Center Stage Youth Theatre

Posts Tagged ‘Young People’

This summer Center Stage will hold a Drama Conservatory for Students ages 5 – 19, July 9th – August 3rd at the Grace Church in Rutland VT.  We are already busily planning the program, and online registration will be available on the Center Stage website within days.  We will also have registration forms that can be printed and sent to us by actual mail!

We are so excited to be spending a month in Vermont, and I am so hoping to see a lot of familiar as well as lovely new faces in our classes.  My Graduate work has opened new horizons for me in the realm of teaching and directing, and I am very excited have this opportunity to bring what I have discovered to young people in VT!

One of the questions asked in my developmental psych class concerned the idea that perhaps we are rushing our children through childhood.  Here are some of my thoughts on a subject that worries me a great deal:

…I also think about how the internet, cell phones and other social and technological advances have brought way too much information and opportunities into the lives of our children.  There are so many new ways for them to become too aware, and I feel they are not ready so much of what they can access easily.  A couple of years ago in a summer program I was running one of my kindergarteners pulled a cell phone out of his lunch box.  This astonished me! His mama wanted him to have it in case he got lost, or needed her, and care about those things are certainly not ways to make a child grow up too quickly, I’ll admit that.  But the level of technology in the life of this little one, as well as the way we must more vigilantly guard the safety of our children now do point toward that end.

I believe that our society’s tendency toward exhilarating children through childhood is also a factor in the loss of creativity and joy in learning that many of our young people experience very quickly upon entering society.  School systems – and here please do not think I make light of the absolutely enormous responsibilities teachers face today, nor of their overwhelming workload – seem to me often to be organized in such a way that the documentation of fulfillment of state standards comes at the cost of the individual child’s learning style and self esteem.  One of my goals in education is to find ways to incorporate the way a child learns and what he most loves to learn about across the curriculum.

A pipe dream?  Quite possibly.  But in my mind, this could make all the difference in the level of personal connection of each child to the contents of what the state says our children must learn.