Tears streamed down my face. I looked around at the colors and took in the chaos. People running everywhere screaming across the auditorium. I just stood there in a daze, holding my flowers and trying to absorb what was happening. I hear “you were great”, “great show”, “awesome job Vaani” but don’t think anything of it. What is going on here and why am I crying? These are the questions that keep running through my head. I look around again and see my fellow cast mates, the people I have worked so closely with the last nine months and I smile. I smile as I continue to cry and cry. The tears don’t stop and I finally look up on stage and see Kathi. Kathi who is my director, my friend and my teacher. As I watch her the reasons for my sadness begin to become clear. The memories of the last three years flood through my head.
I first had Kathi as my theater teacher in ninth grade when I was in Performance One. This was the time I got to know Kathi and this was the time I decided I didn’t like her. During my freshman year I saw Kathi as crude and not caring. I saw her as rash and quick to judge. I thought she was too busy with her Advanced Drama kids to care about us freshman. As I grew older and progressed in the classes I realized that I was the one that was too quick to judge. Kathi was a woman of few words. She never complimented or praised her Perf 1 kids, she only criticized. This to me was not caring and crude but to her it was helpful and practical. The next year I had Kathi for both my Perf 2 class and my dance class. I again saw how hard she was on us both as dancers and actors but in these classes I began to spend more time with her and got to know her as a person. However it wasn’t until I was in Advanced Drama my senior year that I realized how much of an impact Kathi had on my life. Advanced Drama led me see the reasons Kathi acted the way she did. It was in this class that Kathi gave me the chance to shine on stage. She gave me the opportunity that I never thought I would have. Kathi in giving me this opportunity was showing support and confidence in me. She showed me how even though it never seemed like it, she really did have confidence in me as an actress. From Kathi I learned not to judge to quickly and not to follow your assumptions. I also learned that saying nothing is not criticism. It was only a way to weigh out the importance of the praise. For all of us, when and if you ever got a word of praise from Kathi you were glowing forever. You savored her words and took them into you heart. This was something very important to me and something I learned only through Kathi’s personality. Aside from learning about theater and the world of theater, I learned about life and the real world. Kathi taught me how to be tough and how to accept rejection. She taught me how to expect criticism rather than praise.
Although I do not wish to teach theater or high school I feel like the values that Kathi instilled on me will help me when I become a teacher. Even today as a college student I do not expect praise, I look for the criticism first. That way when I do get praised it will be a pleasant surprise. I think that when I teach I will watch how much I praise my kids. I do have the tendency to over praise people and not give them the honest truth. I also feel that with elementary school children praise is more necessary than high school kids but I will still take into account what Kathi taught me. I will also take into account things I didn’t like about her. I didn’t like that she treated her younger kids differently and I will try not to do this as a teacher. However in the end, Kathi taught me valuable lessons about life and about the real world and if it hadn’t been for her I would have been a different person today.
-- Vaani Gupta, American University