I was fortunate to recently sit down with Pedro Garcia, a great member of the Tenement Museum staff who juggles a few different roles here. He discussed his job, his own struggles as a young boy adapting to America, and how the immigration experience is ongoing.
Could you introduce yourself to our readers?
I'm Pedro Garcia. I work at the Tenement Museum as education associate for training and outreach.
How long have you been working here?
In total, I've been at the museum for five years.
What does your job entail?
I have two main roles. Training involves teaching all staff of the Tenement, both part-timers and full-timers, to lead public tours of the museum. So that's the bulk of my job. And outreach involves managing our ESOL (English Speakers of Other Languages) program called Shared Journeys and promoting the education program that we have to offer to the community of the Lower East Side.
What exactly is the mission of the Shared Journeys program?
Well, it's a program that was developed at the museum a few years ago, and the idea is to use history to teach English. Existing ESL classes from around the city can come visit the museum and in a two hour workshop, they will learn about immigration of the past and share their own experiences. Hence the name.
What do you find most gratifying about your job?
It's very rewarding when I teach someone how to do a tour and that person excels. It's also great when Shared Journeys accomplishes its mission, when the students come and they feel that, yes, my immigrant story is very similar to those from a hundred years ago.
Before you worked at the Tenement Museum, what did you do?
I used to work in education. It wasn't really history or museum stuff. I worked teaching for non-profits. Basically, I was an educator in small settings for children who had behavioral problems.
Did that help you prepare for your work here?
Yeah. It helps a little bit because I used to be a trainer there, too. It's very similar and helped me to build some of the skills I use here.
I know you have an immigrant story of your own. Where did you grow up?
Well, I was born in Venezuela. My family came to the United States when I was very young. I was about eight or ten years old. We came straight to New York, and I've been here ever since.
What year was that?
The late eighties, like '88 or '89.
When you got to New York, I assume you weren't an English speaker...
No, no, none of us spoke English.
How did you learn the language?
The great benefit that I always cherish is that I went to school in the Bronx where they have bilingual education. That helped make the transition easier for me... not easy because learning English is never really easy. It's actually one of the hardest languages to learn. But I was able to have a little bit of support and that helped me to transition and grow.
I heard you were recently on a panel where you spoke about being bullied as a kid because of your English skills. Can you tell me about that?
The panel was about professionals in New York City who grew up as immigrant kids, and we spoke to New York City teachers. And the question was, "What is the hardest part about being an immigrant kid newly arriving to school?" I said the hardest part is being bullied because you don't know the language and you don't know where to go. It becomes a very terrifying experience. I went to school in the Bronx and at that time, the neighborhood I lived in was very dangerous. Shootings and violence were all around me. That made it even scarier. I was trying to convey to the teachers one thing that can be done to resolve some of the fear experienced when immigrants arrive - they should have a buddy. There should be another immigrant kid helping them to get adjusted because sometimes, kids can be mean.
Did you have that?
No.
You felt like you were on your own?
I was on my own. My sister went to a different school, and my brother was very young, so he wasn't in my school either. Like I was telling the teachers at the panel, when immigrants come, it's a whole new world. It can be very scary already. It's very daunting to be in a new place. Why make it harder? Why not help them a little bit with a buddy?
Do you feel that your own immigrant experience was similar to the families that we feature here at the museum?
I've always felt that way, yeah. When I tell my own stories about how difficult it is coming to the United States, I think of the Baldizzi family. It was very hard for the parents to come over. It was very hard for the whole family. The Baldizzis had to share a one bedroom apartment with four of them. We had to share a one bedroom apartment with five of us. So I think more and more, our experiences are very similar. My parents wanted us to get the best out of being in the U.S., to learn English, to be Americans. It's the same thing the Baldizzis taught their children. I truly believe there are a lot of similarities.
What do you hope visitors to the museum take away from it? What do you hope they learn about immigration?
