Teachable Moments

TEACHABLE MOMENTS

Seven outspoken entertainers share what they’ve learned in and out of the classroom.

Tina Fey

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Tina Fey is an Emmy-winning actress, producer, and author of the New York Times best-selling autobiography Bossypants. She lives in New York City.

Anthony Mackie

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Everyone in my hometown can sing.

Well, more than the national average, anyway. I myself can carry a tune very quietly and only while making a completely dead-eyed expression, like one of the twins from The Shining.

But that didn’t stop me from being in the chorus of our high school musical every year! Our school was so big that we had 60 kids just in the ensemble. The things that still amaze about those shows: 1. People came to see them.

2. How many weeks of work we put in just to perform for three nights.

3. How many things you can build with a hot-glue gun.

Very few of the kids went on to a career in the entertainment industry, but the skills we learned from working on those musicals—how to show up on time, how to collaborate, how to be loud enough, how to become proficient with a new tool (whether it was a lighting board or a Makita drill or a trumpet), how to proceed with confidence while embarrassing yourself—these are all invaluable life skills.

Arts education in public school is as essential as sports and math. It’s where we learn how to be people in collaboration with other people. And you also get to have a cast pizza party, so…yes, invaluable. ♦

I had amazingly supportive parents.

When I told my mom I wanted to play the trumpet, she took $15 a month and rented me one so I could take lessons. And when I told her I wanted to go to New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, Louisiana’s performing and visual arts high school, she drove me uptown so I could audition—and then made sure I was on the bus every morning, with breakfast in my belly.

I went to Warren Easton High School for the first half of the day. It was a very international public school.

There were kids from Central and South America, from Africa, and I got to experience their culture, their language, their food. I also saw kids who got murdered on their block.

Then, at lunch, I would take a bus over to nocca. I met kids from all different walks of life. I got to watch [jazz musicians] Jason Marsalis and Irvin Mayfield perform when they were just kids. What was most important for me was having both realities, and that’s what informs me as an actor today. ♦ Anthony Mackie has starred in Captain America films and The Hurt Locker and was most recently in Detroit. He lives in New Orleans.

DEPARTURES.COM

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Judith Light When you bring arts education into a school system, you expand a person’s vision of themselves and the world. They don’t hold their narrow view any longer. From the time I was very young, I knew that I wanted to be an actress. Every one of my teachers supported me. My fourth-grade teacher, especially, Mrs. Thompson, she got me. I was not like the other kids, and she made me feel less alone. She validated the way I wanted to express myself. I’m on the board of Manhattan Class Company Theater, and we have a very powerful young people’s education initiative called the Youth Company that brings together 1,200 students for a free after-school program. One of the things we have them do is to write and perform their own plays. They come to recognize that while the content of somebody else’s story may be different, the context is the same. ♦

Priyanka Chopra Education is a tool for empowerment. I was recently traveling in Zimbabwe with unicef. During a visit to AfricAid, I met Lloyd, an HIV-positive young man and a community adolescent-treatment supporter. Lloyd has an undeniable passion for music, and singing is a therapeutic release for him. It gives him the strength to mentor other kids facing tough times.

I also saw firsthand how a weekly music class brought a group of girls together. They created their own song of determination, and together their voices carried that message to everyone around them. ♦

Judith Light is a two-time Tony Award winner and currently stars on the Amazon series Transparent. She lives in New York City.

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Priyanka Chopra stars on the television series Quantico. Her foundation, the Priyanka Chopra Foundation for Health and Education, provides support to underprivileged children in India. She lives in New York City.

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Tony Bennett I wanted to go to the High School of Music & Art, but I was not accepted and got into the High School of Industrial Arts in Manhattan instead. After a few weeks, I was learning all of the techniques and being trained in all of the art forms—etching, glassmaking—and was very happy to be there. It provided me with a foundation on which to build my own artistic creativity. The phrase “free-form” means improvisational, but “form” means you have to know the discipline of a subject before you can be free to break the rules. Industrial Arts gave me the “form” that I needed as an artist.

