The Old Man and The Sea - watch my little school play

I would really like to encourage you, not only to spare some comfortable 30 minutes to enjoy our school play, but also to read The Old Man and The Sea, by Ernest Hemmingway, if you haven’t. One year later, I still miss participating in such process. Some of those students aren’t among us anymore and everybody at that school got pretty aware of how tiring making something beautiful can be.
I sometimes take the whole story as a metaphor of that process, and as a metaphor of our condition as teachers. It’s hard to say whether we tend to take the role of the Old Man, or an absent Manolin during fight, or even that magnificent fish that is the first to be gone. When I think that so much trouble had been had in order to have a only one night play, I wonder what we are supposed to get from all of this. There are many ways to put production into our practice in class, as well as many ways to deny it, because production doesn’t seem to please students, parents, directors and even teachers, not all of them, but a great deal of, especially the ones committed to the maintenance of the school’s irrelevance in their lives and other people’s.
So I could think of that play as the remains of that fish, from which little I would be able to benefit, but I’m still grateful for the time I live in. We can still make something beautiful out of what we’ve got and we’re not considered pirates for having using, for instance, Donald Sutherland’s voice in our narration without any royalty. We’re poor teachers. We are able to get friends to record things for us on their digital cameras, put everything together using some new tricks we’ve learned, patch the gaps with some nice pictures we’ve got, and hope that you’ll feel something when you see what we could save from being forgotten.
But the real reason you should read the book too is for the very sake of my metaphor, because we grow old to find out that there’s much more involved in this process of teaching and learning, as the Old Man points out all over his saga, the Sea, the Age, the Fortune, things that are so much bigger. Are we really that kind of hero? Perhaps my little play doesn’t give us that dimension. So, please, watch my play, but don’t forget to go through the reading as well.

Enjoy the play by clicking here.

Kleber Garcia.