Well, I hope that they get to think about the immigration experience and how hard it was while realizing that it hasn't gotten easier. There's a bad misconception that everyone who came to this country in the last twenty or thirty years had it very easy. It's hard, but a different type of difficulty. If visitors pause for a second and just think about what they're seeing around them and what they just heard about the past, they can see a lot of similarities. I hope that by the time they leave a tour that I lead or a tour that is lead by one of my trainees, they at least think about it. I don't want to force anybody to change their minds or their opinions. I just want them to start discussing it. You just have to stop and think.
- Posted by Joe Klarl
Showing posts with label interview. Show all posts
Showing posts with label interview. Show all posts
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Friday, October 8, 2010
Meet the Educators: Justin Gilman and Rachel Serkin
Recently, I had the opportunity to talk with two of the Tenement Museum's educators, Justin Gilman and Rachel Serkin. They told me about their jobs, inside and outside of 97 Orchard.
How long have you been working at the Tenement Museum?
JG: I've been working here for a month a half.
RS: I've been working here for four years now.
JG: Pretty different.
RS: For your fifth year, you get a chamber pot.
JG: I can't wait!
Can you tell me about your day-to-day schedule?
JG: Basically, I give tours here. I mostly do the Moore family tour, the Irish immigrant family. I'm learning the Piecing It Together tour starting today. I'm learning it because I took Rachel's tour and she was really great.
On a typical day, I get here about fifteen minutes before the tour and hang out with the other awesome educators. There's so many new people to meet every day. The tours last about an hour, and each and every tour is completely different. So every day is a totally different experience with student groups or families that came from Ireland or people who have no idea of Irish culture at all. I work twice a week: Thursdays and Saturdays for about five or six hours a day.
RS: When I started out at the museum, I was an access intern four summers ago in the office [editor's note: "access" involves working to make the museum accessible to people with disabilities]. So part of my training experience was to give tours, and I loved it so much that I asked them, "Can I come back next summer?" I've stuck around ever since.
I've succeeded in doing all the building tours so I've got all the family stories. I just passed the test to do the Immigrant Soles walking tour, and in addition, I do the Shared Journeys program with ESL classes. I'm a teacher by profession so, for me, it's a combination of teaching/storytelling/performance art.
I typically work three days a week. My day starts at ten or eleven o'clock but I usually end up coming an hour early because I like everyone here so much. It's really fun to schmooze in our break room. It's like our warm-up for the day and then, typically, I'm doing anywhere from three to five tours a day.
I had my first school group of the year yesterday... eighth graders. I just finished graduate school and the tenement building is my unorthodox classroom.
Justin, what other experience do you bring to the Tenement Museum? Do you have another outside job?
JG: Yeah, I got a couple of jobs. I'm an actor by trade. I just graduated from Columbia in May with a master's in acting. I don't have a teaching credential so I end up teaching acting because you don't always need a credential for that in university situations. They're just like, "Aw if you can do it, come on in." That's really fun and I love it. I'm also a nanny for a five month old baby boy, a four year old, and a six year old boy and an usher in an interactive bus tour that goes through Times Square called "The Ride."
When did you start doing that?
JG: I started doing that a week ago. I had a teaching job over the summer at Columbia where I taught high school kids acting, directing, and playwriting. Then I thought, I'm out of grad school and I have no job experience in New York City at all except for teaching. So I spent all of September trying to find work and now finally, as of five days ago, can pay my rent.
RS: Mazel tov!
So being a tour guide is brand new to you.
JG: Yeah. Everything that's happening to me right now is new but I think that all of my acting training comes into it, like breathing so you can be relaxed. I'm more of a storyteller so my tours are very, very story heavy. They're about being as dramatic as possible.
What do you each find most rewarding about being educators here?
RS: I love my job. This is the coolest job that I've ever had. And the building itself is cool, too. As Justin said, we're really storytellers. I'm from Brooklyn, born and raised, so this is my history and my family's history. I love interacting with people from all over the world. Sometimes you touch people. I've had grown men get teary-eyed on my tours. And people share their stories. These families came to this country a hundred years ago and I try to get people to realize you have more in common with them than you might think.
