Highschool

In highschool I had a couple of friends on the improv team. For a couple of years they were on a hot streak - going so far as to compete and win at Nationals - and I was a groupie. Their main competition was the team from Cardinal Carter, a rival Catholic school in York Region. It was the heyday of The Simpsons and I’m sure we made the requisite Shelbyville jokes. Maybe they did too.

I hadn’t thought about improv or highschool in ages. But then a teacher from Cardinal Carter sent me photos. Students in their uniform kilts and sweatshirts (go Cougars!) sitting on the floor by a locker bank, desks forming a circle in a classroom, engaged in conversation, copies of The Boat People nearby.

First of all, I’m impressed. These are grade 11s - how old are they? 15? 16? - reading a 400 page, thinly veiled refugee law text book. At their age I was reading Salinger and snickering at Holden Caulfield’s potty mouth. The Shakespeare on the cirriculum that year was Romeo and Juliet. Which. Real talk. R&J is the most accessible of Will’s plays. We went to see Baz Luhrmann and called it a day.

At Cardinal Carter, the grade 11s are engaged in something called a Socratic Seminar. I don’t know what that is but I love the sound of it. The Socratic Method is how I like to engage with work-in-progress. I imagine them interrogating the book, each other, and their own morality, fumbling toward answers or possibly deeper questions. I hope they are thinking beyond the fictional characters and considering the real world and present day concerns, and how they will cast their first votes.