The Trigger show

Margaret Butler pulls aside a makeshift closet door in her classroom at St. John’s Episcopal School, revealing clothing racks stuffed with costumes.

When students walk into Mrs. Butler’s room, they could be entering an interpretation of mountains in Iraq or a Shakespearean set. Every day is different in Mrs. Butler’s class.

She teaches literature to sixth graders, and the novels they read always have to do with social studies. Costumes, puppets, funny hats, re-enactments and skits are the norm. The desks are never in the same formation from one day to the next.

In the hallway, above her classroom door, is a neon “Open” sign of the type that might be in a convenience store.

“We’re open to what these young people want to know and what they want to do,” she says. “It works.”

Butler is 72, and she gained the nickname “Trigger” in 1952 during a summer at Camp Longhorn in Burnet, Texas, where she tacked a picture of Roy Rogers’ horse near her bunk. The name kept following her until she ultimately embraced it. It fits, too. It’s cute, inviting and totally unintimidating. Kids are at ease around her, even, and especially, sixth-graders.

Trigger pulls one of them into the interview, a blue-eyed boy with brown hair and freckles named Carter Elliot.

“All the teachers here are completely amazing,” he says, after shaking hands. “It’s really fun being a sixth-grader.”

Wait. What? It’s really fun being a sixthgrader?

It’s fun when, as a sixth-grader, a kid walks into the classroom to find plastic building blocks in his way. He must traverse them while water splashes him and recorded gunfire plays from a boom box.

For a moment, he is on a 10-inch-wide ledge on the side of the Zagros Mountains, risking life for freedom.

It’s just like what happens in the novel the class is reading, Kiss the Dust, about girls in 1980s Iran and Iraq.

All the world’s a stage, and Butler’s classroom is no exception. She also teaches speech, where eighth-graders learn how to groom and prepare for interviews and public speaking. It readies them for private high school admissions processes, which often involve interviews. When it’s time for speech, Butler’s classroom becomes an office with a receptionist, where students must check in and wait for their interviews. A few weeks earlier, it had been a fashion runway for them to strut their business-appropriate clothes.

On one wall of Butler’s classroom is a collage of faces, pictures of every single student she has had during the past 21 years at St. John’s. She remembers all of their names, and she keeps in touch with many of them.

“I want that spirit, a part of them, to stay right here,” she says. “We’re still connected.”

Butler’s children and grandchildren live in Alabama. Every spring, she asks herself whether this is the year she should retire.

So far, the answer hasn’t changed.

“As long as I have gifts to offer, I would like to do that,” she says.

NOVEMBER 4−6, 2011 PREVIEW NIGHT: NOVEMBER 3