JG: For me, it's the people as well. Teaching people is huge for me. And since I'm doing the Irish tour mostly, seeing people share what their ancestors had to deal with when they came to New York, it's really striking to me how that affects people. It gets me thinking too, because I'm half Irish, about my family, and thinking about what they had to deal with when they came to New York. I'm so lucky and so grateful that they dealt with that so we don't have to.
But the most rewarding thing is this job makes me feel like more of an activist because there's a lot we still have to do, especially in the Lower East Side, revving people up and saying, "we're not done yet." It's what helps me wake up in the morning.
RS: A lot of people sometimes come in with the mindset that their family was the only demographic to come through, and I love talking about Kleindeutschland (Little Germany) or the Five Points or Chinatown. This neighborhood is still a living, breathing thing. This community is still a living organism, still here.
What's most difficult about your job?
RS: Oh boy.
JG: I'm new to this, so I don't have a lot of difficulties right now. It's the simple things like remembering the dates, the names, the information, and being okay with not knowing the answers to everything. I'd like to be a know-it-all and make something up while saying it passionately but I can't do that because the visitors might know more than me. It's the idea of humbly giving a tour. I am not the end-all, be-all of this information. You clearly might know more than me and I'd love to hear your experience. The other thing is that people come in with their story and their family and sometimes it's difficult to open up their minds and say, "that's your experience, but we're talking about the Moore family. It's a different experience, but there may be correlations." It can be difficult, but when it happens, it's really rewarding.
RS: And if you work at a job like this, you learn a lot about human behavior and people. When there's fifteen, sixteen of us and 325 square feet, a lot of stuff can go down on a hot summer day, and sometimes people don't necessarily want to hear what you want to say. But we like to be challenged, and we like when people challenge each other. The majority of the time, the discussions are wonderful, but sometimes people just come in with a certain mindset and they aren't willing to change. They might not see any value in the history of the building, which is unfortunate.
One of the most challenging things for me is that I talk so much. We talk for a living, and it can be emotionally exhausting sometimes. When I was learning these tours, like the Moores tour, I started having dreams that I was giving the tour in my sleep.
Doing every tour here, you must be juggling a lot of information.
RS: It's amazing. I've learned that you can just turn it on for each tour. Sometimes you feel like you're telling the same tour but in the end, you can still bring it back to suit the individual theme or topic of the tour.
Do you ever confuse one tour for another?
RS: Oh yeah. One time I was doing a Getting By tour and I forgot Julius Gumpertz's name. I just drew a blank.
JG: That's something that I'm nervous about now that I'm learning my second tour. I've just been giving this one tour every day, and suddenly there's a lot of new information.
How do you prepare for all the question that you're asked?
RS: I'm used to some of them. "Is this the fireplace? Where's the toilet?" We get a lot of some of the same questions but I love it when visitors ask questions. I don't feel that I've done my job right when they're quiet. This is your tour. I like to talk, but I don't like to lecture. I want you to share. Open it up, ask anything you want.
JG: And we have tour content for every tour, and it's so much information that you couldn't possibly get out in an hour. So sometimes it's good for me to go back and reread the tour content because there's so much info that answers questions I have for myself. We have to study a lot because we're students at the same time as we're educators.
RS: We're always observing each other. They put us on observations because it's the same content, but every educator has a different way of spinning the same story. It refreshes your tour content.
JG: I observed somebody else today on the Moore family tour, and she does a tour that is 180 degrees from what I do, but in the end, there's the same result, and it's beautiful to see that.
How do you react when you don't know something? Do you admit that you just don't know it and need to study?
JG: I have to because I feel like otherwise I'm not doing my job. I always say "please go to the Visitor's Center where we have so many books and online access for further research." If I honestly just don't the information, it's always better for me to say that than lie to you.
RS: Absolutely. There's some things I just don't know and I'll say "Sorry, but I'm going to be sure to get that information."