In the late ’80s, when the arts were being completely eradicated from public school education due to budget cuts, my wife, Susan, and I decided to open a school, the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, which we founded along with the NYC Department of Education in my hometown of Astoria, Queens.

Our nonprofit, Exploring the Arts, was initially created to raise private funds to support the public art school, but we decided not to stop there. We now support arts education in 37 public high schools in New York City and Los Angeles.

I’ve seen teenagers just come alive with energy and joy when given the opportunity to express themselves creatively. They know to approach their craft very seriously. And it’s beautiful to witness how supportive they are of one another. Playing in an orchestra, singing in a choir, rehearsing for a school play—these opportunities help students form a family with their classmates, across whatever differences may have otherwise divided them. ♦ Tony Bennett has won 18 Grammy Awards and sold over 50 million records worldwide. His latest album is Tony Bennett Celebrates 90. He lives in New York City.

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Although he had difficult times and could have given up, he was always intent and focused on completing his education. Because of his determination, Haman graduated salutatorian of his high school class.

The Magic Johnson Foundation granted him a Taylor Michaels Scholarship, and he is currently enrolled at Morehouse College in Atlanta. It is students like Haman who remind me that kids just need opportunity. Who knows, we may be helping the next doctor, lawyer, business owner, or president. ♦ Earvin “Magic” Johnson Jr. is a retired professional basketball player and the chairman and CEO of Magic Johnson Enterprises. He lives in Los Angeles, where he serves as the president of basketball operations for the Lakers.

It was my eighth-grade English teacher, Dr. Rembert Herbert, who saw something in my writing and nudged me to do something with it. It changed my life forever.

Suddenly, I had a creative conduit.

I wrote countless one-acts, and by the time I graduated, I had produced one comedy and two one-act musicals. We had a student-run theater group at Hunter College High School in Manhattan. Only in hindsight do I see what a rare, special thing that was. The last show of the year was entitled Brick Prison—named for our beloved, windowless building— and consisted of an evening of five or six one-act plays, written and directed by the students.

My first job out of college was teaching seventh-grade English at my old high school. Collaborating with my former instructors and learning to teach profoundly changed who I am. I learned that the most effective teachers don’t spend their whole period lecturing, but that they gently guide the students into debate and discussion among themselves, listening to them and keeping the conversational ball in the air. This extended directly into my work as a writer and performer.

The best ideas most often come from collaboration, not soliloquy.

Hamilton, the musical, for all its two hours and 45 minutes, barely scratches the surface on the man, much less the history. I founded the Hamilton Education Program in 2015, along with [Hamilton producer] Jeffrey Seller, the Rockefeller Foundation, the NYC Department of Education, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute, to provide public school students in New York City with the opportunity to see the show and to integrate it into their classroom studies. We wanted to make sure that Hamilton acted as a springboard for learning history, not as a definitive guide. It’s not about imparting the information. It’s about making kids hungry to learn. ♦ Lin-Manuel Miranda is a composer, playwright, and actor best known for creating and starring in the Broadway musical Hamilton, which won 11 Tony Awards. Miranda, a MacArthur “genius grant” fellow, lives in New York City.

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I was bused to Everett High School in Lansing, Michigan, which was then [1973] predominantly white and had a basketball team that couldn’t run or jump—and worst of all, couldn’t win. Upon arriving, I was focused on basketball. When I was only 14, the principal asked me to become the student leader in helping to unite the black and white students at the school. I became the voice for black students within Everett, and through all of that, I helped take the school to the state championship. That time taught me about leadership, diplomacy, and teamwork.

There are so many young students who make me realize the importance of education and who incentivize me to do more. I met Haman Cross about four years ago.

He was homeless for a short time.

Lin-Manuel Miranda

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Magic Johnson