Kid Quixotes: A Group of Students, Their Teacher, and the One-Room School Where Everything Is Possible

In this poignant and politically minded debut, educator and theater director Haff explains the pedagogy behind Still Waters in the Storm, the after-school program he founded in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in 2008, and dramatizes his students’ efforts to translate Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote from 400-year-old Spanish into modern English and stage a bilingual musical adaptation. After resigning his public school teaching job and entering treatment for bipolar depression, Haff started Still Waters as a way to keep in touch with former students. The curriculum evolved from basic homework help to literature discussion groups, Latin instruction, mentoring, and weekly author workshops. “Everything we do,” Haff writes, “is based on the same ritual of reading a text, discussing it together, writing a response, and taking turns reading our responses to the group.” He interweaves the story of his mental breakdown and recovery with criticisms of the New York City public school system, along with accounts of his students analyzing Cervantes’s antiquated language and developing scripts and songs connecting the plot to their own experiences as the children of undocumented immigrants living under the threat of arrest and deportation. Haff eloquently traces the journey one student makes “from shy to brave,” and makes a convincing case for the power of “mutual attention and cooperation” in the classroom. Educators, immigration activists, and school reformers will find inspiration in this frequently lyrical account. (Apr.)