Do people typically react well when that happens?
RS: Yeah. Overall, people are very understanding. We don't know everything and that's okay.
JG: I think that's how I feel a leader should work. It's like I know something up to a point and then I may need your help. Because I think when we lie and give the wrong information, then we're sending them the wrong message about our position. And I'd rather just say, "if you know more than me, you might want to talk about this because I want to hear." It's not like I'm the dictator and they're my minions. We're all in this together and I just happen to know more about this particular family.
RS: I've had visitors step in and save me because they knew an answer I didn't. Thank you!
JG: When there's somebody who has come straight from Ireland because they've heard about this museum and they want to take this tour, I'll always look to them and ask if they want to elaborate on anything. I don't want to feel like I know more than them because if his or her family dealt directly with these issues, then technically I don't.
Are there any particularly odd or unique questions that you recall getting?
RS: I've had visitors obsess with the families about birth control and things like that. I have people all the time asking, about the Baldizzis, "So they're Italian Catholics and they really only had two kids? Can you explain that?"
JG: I got asked the question, "Why are you talking about the Irish people so much? When are you going to talk about the Jews?" and I had to say "I'm sorry ma'am, I think you're on the wrong tour?" I can't give all of the tours at once. It's impossible.
I also get a little political with my tour, and we talk about the "No Irish Need Apply" policy, when many people didn't want the Irish to hold jobs. I relate that to modern times, trying to understand who might be in the position of the Irish today. I mention the Arizona immigration law, and sometimes I'll encounter people from Arizona. One woman stood up and gave a speech about why the law was fantastic, but I loved it. I love that stuff because I'd never heard someone vocalize that side of the issue before. People can get super passionate and they've experienced things that I'll never know.
Have you been in situations where you've applied the experience you've gained here?
RS: I come from the belief that history and literature really compliment each other. You look at our bookshop and you've got some of the greatest works of literature. I'd want to teach my kids Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, excerpts from Triangle: The Fire That Changed America, the work of Abraham Cahan, the editor of The Forward, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Some of the greatest works of literature come out of this time, so I love when I get school kids and tell them it's not just for your history class. Literature is a product of a time period and a historical event. That's exciting for me.
I was doing my student teaching last year, and I was a little nervous because the kids who come to this museum are kind of my guinea pigs. We had a workshop last week about classroom management and the school kids who are coming back. Essentially, we are playing the roles of teachers. We don't see these kids after two hours but we want them to have a positive educational experience. I'm applying for a teaching job right now so I love that I can still apply these skills I've learned and use them somewhere. And I feel so gratified when I get through to a group of kids.
Justin, has it helped you as a performer?
JG: Yeah, for sure. It's taught me more clearly how to read a room. Just like with an audience on stage, when you're giving a tour, sometimes you'll see that there's a gloomy atmosphere going on, and the tour that I give is already specifically gloomy so I can make the decision to put more jokes in, to have a better time. We don't need to be miserable while dealing with sad subject matter.
I use that at my usher job in Times Square job as well, thinking about what these people need and how I can help them. How can I play with a person for an hour and be okay with things changing so that they can have a good experience? I don't have to force gloom and doom on them if I can tell they already feel that way.
And It's the same way on stage. If the audience isn't feeling it, okay, let's do it funny.
RS: You've got to improvise. For me, with school kids, eighth through twelfth graders are the toughest sell because they're at that age where it's hardest to engage and motivate them. They come and pretend they don't care about history but they really do. And I have so much fun really trying to challenge them. I've also become a much better listener as a result of working here, hearing so many other people. It's not all about us talking. Even the questions I ask are a skill. We have some great facilitators that really know how to challenge visitors and ask these open-ended questions. It's a difficult skill and a great skill to have.
JG: It's taught me to be more open and inviting. I want you to be able to open up to me. It's the same on stage, where even if I'm playing a villain, I have to play an inviting villain because I want you to come on the journey with me. I don't want to keep you at bay. The greatest villain performances are when you want to be that guy's friend even though he's a maniac.
