Don't bother learning, just name five facts

A handful of times over the four years, Ms. Mxdxxxx brought a lesson to class that, if you squinted, looked halfway legitimate. (Spoiler alert…)

She would roll out the old-school projector and show us slides of an academic theater topic, like kabuki theater, the method, the Meisner technique, or the life of Shakespeare. Each slideshow would have a brief overview of the topic in the form of some bullet points and photos. She'd read the slides out loud to us. Then, we were to write up a page of “five facts” we learned from the lesson.

Unfortunately, even this simple, unassuming presentation failed spectacularly. Mxdxxxx's lectures were so sparse on detail that nobody in the class could honestly say they actually learned anything about the topics, beyond the fact that each topic was perhaps a thing that existed. The facts were not interesting or memorable. More offensively, though, was that this was a theater class where we were listening to facts about “the magic if,” such as who coined the term, and when, and what it meant… BUT NOT ACTUALLY MAKING USE OF IT. The most “exposure” we had to acting techniques, skills, and styles of theater was hearing ABOUT them as bullet points in a ten-minute long slideshow lecture presentation by a teacher who could barely read or pronounce her own words.

Uta Hagen? Sure, she existed. Did we ever make use of any of her techniques? Hell no.

Many of our graduating seniors went on to audition for B.F.A. theater programs. Many of them listed training in various acting techniques on their resumes, no doubt thanks to these “five facts” lessons. None of them knew the least bit about what they actually were.

Speaking of, the listing of the five facts was actually the most fun part of the whole thing. You see, you could write down any five facts, whether or not they were taken from the presentation. You could say, for example, “Shakespeare's first name was William” and be fine. Equally acceptable: “Kabuki is Japanese,” “Drama is the study of theater,” “Meisner came up with an acting technique” — all A+ work. For those keeping score at home, Mxdxxxx did not actually read the turned-in assignments.

I mean, you could really write down anything at all on your paper. Josh and I were known to scribble variations of “peepee caca poopoo” as five facts — first to test our teacher's limits, but more often out of silent protest and disillusionment with the program overall. As expected, we received straight As on all of our assignments. And if one of our papers said, “Stella Adler made peepee many times in her life” five times, could anyone prove those were not, indeed, five facts?  ❒

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