Bright Ideas Become Class Acts

Teachers Marc Cohen and Beth Winningham believe one special trip could change their students forever.

Here’s their idea: Take 60 students from Monroe High School to Ashland, Ore., this June, to learn the joys of Shakespeare and rural living.

They will attend a couple Shakespearean plays during a festival, listen to lectures about the bard, and still have time for a raft adventure on the Rogue River. No one expects this to be your run-of-the-mill field trip.

“I know it’s going to stay with them forever and ever,” Winningham said. “They’ll never forget this.”

The students would leave their largely poverty-stricken neighborhoods to take in the theater at the highly touted Oregon Shakespeare Festival and travel to a part of the country they might otherwise never see.

At Monroe, 4,000 students come from mostly middle- to lower-class families. About 70% of the students are Latino, more than one-third of them consider English to be their second language, and at least 65% qualify for free lunches.

In many cases, their lives do not reach far beyond the few blocks they navigate to and from the Haskell Avenue school. Many come from troubled areas in North Hills, Panorama City or Pacoima.

From that environment to an understanding of Elizabethan-era writings required a fair amount of work for most.

“The words are kind of weird in a way, but he’s teaching us,” said Alex Esparza, 15, of Panorama City, referring to Cohen.

During one recent class, Cohen instructed his 10th-grade students to review portions of a Shakespearean play and then to act out various scenes.

Several students read their parts aloud in English, then quietly critiqued each other in Spanish.

“Let’s have some fun with it,” Cohen told them. “Don’t be so serious.”

Cohen, 30, a first-year teacher who spent seven years working in the entertainment industry, said he finds the students’ energy invigorating.

“They’re falling in love with literature,” he said. “It tells you that it’s working.”

Heading north to Oregon later this year would require each student to pay at least $100. In addition, the group must raise about $20,000 to cover expenses for the four-day trip.

So far, they’ve raised $2,000 by selling tickets to a booster-club dinner, running a concession stand at a school dance, and holding a bake sale.

“Everybody’s trying,” said Blanca Rodriguez, 15, of North Hills. “I think they would be disappointed if they can’t go. Everybody is excited about this.

“We’re trying to learn something about Shakespeare and at the same time have a lot of fun,” she said. “Basically, it’ll be the first time I go out of the state.”

The festival in rural Oregon, far from Los Angeles, makes the trip unique and worthwhile, said Joan K. Elam, the high school’s principal.

“It’s not just a field trip,” she said. “It’s a total experience. It teaches responsibility. They’re wonderful kids. It’d be great to get them there.”

Elam said she supports the trip as a potentially enriching experience far beyond anything the school could afford to sponsor on its own.

Teachers emphasized the importance of encouraging youths not to limit their educational experiences, Elam said.

Winningham, 39, a 17-year teaching veteran, said that in Shakespeare’s works there are lessons of life that remain valid today.

“The themes in the literature are the same things everybody deals with,” she said. “Love, power, the desire to be happy, the fight to control your life when other forces are trying to control you . . . all that’s in Shakespeare.”

Esparza, who plans to join the Marines and someday become a police officer, said that understanding the literature is important, but so is seeing other parts of the world.

“For me, it’s probably once in a lifetime to go to Oregon,” he said. “It’s probably peaceful over there.”