Do you think that willingness to learn is contagious with the visitors to the museum?
JG: Absolutely.
RS: We're accessible. We're the face of the museum. We're approachable. I love talking about how I'm the girl from Brooklyn. My mom's from Brooklyn, my dad's from the Bronx, and people can relate to those kind of stories. We're all the children of immigrants.
- Posted by Joe Klarl
How long have you been working at the Tenement Museum?
JG: I've been working here for a month a half.
RS: I've been working here for four years now.
JG: Pretty different.
RS: For your fifth year, you get a chamber pot.
JG: I can't wait!
Can you tell me about your day-to-day schedule?
JG: Basically, I give tours here. I mostly do the Moore family tour, the Irish immigrant family. I'm learning the Piecing It Together tour starting today. I'm learning it because I took Rachel's tour and she was really great.
On a typical day, I get here about fifteen minutes before the tour and hang out with the other awesome educators. There's so many new people to meet every day. The tours last about an hour, and each and every tour is completely different. So every day is a totally different experience with student groups or families that came from Ireland or people who have no idea of Irish culture at all. I work twice a week: Thursdays and Saturdays for about five or six hours a day.
RS: When I started out at the museum, I was an access intern four summers ago in the office [editor's note: "access" involves working to make the museum accessible to people with disabilities]. So part of my training experience was to give tours, and I loved it so much that I asked them, "Can I come back next summer?" I've stuck around ever since.
I've succeeded in doing all the building tours so I've got all the family stories. I just passed the test to do the Immigrant Soles walking tour, and in addition, I do the Shared Journeys program with ESL classes. I'm a teacher by profession so, for me, it's a combination of teaching/storytelling/performance art.
I typically work three days a week. My day starts at ten or eleven o'clock but I usually end up coming an hour early because I like everyone here so much. It's really fun to schmooze in our break room. It's like our warm-up for the day and then, typically, I'm doing anywhere from three to five tours a day.
I had my first school group of the year yesterday... eighth graders. I just finished graduate school and the tenement building is my unorthodox classroom.
Justin, what other experience do you bring to the Tenement Museum? Do you have another outside job?
JG: Yeah, I got a couple of jobs. I'm an actor by trade. I just graduated from Columbia in May with a master's in acting. I don't have a teaching credential so I end up teaching acting because you don't always need a credential for that in university situations. They're just like, "Aw if you can do it, come on in." That's really fun and I love it. I'm also a nanny for a five month old baby boy, a four year old, and a six year old boy and an usher in an interactive bus tour that goes through Times Square called "The Ride."
When did you start doing that?
JG: I started doing that a week ago. I had a teaching job over the summer at Columbia where I taught high school kids acting, directing, and playwriting. Then I thought, I'm out of grad school and I have no job experience in New York City at all except for teaching. So I spent all of September trying to find work and now finally, as of five days ago, can pay my rent.
RS: Mazel tov!
So being a tour guide is brand new to you.
JG: Yeah. Everything that's happening to me right now is new but I think that all of my acting training comes into it, like breathing so you can be relaxed. I'm more of a storyteller so my tours are very, very story heavy. They're about being as dramatic as possible.
What do you each find most rewarding about being educators here?
RS: I love my job. This is the coolest job that I've ever had. And the building itself is cool, too. As Justin said, we're really storytellers. I'm from Brooklyn, born and raised, so this is my history and my family's history. I love interacting with people from all over the world. Sometimes you touch people. I've had grown men get teary-eyed on my tours. And people share their stories. These families came to this country a hundred years ago and I try to get people to realize you have more in common with them than you might think.
JG: For me, it's the people as well. Teaching people is huge for me. And since I'm doing the Irish tour mostly, seeing people share what their ancestors had to deal with when they came to New York, it's really striking to me how that affects people. It gets me thinking too, because I'm half Irish, about my family, and thinking about what they had to deal with when they came to New York. I'm so lucky and so grateful that they dealt with that so we don't have to.
