Before and After

Are you going to teach this class next year?

June 7th, 6:30 PM. The cafeteria was warm, with lemony sunlight through floor to ceiling windows. The expected rust and white square tile flooring. Tables, old wooden chairs, wheeled carts with ketchup and mustard. Parents, brothers and sisters, and a few visitors gathered near the stainless steel kitchen to see and hear a small group of student poets and dancers. These San Leandro High School freshmen and seniors were beginners who said there wasn't much to do after school except to go to tutoring. They told the group that our program gave them a chance to make friends, have fun, be creative, and learn something new. They looked back and were proud of what they'd done by the end of this short six week program, meeting only once or twice a week. It wasn't slick, it wasn't professional, but they had persisted and it was good.

May, 2007. An old fashioned auditorium at Sankofa Elementary, Oakland. Kindergarteners and first graders burst through the door behind us and came marching down the aisle. "I AM SOMEBODY, I AM SOMEBODY," they chanted in rhythm with the drummer. They wore their African fabric waist bands proudly. The audience cheered as the children showed us their dances.

But before, when they started? They thought it might be boring or take up too much time from other things.Certain other students "got on their nerves." They felt shy reading their poems or dancing in front of the others.

Before and after. An experience of some kind of transformation. We look back and realize we created something, became something, persisted through difficulty and came out the other side. As the school year winds down, we artists who teach in after school programs once again experience our reward. Through the challenges -- absences, sudden room changes, crowding, noise, fights, freezing rain, broken heaters, illness -- when we share what we've done with an audience and look back, it becomes clear. And we want to do it all again next year.