dialogue and we’d launch this thing by the end of the week.

But that wasn’t it at all.

The second day I walked in to class, I get bombarded. I had previously dropped stacks of research into these students’ laps and walked away with ambivalence. When I came back, there was nothing but energy. These students not only dug through the history of Pell City to find the city’s roots, they started digging to find their own.

They went home and asked their parents about the creation of Lake Logan Martin. Students asked about the Mill and who in their families worked there. They researched their own genealogy. One student went to the St. Clair County Archives in Ashville on her own to to dig deeper.

Then, they all told each other their stories.

I learned in that moment the infectious nature of education. Excitement breeds creativity and critical thinking, and being connected to it when it manifests in a student is a feeling that I’ve never felt in another setting.

Seeing a student care about something in the way these have will make you wish immediately that you had the time to provide more opportunities like this. It has with me, anyway.

In about six weeks, they’re going to take the script they wrote and perform it for you as part of Avondale Mils Day on October 1. I have to say, what they came up with better than I ever imagined. I know that October 1 is a football day, but this year I can honestly say I’m going to sell my tickets to make sure I’m here for this one.