But the most rewarding thing is this job makes me feel like more of an activist because there's a lot we still have to do, especially in the Lower East Side, revving people up and saying, "we're not done yet." It's what helps me wake up in the morning.
RS: A lot of people sometimes come in with the mindset that their family was the only demographic to come through, and I love talking about Kleindeutschland (Little Germany) or the Five Points or Chinatown. This neighborhood is still a living, breathing thing. This community is still a living organism, still here.
What's most difficult about your job?
RS: Oh boy.
JG: I'm new to this, so I don't have a lot of difficulties right now. It's the simple things like remembering the dates, the names, the information, and being okay with not knowing the answers to everything. I'd like to be a know-it-all and make something up while saying it passionately but I can't do that because the visitors might know more than me. It's the idea of humbly giving a tour. I am not the end-all, be-all of this information. You clearly might know more than me and I'd love to hear your experience. The other thing is that people come in with their story and their family and sometimes it's difficult to open up their minds and say, "that's your experience, but we're talking about the Moore family. It's a different experience, but there may be correlations." It can be difficult, but when it happens, it's really rewarding.
RS: And if you work at a job like this, you learn a lot about human behavior and people. When there's fifteen, sixteen of us and 325 square feet, a lot of stuff can go down on a hot summer day, and sometimes people don't necessarily want to hear what you want to say. But we like to be challenged, and we like when people challenge each other. The majority of the time, the discussions are wonderful, but sometimes people just come in with a certain mindset and they aren't willing to change. They might not see any value in the history of the building, which is unfortunate.
One of the most challenging things for me is that I talk so much. We talk for a living, and it can be emotionally exhausting sometimes. When I was learning these tours, like the Moores tour, I started having dreams that I was giving the tour in my sleep.
Doing every tour here, you must be juggling a lot of information.
RS: It's amazing. I've learned that you can just turn it on for each tour. Sometimes you feel like you're telling the same tour but in the end, you can still bring it back to suit the individual theme or topic of the tour.
Do you ever confuse one tour for another?
RS: Oh yeah. One time I was doing a Getting By tour and I forgot Julius Gumpertz's name. I just drew a blank.
JG: That's something that I'm nervous about now that I'm learning my second tour. I've just been giving this one tour every day, and suddenly there's a lot of new information.
How do you prepare for all the question that you're asked?
RS: I'm used to some of them. "Is this the fireplace? Where's the toilet?" We get a lot of some of the same questions but I love it when visitors ask questions. I don't feel that I've done my job right when they're quiet. This is your tour. I like to talk, but I don't like to lecture. I want you to share. Open it up, ask anything you want.
JG: And we have tour content for every tour, and it's so much information that you couldn't possibly get out in an hour. So sometimes it's good for me to go back and reread the tour content because there's so much info that answers questions I have for myself. We have to study a lot because we're students at the same time as we're educators.
RS: We're always observing each other. They put us on observations because it's the same content, but every educator has a different way of spinning the same story. It refreshes your tour content.
JG: I observed somebody else today on the Moore family tour, and she does a tour that is 180 degrees from what I do, but in the end, there's the same result, and it's beautiful to see that.
How do you react when you don't know something? Do you admit that you just don't know it and need to study?
JG: I have to because I feel like otherwise I'm not doing my job. I always say "please go to the Visitor's Center where we have so many books and online access for further research." If I honestly just don't the information, it's always better for me to say that than lie to you.
RS: Absolutely. There's some things I just don't know and I'll say "Sorry, but I'm going to be sure to get that information."
Do people typically react well when that happens?
RS: Yeah. Overall, people are very understanding. We don't know everything and that's okay.
JG: I think that's how I feel a leader should work. It's like I know something up to a point and then I may need your help. Because I think when we lie and give the wrong information, then we're sending them the wrong message about our position. And I'd rather just say, "if you know more than me, you might want to talk about this because I want to hear." It's not like I'm the dictator and they're my minions. We're all in this together and I just happen to know more about this particular family.
RS: I've had visitors step in and save me because they knew an answer I didn't. Thank you!
JG: When there's somebody who has come straight from Ireland because they've heard about this museum and they want to take this tour, I'll always look to them and ask if they want to elaborate on anything. I don't want to feel like I know more than them because if his or her family dealt directly with these issues, then technically I don't.
Are there any particularly odd or unique questions that you recall getting?
RS: I've had visitors obsess with the families about birth control and things like that. I have people all the time asking, about the Baldizzis, "So they're Italian Catholics and they really only had two kids? Can you explain that?"
JG: I got asked the question, "Why are you talking about the Irish people so much? When are you going to talk about the Jews?" and I had to say "I'm sorry ma'am, I think you're on the wrong tour?" I can't give all of the tours at once. It's impossible.
I also get a little political with my tour, and we talk about the "No Irish Need Apply" policy, when many people didn't want the Irish to hold jobs. I relate that to modern times, trying to understand who might be in the position of the Irish today. I mention the Arizona immigration law, and sometimes I'll encounter people from Arizona. One woman stood up and gave a speech about why the law was fantastic, but I loved it. I love that stuff because I'd never heard someone vocalize that side of the issue before. People can get super passionate and they've experienced things that I'll never know.
Have you been in situations where you've applied the experience you've gained here?
RS: I come from the belief that history and literature really compliment each other. You look at our bookshop and you've got some of the greatest works of literature. I'd want to teach my kids Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, excerpts from Triangle: The Fire That Changed America, the work of Abraham Cahan, the editor of The Forward, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Some of the greatest works of literature come out of this time, so I love when I get school kids and tell them it's not just for your history class. Literature is a product of a time period and a historical event. That's exciting for me.
I was doing my student teaching last year, and I was a little nervous because the kids who come to this museum are kind of my guinea pigs. We had a workshop last week about classroom management and the school kids who are coming back. Essentially, we are playing the roles of teachers. We don't see these kids after two hours but we want them to have a positive educational experience. I'm applying for a teaching job right now so I love that I can still apply these skills I've learned and use them somewhere. And I feel so gratified when I get through to a group of kids.
Justin, has it helped you as a performer?
JG: Yeah, for sure. It's taught me more clearly how to read a room. Just like with an audience on stage, when you're giving a tour, sometimes you'll see that there's a gloomy atmosphere going on, and the tour that I give is already specifically gloomy so I can make the decision to put more jokes in, to have a better time. We don't need to be miserable while dealing with sad subject matter.
I use that at my usher job in Times Square job as well, thinking about what these people need and how I can help them. How can I play with a person for an hour and be okay with things changing so that they can have a good experience? I don't have to force gloom and doom on them if I can tell they already feel that way.
And It's the same way on stage. If the audience isn't feeling it, okay, let's do it funny.
RS: You've got to improvise. For me, with school kids, eighth through twelfth graders are the toughest sell because they're at that age where it's hardest to engage and motivate them. They come and pretend they don't care about history but they really do. And I have so much fun really trying to challenge them. I've also become a much better listener as a result of working here, hearing so many other people. It's not all about us talking. Even the questions I ask are a skill. We have some great facilitators that really know how to challenge visitors and ask these open-ended questions. It's a difficult skill and a great skill to have.
JG: It's taught me to be more open and inviting. I want you to be able to open up to me. It's the same on stage, where even if I'm playing a villain, I have to play an inviting villain because I want you to come on the journey with me. I don't want to keep you at bay. The greatest villain performances are when you want to be that guy's friend even though he's a maniac.
Do you think that willingness to learn is contagious with the visitors to the museum?
JG: Absolutely.
RS: We're accessible. We're the face of the museum. We're approachable. I love talking about how I'm the girl from Brooklyn. My mom's from Brooklyn, my dad's from the Bronx, and people can relate to those kind of stories. We're all the children of immigrants.
- Posted by Joe Klarl
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